JOB SATISFACTION
Welcome to The Small Jar, a podcast where we explore how to intentionally design the life that you want in the space between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 20.
Hello, my friends. This one goes out to all of the working women out there and also to all of those women who are thinking about going back to work now that the kids are leaving the nest. So whether you're working or thinking about working, I want to address the issue of job satisfaction.
Now, some of you may be lucky enough to love your job. And even if you wouldn't say you love your job, there might be things you do enjoy about your job, even if it's just earning money to support your family or seeing coworkers who have become friends. But on a day-to-day basis, we are so much more likely to think about all of the reasons we don't love our jobs or don't love the people with whom we work, our bosses or particular coworkers, maybe particular clients or customers we serve.
On some level, we know work is work, but it also seems a shame given how much time we spend working that we don't achieve a certain level of satisfaction. I mean, if you're going to spend 40 hours a week working, so at least a third of your waking hours, if you're going to invest that much of your life in your job, it could be worth exploring how to feel more satisfied. Now, for most of us, if we get to a point where we're really frustrated or dissatisfied with our jobs for whatever reason, usually our first instinct is to find a new job.
That sounds reasonable, right? And of course, this option is always available to you. But I want to offer a different perspective. When you think about the circumstances of your job, it's natural for us to think that those circumstances drive how we feel.
And actually, more to the point, we tend to mistakenly believe that our perceptions about our job are true. Think about these statements. My work is undervalued.
The culture of this company is toxic. My boss doesn't appreciate how hard it is for me to do my job. My coworkers are lazy and don't pull their weight.
So-and-so client is a huge pain, and I hate dealing with them. This firm doesn't give equal opportunity to women. If you've ever thought anything along these lines, it's easy to feel not only like these statements are true, but they're completely out of your control.
When you think, my work is undervalued, you can come up with a long list of evidence for the statement. And all of it would relate to something your bosses or the company in general doesn't do to value you or others. Most of your coworkers would agree with you.
And because everyone at the water cooler agrees, not only does everyone now agree that the company undervalues its employees, but now we all feel completely collectively helpless because this is just what's wrong with the company. And because the company is broken, we all feel undervalued. The only option seemed to be to live with it or try to find another company that values its employees more.
It's a helpless and frustrating state of affairs. We can't do anything to make the company value us. We can't change work culture to be less toxic.
We can't make our boss understand how hard our job is or make our coworkers pull their weight when they're lazy. We certainly can't make the workplace less sexist, at least not all on our own. At the end of the day, we come home and feel exhausted, like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill.
And all of these injustices build up to the point where we just can't take it anymore. We can't stand our job and we want to leave. And as I said, sometimes the solution is to find a new job, but maybe there's another way.
I thought I'd take a different approach and think not so much about what we don't like about our jobs, but more about what do we want out of our jobs? Like what would create job satisfaction for you? I want to go through a number of different aspects that might contribute to job satisfaction to unpack this a bit, this concept of being satisfied at work. Now let's start with the concept of feeling satisfied. What does that even mean? I think if you were to unpack it for yourself, you might come up with a number of different emotions that are important to you.
And remember, the reason we do anything is ultimately because of how we think it will make us feel. So think about if any of these emotions resonate with you. Is it to feel accomplished at work, or to feel proud of your contribution, or proud of your professional or personal growth? The feeling that you're moving forward and being challenged in a way that matches your preferences and desires? Some of us also think about job satisfaction in the sense of enjoying what you do.
And there are two key parts to this, enjoying the actual work and enjoying the people with whom you work. Now theoretically, when we took our jobs, we vaguely agreed to the parameters of the work. Like we didn't take a job where we knew we would hate doing the work.
But I don't care how much you theoretically like your job, there are days when work is just work. Sending emails, working on websites, cleaning up after people, talking to clients, some clients. Not all of it is moonlight and roses.
And sometimes it depends on the day. And then the other element of enjoyment is enjoying the people with whom you work. The definition of satisfaction is the fulfillment of one's wishes, expectations, or needs, or the pleasure derived from this.
So let's use this as a framework to think about satisfaction when it comes to our jobs. Let's start with needs. Most people, when they think about working, they think about earning money.
For some of us, not working is just not an option. So of course, earning money is a need. Even for those of us whose families don't specifically need the income, it's still a need in that you probably wouldn't do that specific job for free.
A job has certain expectations. And you're entering into a contract with your employer that you'll fulfill those expectations in exchange for payment. So money in the context of work is a need.
