How To Be Happy At Work

Are you unsatisfied with your job? Is your employee unsatisfied? If you’re not able to pinpoint exactly why, run through this list and try to make adjustments in each of the following areas.

Similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, there is a hierarchy of needs in your career too. At a bare minimum, employees need a job to pay the bills. As you work your way up the hierarchy, employees need to feel safe at work, they need benefits, and they need to be compensated fairly for their skill level. As these needs are met, they are motivated to fulfill other needs, such as belonging and friendships. Finally, employees will want a fulfilling and meaningful career.

Creativity

In order to have a fulfilling career, you need to utilize your own unique talents. As technology advances, human skills such as creativity become more important. According to a report from the McKinsey Global Institute, the demand for higher cognitive skills, including creativity, will rise 10% by 2030. The growing trend of new titles like ‘Chief Innovation Officer’ and ‘Chief Design Officer’ supports this hypothesis. Most people know innovation makes a business more competitive yet few in the workforce feel like they’re able to be creative in their daily work.

So how can you spark creativity in your job? First identify the unique talents and skills you possess. Talk to your manager about how you could apply these talents to your job. Perhaps you could revamp a process or improve the marketing materials. Collaborate with other teams and offer to help with an interesting project. If you’re a leader, think about how you could make meetings more intriguing. Have your team complete a personality assessment (I prefer the Enneagram) to get a better feel for their strengths. Tell your team what the goal is and ask them how they can use their individual talents to achieve that goal. Employees are more likely to support a company goal when they are part of the solutioning process. We are innovative, collaborative beings by nature. Let’s stop acting like robots and be more human!!

Project Follow-Through

If you’re not happy with your job, it may be because you’re not involved in the appropriate projects during the appropriate time frame. Have you ever been thrown into a project halfway through? Compare that experience to being involved in a project from start to finish. Typically, employees are more satisfied when they see the project from start to finish. While some endeavors are company-wide and involve a number of departments and years, employees should be involved in their department-level portion of the project from start to finish. If you’re a leader, make sure you communicate the importance of the project and lay out clear expectations for who is doing what. If employee A doesn’t need to be involved in the latter half of the project, at least provide a summary of what is going on. If you’re an employee, ask the project manager to send you meeting minutes and an update periodically so you can stay in the loop.

Productivity

Not only do you need to stay productive to get things done at work but it is also fulfilling! Think about how you feel when your to-do list never ends; it just keeps going and going. If you’re not satisfied, it could be due to a lack of productivity. The key to being productive is to avoid a long to-do list. Your annual goals should align with the company’s (hint, hint leaders). You should also reverse engineer your annual goal so you know exactly what you need to do each month in order to achieve that goal. Take that 1 step further and determine what you need to do each week to achieve your monthly goal. At the beginning of each day, list only 1 important thing you need to do that day. I do NOT keep a to-do list as this gets overwhelming and I feel like a failure when I don’t check everything off. For more tips, join my free productivity challenge or purchase my eBook. You have to complete the tasks you committed to in order to be fulfilled.

So there you have it. These are 3 simple things you can incorporate into your career to help you feel more engaged, satisfied, and fulfilled. Try it out for yourself and let me know how it works!

Originally published on janeystahl.com