We often hear employees and professionals complain that they do not love their work and the role that they play. It has been a topic of continuous research on why employees do not love their work .
Nearly 60% of the 700 working professionals surveyed by Times Jobs, stated they hate their jobs.
Several employee engagement surveys show that content of work matters a lot in creating engagement at work. Nearly 30% surveyed professionals by Times Jobs attributed their discontent to ‘the job itself’, which includes dissatisfaction with their current role, profile and position. Of these 30% professionals, 50% said they do not feel passionate about their current role, 25% say that the job description is not the same as communicated during hiring, 15% say they don’t see a clear career growth path and 10% feel their work is not challenging enough.
Ill-Effects of Job Misery
Job-related misery robs one of the best, most productive days and years. It increases stress and illness, causes fatigue, reduces life span, creates trouble in marriages, separates families and could severely affect overall quality of life.
Experts agree that the majority of lost productivity is due to employees who show up for work but don’t really engage. The cost to employers due to loss of productivity associated with disengagement is estimated at $500 billion or more per year.
Find a New View on the Content of your Work
So anyone doing any job always look at the quality of content of work. An analyst may find the content of his work monotonous over a period of time; if he/she is mostly required to pull out information from several databases and copy and paste excel data to be sent to some client.
It’s a reality of workplace that not all the work that you do will have interesting and substantial content. You need to align your self to the role in the organization that has the content of work which you like doing day in day out.
Even the content of work of our parents and spouses may not be interesting all the time, but they pour out their love in doing their work even if the content is not exciting for them. Not all enjoy cooking food or scrubbing dishes but they still do it.
Have we ever wondered about the contents of work of the garbage collector at home, but still they do the work even if it is intellectually not stimulating.
Mental stimulation is essential for all those who are in professional and corporate work, there is no denial of that fact but not all the content of the work will be of your exact liking.
It requires mental flexibility to accept and adapt to the content of the work. Yes, you need to be aligned to a work content that atleast utilizes 60-70% of your talents and skills if not always 100%.
One of the reason why employees or fresh students end up in a wrong role is because they knowingly hide their true likings and expectations during job interviews. Later on they complain when there is a major mismatch in the contents of the work in their jobs.
Change Perspective Towards Your Work
There is an old adage that states, if you don’t like your situation, you have three options:
- Accept it
- Leave it or
- Change it
Before accepting, changing or leaving your work, “try changing your perspective”. This could be your best first step before you make the other changes.
By using new perspectives to see your current situation, you build skills that go with you to your next position and every position after that. If you can find a new perspective, then you’re more likely to choose a different response. If your new perspective gives you new clarity, your different response might be a better and more productive one.
Each new perspective that one tries is like trying a new pair of glasses. Your situation may not change, but the way you see it does.
According to Cal Newport, you should try to adopt the craftsman mindset, which asks you to leave behind selfish concerns about whether your job is ideal for you, and instead work at getting really good at one thing. No one owes you a great career – you need to earn it, and the process won’t be easy. If you want to love what you do, abandon the question of, “what can the world offer you?” and instead think, “what can you offer the world?”
In third world countries, people work extremely hard in physically taxing labor to make minimal wages. Having a relatively easy and cushy job for a middle class income isn’t so hard in comparison. A demanding boss or small office space is nothing compared to the systemic oppression others experience. Perhaps you don’t yet know the value of what you have.
So continuously strive to add new perspectives towards your work to start loving your work. Enjoy your Work !