You need to get paid or else you wouldn't feel any obligation to fulfill the expectations of the job. This is why it's sometimes hard to set expectations of volunteers because frankly, they're not paid. Now, when it comes to your job, the concept of whether or not you feel you're paid what you're worth is a big topic.
In fact, one I'll tackle separately. So for now, I want to leave it that the fact that you are earning money at all is part of job satisfaction. And of course, could be a factor in why you might be satisfied or dissatisfied with your current job.
More on that in a future podcast. Okay, so what about the other elements of satisfaction, namely wishes and expectations? Let's go with expectations. Other than getting paid, what are the expectations you have for your job? Honestly, we don't often proactively think about the expectations we have for our jobs until the job or the people we work with don't meet those expectations.
Here are a few examples to consider. We expect other people to do their jobs, take responsibility for their obligations, to be responsive to us. And here's the thing, we don't realize this is an expectation that we have until we see our coworkers not doing their jobs, not taking responsibility, not responding to our emails about the status of the project.
Before we know it, we're incredibly frustrated because this coworker is making our lives more difficult. Since they aren't doing their job, suddenly we feel burdened by picking up the slack. The other annoying thing coworkers do is they do things a bit differently than we would have wanted them to do things.
Like you ask Jim to create a presentation, but when he finally gets it back to you, it's not at all what you had in mind. Or you ask a colleague to teach one of your classes or take over one of your shifts, and they do it wrong. They don't take care of your students or clients in the way you would have liked.
Your clients complain. They leave your desk or workstation a mess. Technically they did what you asked, but it wasn't up to your standards.
I mentioned before there are feelings that whether we realize it or not, we're looking to feel, expecting to feel as a result of our jobs. So one of them is to feel accomplished. So when other people don't do their jobs at all, or don't do things up to your standards, and then it impacts your work, you feel frustrated and you don't get to access that feeling of accomplishment.
For you in your job or past jobs, what has stood in the way of you feeling accomplished? Sometimes it's not hitting our goals, whether that be a certain revenue or sales target, or just getting through the pile of work or line of clients ahead of us. Sometimes it feels like the mere circumstance of literally not completing the work or hitting the goal can make us feel overwhelmed and disappointed. Again, rather than feeling accomplished, we experience these other negative emotions, overwhelm, disappointment.
And then there are the awful times when you kind of think you did enough, or got close enough to the goal, and then your boss comes around and says something that makes you think that it wasn't good enough. And sometimes they will literally say the words, this wasn't good enough. Hard to misinterpret.
Once again, it seems accomplishment is out of reach, and it feels like it's not up to us, because the things standing in our way of feeling accomplished are out of our control. Colleagues and coworkers' performance, our bosses' expectations and judgments, and then the actual work product or result of our past efforts. All of it, at this point, out of our control.
Here's why I think the conversation about expectations is really useful here. When we think about failure, it has such a heavy negative connotation. But really, the definition of failure is, yes, the lack of success, but also the omission of expected or required action.
Said another way, failure is just another way of saying my expectations were not met. Okay, so let's look back at our expectations. We expect other people to do their jobs.
Sometimes they don't. We expect other people's standards to be as high as ours, or the same as ours. And sometimes they're not.
We expect to succeed, to finish our work, and hit our goals, and sometimes we don't. Oftentimes we don't. When we think we do a good job, or a good enough job, and we expect other people to agree with us, we expect our bosses to agree with us.
Sometimes they don't. In short, we actually expected to feel accomplished, and we don't. So first, I want to clarify, it's not the circumstances in these examples that take away our ability to feel accomplished.
It's not what your co-worker is doing or not doing. It's not the literal pile of work done or undone. It's not whether or not you hit your revenue goal, or even whether your boss thinks you're good enough.
The reason you don't get to feel accomplished, but instead feel frustrated, overwhelmed, and disappointed, the reason is because of what you're making the circumstances mean. So back to the lazy co-workers. Other people don't do their jobs the way you want them to.
Bill is out there doing things last minute. He's sloppy. He never responds to emails.
Bill is over there doing his thing, and we're over here making it a problem. Why? Well, often we think because Bill is last minute and sloppy, that I'm going to have to pick up the slack. That if I don't, Bill's going to make me look bad, and I'm going to have to fix things at the last minute, and all of this creates more work for me.
