Early on in my career, I often had a feeling at the end of the work week that I was leaving a cocoon where I was buried under an endless mountain of work, only to return to it on Monday.
This feeling did not exactly inspire a happy return the following week. In fact, the feeling of being on a ‘treadmill’ was completely counter-productive.
There are three key feelings that I have found need to work in sync to ensure work satisfaction, and I was lacking two of them.
The three key feelings for work satisfaction are fulfillment, value alignment, and playing to strengths.
The two feelings behind work satisfaction that I was lacking during that time were fulfillment and value alignment. I had one piece of the puzzle, in that the role was playing to my strengths, but I found that it was not fulfilling nor was it aligned with my values.
One of the most important elements contributing to work satisfaction is having a fulfilling job.
This includes:
Finding meaning in what you are doing. Know why you are doing it, and who you are doing it for.
Experiencing growth. By learning, stretching yourself to complete new tasks, take on more responsibilities and work on increasingly challenging projects you will continue to expand and are more likely to be motivated. The moment you stop learning and growing it’s very easy to become bored and distracted and may start to find that work lacks meaning for you. Another key aspect of growth is being promoted and increasing your income – who doesn’t want that?!
Taking ownership and being recognised for your contributions to company milestones. Even if you weren’t the leader of the project, having your part recognised is essential to a feeling of fulfillment and good companies tend to be brilliant at this. I believe everyone should be charged with responsibility for their own work – with different degrees of reporting back. Thus, they can really take ownership of successes and learn from failures or stumbling blocks in a supported environment. It’s important to learn from setbacks in a healthy, productive way and to celebrate successes. It’s often the people doing the work at the bottom or the middle of the chain that are charged with physically getting the impressive results – and they need good leadership to provide honest, supportive and constructive feedback.
The second most important element contributing to work satisfaction is that it aligns with your values.
This includes:
The work enables you to live the lifestyle that you want to live – for example, in terms of travel time to and from work, life balance, location, and factors within the workplace itself such as ergonomics, sustainability, people and diversity.
You respect the company or brand, and the people at the helm. A company’s culture comes from the top so it’s important to ensure that your values are aligned with theirs. This includes your perspective on key cultural and ethical issues – as well as that you agree with and like the product or services they provide!
The third piece of the puzzle contributing to work satisfaction is playing to your strengths. This includes:
Focusing on growing your unique strengths and talents, rather than trying to fix weaknesses. There is a whole strengths-based movement out there which are based on decades of solid research highlighting how much more productive and happy employees are when they focus on their strengths, rather than attempting to fix weaknesses. One that I have come across is Gallup and you can take their strengths finder test online to find out what your strengths are (hint: you may be surprised! My top strength is creativity followed by risk taking… I was surprised by both being so high up in my skill set!)
That the job enables you to do what you are good at and what you like to do every single day. Every job involves tasks that we don’t want to do but as long as you are able to do an element of what you love to do daily, that will be enough to keep you happy, motivated and performing.
What are the most important feelings behind work satisfaction for you?
