Increase your level of job satisfaction by 25%
Lea Water found that feeling grateful predicts 25% of your job satisfaction!
By ‘feeling grateful’ Waters refers to what is ‘you being grateful’ and/or ‘working in a workplace that has a culture of gratitude’.
Below are three ‘Do It Yourself’ tricks to move your team and organisation towards a culture of gratitude:
Feeling grateful determines 25% of your jab satisfaction
#1 Gratitude letters and journals:
Ask yourself and your team members to do the following at the end of every day: “when you get home, please write down three things you feel grateful for at work”
Next, you take it a small step further and ask them to write a letter thanking a co-worker.
You’ll quickly notice that this approach forces you not just to look at what is going wrong — what a lot of managers tend to do. Instead it makes you sit down and think “what am I grateful for at my job?” and “what went well today?”
#2 Random acts of kindness
Leave flowers on your colleague’s desk without him or her knowing the sender’s identity, send a thank you card to your customer, etc.
This act of kindness will leave you feeling good about yourself, and make the receiver’s day — no brainer right? ;)
#3 “What went well” & Peer recognition programs
I remember being invited to the StoryMe HQ one Friday evening. I was amazed by how all the 50+ employees sat together, had a beer, and started their “good and bad” session.
At such a “good and bad” session each member spoke up about what they believe went well that week, or what could have gone better. I witnessed how sharing the “bads” led up to people getting together afterwards and converse on how they can help each other. On the other hand, the “goods” rarely were a one-woman job —filling the room with praise and applause!
In order to maintain and grow their gratitude culture, StoryMe has recently adopted INTUO, a digital tool that allows them to capture all praises and feedback. Even more, INTUO allows them to get a good understanding of how their employees wish to grow within the fast growing organisation StoryMe is.
Slightly different, yet similar to StoryMe, at INTUO we have adopted “thankful Fridays” which also occurs each Friday after our team meeting. In this moment we take the time to each thank one specific individual in the company for how they have surprised us, helped someone out, or handled a specific situation.
Don’t hesitate. Create a habit out of these three tricks. Keep it up, and after 4 months a culture of gratitude will have slipped into your organisation, positively impacting your and your colleagues’ job satisfaction. ;)