Okay, look, if I were working with you and Bill, we would probably both have a blast working each other up at the water cooler about how much Bill sucks. We both totally agree he's awful. The problem is he's awful, and we're not going to change him.
I don't even want to try and change your mind about Bill, and please insert the name of your awful co-worker here. Let's just agree that he or she is awful. But Bill's awful, and he's staying awful.
Or at the very least, whatever he's doing or not doing is not going to change. The only thing you can change is how you respond to Bill. If every time he fails to meet your expectations, you get frustrated and take on his work.
His failure has now become your problem. Not only are you frustrated, but you're taking on extra work and resenting Bill the whole time. The only thing this accomplishes is that you feel awful, and you have to wonder, does it even keep you from looking bad? What if Bill's behavior isn't your problem? Just consider that it's a choice you're making when you decide his failure to meet your expectations means you have to pick up his slack.
What if that's not true? Yes, I know at work we often work in teams, and sometimes you have to rely on your team or co-workers to get things done. But more often than not, we have unspoken expectations of the people we work with. We don't even communicate these expectations before we decide they've let us down.
No, you can't change other people, but you also can't blame them for not meeting expectations you haven't even communicated, or maybe haven't communicated clearly enough. And question, does your success, your ability to feel your own accomplishment really get diminished because of what a co-worker does or doesn't do? In my experience, a very small percentage of people with whom you might work actually don't care at all about their performance. The majority of the others are doing their job their way, just not according to your expectations.
So the most important message here is that you can only control yourself, what you do, and how you show up. So if you make your feeling of accomplishment contingent on others, you will inevitably get let down a good portion of the time, depending on how well others follow your manual for them. But if you can separate out in your mind your contribution, how you've shown up, and how you've recognized that the lens you have as you evaluate your co-worker is just your perspective, is it possible that by focusing on what you can control, rather than getting frustrated by others' non-compliance, that you can often access that feeling of accomplishment? For example, I can only control my own contribution, and I'm doing my best.
I'm doing the best I can with my responsibilities, and I'm doing the best I can as I navigate the contributions of others. Now that's an accomplishment. I want to touch on another expectation that we tend to have at work, that again, is almost never spoken out loud.
Let's talk about feeling appreciated at work. I want to address this because it's actually not something that we proactively think we look for in a job. Like, I'll bet that if I asked you, why do you work, you wouldn't be likely to answer, because I want to feel appreciated.
But I've noticed in so many of my conversations with clients, co-workers, and friends that they feel unappreciated at work, and this feeling really contributes to job dissatisfaction. People expect their bosses and companies to appreciate them. In other words, I had an expectation that my boss or my company would treat me a certain kind of way, and they failed to meet my expectations.
Here's the funny thing. In all of the leadership positions I've had, where I've had the opportunity to work closely with the C-suite, the CEOs, the CFOs, the COOs, and I had the opportunity to see their intentions. Almost without fail, these leaders had intentions to appreciate their employees.
Some bosses are certainly more intentional about it than others, but by and large, most bosses want their employees, certainly their best employees, but generally, they want all their employees to feel like their work is valued and appreciated. But from a boss's perspective, they're also thinking, well, I pay you, so that's how I value your work. But of course, they also understand that a little employee appreciation is important to creating a positive work culture.
The problem is, the way a boss might decide to appreciate their employees is not going to hit every employee in the same way. Let's say everyone's given a $500 bonus. Jill might be thinking, amazing, I wasn't expecting that.
But Susan thinks, well, that's a small bonus. One feels surprised and appreciated, and the other feels let down and unappreciated. So in this case, very similar to our expectations of our coworkers, it's our own internal perspective on what we expect that creates our feeling, not the actual actions of our bosses or coworkers.
My mom often says, expect nothing, and you'll never be disappointed. At first, this sounds awful, like who wants to live in a world where you expect nothing? But really, truly, it's our own expectations that set us up for disappointment. Coworkers are lazy.
Bosses appreciate us in a way that we think isn't good enough. We're over here judging whether or not others have met our expectations and feeling awful the whole time. Because honestly, people are really only going to meet our expectations some of the time.
What if we could just let the other people do what they're doing? If our expectation is important enough to us, we should communicate it. If not, maybe question why you have it in the first place. Why do we spend so much time waiting for others to help us feel accomplished and appreciated? Let's cut out the middleman and do it for ourselves.
