Creating Job Satisfaction

Getting the Most From Your Job – The key to job satisfaction is your attitude. Skills and Knowledge ensure that you do an excellent or outstanding job. They determine what you give to your job, what you do on the job. They embellish your tasks, actions and influence their outcome significantly. But they have no influence on what you derive from your job – Job satisfaction . Attitude is our way of looking at situations, people and environment around us. It is the filter we use to give a meaning to all that is happening around us at work and in life. It determines our expectations, responses and reactions.

For many of us the idea of having a job that is truly satisfying – the kind of work which doesn’t feel like work anymore – is pure fantasy. Surely, most in the field of fine arts and sports have found a way of doing what they love and getting paid for it. They are living the famous quote “Find a job you like, and you add five days to every week”.

Career dreams are one thing; practical reality is often another. Most adolescents reaching adulthood have gone through these pangs within the first few years of working. It is good to know that it is possible to get job satisfaction from a practical career choice. You can work at job satisfaction and find it in the most unexpected places. As mentioned earlier, the heart of Job Satisfaction is in your attitude. It is more about how you approach your job than the actual duties and task you perform on the job. The secret is to understand the key ingredients of your unique recipe for job satisfaction.

Identify Your Satisfaction Triggers – We approach work in three different ways: Is it a Job, or a Career or a Passion? Depending on which type of work you are in right now, the things that give you satisfaction will vary. A caution here is that this classification applies irrespective of whether you are a salaried person, self employed or even running a NGO.

If you work for a JOB, the compensation aspects of the position might have a greater influence whether you stay or go.

If you work at a CAREER, promotions and career development takes priority over money. Your satisfaction has strong linkage to your status, prestige or control.

If you work at a PASSION, the work itself is the factor that determines you satisfaction. Money, Prestige or Control become a non issue.

The reality is we get satisfaction from more than one of the above types of work. Being aware of which type of work you are doing and which type gives you the maximum satisfaction enables calibrate your satisfaction expectations and being realistic.

Building Job Satisfaction – Once you have identified the blend of status, power or intrinsic enjoyment that you need to have in your work for you to be satisfied, you can work on the seven ingredients to create a satisfying job. The key here to understand is not ‘finding’ a job that suits your blend, but ‘creating’ job satisfaction in the job you have, thereby ‘discovering’ what is the best for you.

1. Self Awareness. The first step in the search for job satisfaction is knowing yourself. You need to understand your strengths and weakness. You also should have a good understanding of your personality traits and your preferred style of working. These are matters of the heart and need intuitive thinking to realise what is that you value and what motivates you when you work and conversely what is that you do not value and what demotivates you. A word of caution here is to do this exercise with a neutral disposition without overanalysing the findings. We should love and respect ourselves for what we are and not bemoan for what we are not. A self awareness exercise with this disposition will enable you to work towards an ideal blend of compensation, status and intrinsic reward that suits you and that you can realistically achieve. Being truthful with yourself is extremely rewarding in the long run. Setting appropriate goals which leverage your strengths, do not expose your weakness areas, utilise your personality traits and which supports your style of work is a sure recipe for Job satisfaction. In fact expectation management is the key ingredient which enables a greater match between your preferences and the requirements of the job. This increases the potential for job satisfaction you can have. The balance 6 ingredients determine how much of that potential you can actually achieve.