Take responsibility for your own emotional well-being at work. The alternative, frustration, overwhelm, and disappointment. And the bad news is, if we're in a habit of delegating our emotional well-being to others by waiting for them to behave or show up better so we can feel better, we're going to take that habit with us to our next workplace.
And wouldn't you know, that place isn't going to do a good job of making us feel any more accomplished or appreciated. So I've been talking about expectations at work. Now let's tackle wishes.
In this category, I want to talk about personal and professional growth. At this stage in our lives, money may no longer be the driving force with respect to why we continue to work. But for many of us, the concept of growing or moving forward, either personally or professionally, is an attractive aspect of working.
You could also think of personal and professional growth in terms of getting promoted or taking on leadership opportunities. So the magnitude and variety of opportunities for promotion may vary greatly depending on the size of the company or institution where you're working. Some smaller organizations have fairly limited opportunities for promotion, while larger institutions may have a variety of departments and levels of management and leadership.
But what I want to offer is that your opportunities to grow in your job are not limited to the circumstances of that particular company. Here's what I mean. The circumstances of our job are largely out of our control.
We might be able to advocate for different hours or different pieces and parts of our jobs, but for the most part, much about the circumstances of our jobs, particularly the people with whom we work, much of this is out of our control. And I really want to underscore this because it's almost astounding how much we place our emotional health in the hands of circumstances entirely out of our control. And I'm not saying this is actually what's happening, but in our minds, the circumstances are directly responsible for how we feel.
Even though we have no control over our bosses and co-workers, or even those who report directly to us in some cases, unless we threaten to fire them, yet we can still find ourselves out of our minds with frustration because someone does something that we didn't want them to do. They failed to meet our expectations and now we're stuck. The only way to feel better is to change them.
For me, I have to say that the work I've done on my own professional career as it relates to managing my mind and my emotional well-being has been some of the most transformational work I've been able to do because I've spent a very large portion of my professional career feeling at the effect of my bosses and colleagues. And I've had bosses with a wide range of skill sets and personalities, and none of them have been bad people by any stretch of the imagination. But I found myself so challenged in my relationships with them that I was constantly frustrated and insecure.
So if you're looking for opportunities to grow, the workplace offers a rich curriculum. We're looking to feel accomplished, proud, valuable, and appreciated. But the workplace, your boss, your colleagues, they cannot give these feelings to you.
These feelings come directly from your own thoughts, your own perspective, and lens regarding your contributions. Let me challenge you to find job satisfaction in a way that is totally independent of others or any specific circumstance. You can feel accomplished even if you don't hit your revenue goal.
You can feel accomplished by thinking, I gave it my all, I learned some valuable lessons along the way, and next time I'm going to be even better positioned to hit my target. You can feel proud even if your co-workers don't produce at the same level you do. You can think, I did my best, I communicated my expectations and they weren't met, but I showed up in exactly the way I wanted to.
You can feel appreciated even if your boss doesn't do a thing. You can know I am a valuable member of this team. This company is lucky to have me.
I don't need accolades to know that my contributions are important. This is the work. Understanding that you create your emotional reality with the lens you use to interpret the circumstances of your life, your career.
Emotional adulthood involves taking responsibility for your own emotional life, not waiting for others to reinforce you or give you permission to feel accomplished and proud, worthy. And I have to tell you, when I learned how to let other people be exactly how they are at work, it was so much easier to let the people I love, my children, my husband, my family and friends, it was so much easier to let them be exactly who they are and not place expectations on them to create my happiness. So let's recap.
How can we find job satisfaction? Be clear with yourself about your needs, expectations and wishes. Number one, what are your needs? How much do you want to get paid? Is your current job meeting that need? And again, more on this topic to come. Number two, understand and be clear with yourself about your expectation for other people's behavior.
Recognize when you're fighting against reality by expecting people to be different than they are. What if it's actually a good thing that they're not exactly like you? What if you could stop taking other people's behavior and lack of performance, again, up to your standards? If you could stop taking that personally, stop making it a problem for yourself and just decide for yourself, rationally, how do you respond? Do you pick up the slack or not? Number three, understand your goals, your wishes. What is it that you want to accomplish with your career and how is even your current position an opportunity to grow, an opportunity to grow into emotional adulthood? Here's the good news.
You are already worthy. You are already enough. You can feel accomplished and proud and appreciated if you choose to.
You have more power in your professional life than you know and it all starts and ends with you. Until next time, friends. Thanks for listening to The Small Jar Podcast.
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