Whenever we hear this term, by
default the disclaimer at the start of every movie comes to our mind which
would fit in for this term as “Every interpretation around this word is fictional
and has no resemblance with anything which exists in real life. Any similarity
to actual events is purely coincidental.” Some people say that combining these
two terms together is just unfair to humanity. Finding someone who is
completely satisfied with his/her job is almost like finding greenery in
desert. But why is it so, is it more of how we perceive or the reality actually
sucks? Are the expectations around it unrealistic or the real expectations are
botched up every time to make us believe that job satisfaction is never
possible? It would be quite interesting to decode this one as every
disgruntled/satisfied creature can relate themselves to the extent of 100%.
I personally feel that the way
most of the employees infer job satisfaction is very similar to what investors infer
of insurance products. Insurance products have an element of insurance as well
as investment which can’t be compared with typical investment products. If as
an investor you buy insurance product based on their return, then surely it
will never satisfy you. Coming to the job, it’s very important as to what all
we associate with our job. Since, we spend most of the time at office so we tend
to associate every aspect of our life with it which sometimes is the real root
cause of our dissatisfaction level as a workplace can’t feed every possible
need of an individual. As a professional we should be very cautious of weaving
our expectations from our job.
I wouldn’t deny the fact that low
level of job satisfaction in few cases are very genuine. The reasons in these
cases are mainly attributable to lack of rewards & recognition, prejudice,
lack of transparency, lack of growth opportunities and most importantly bad
leaders/seniors/counselors. Coming to rewards, no one in this world can
demystify the unimaginable elements attached to it.
Everyone at every level has
to embrace the reality that rewards will vary from one individual to other. If
we can’t understand why it is so then there is nothing worth understanding in our
life. Recognition, prejudice and lack of transparency mostly goes hand in hand.
This is the worst element to exist in any organisation and unfortunately this
is one of those elements which finds space for itself irrespective of tons of
efforts made to dissipate it. An entity should never be complacent of the fact
that it has controls in place to take care of prejudices which affects
recognising the right talent and also creates a damp on the transparency
levels.
The next is growth opportunity
which is not as simple as it sounds. Chasing growth opportunity is sometimes
like chasing sun rays to catch hold of the sun. I don’t say that every job
change ever done in the name of better growth opportunity is just a myth but at
the same time fancy job descriptions doesn’t always translate into better
opportunities. We should accept the fact that we are not NASA scientists who
will develop something crazy on a daily basis. If we analyse, we will realize
that 95% of the jobs in this world are the ones where more or less same set of
things are done in more or less the same fashion so if we peep outside the
window to do something very different, we should first do the reality check.
Lastly, the most important reason i.e. bad boss/counselor/leader/supervisor.
The only thing I can say in this regard is that if you strongly feel about it, fight
it out to the extent you can. Don’t give up assuming you are weak and powerless
or it will affect your appraisals. In most of the cases the relevant person
turns bad because the people let them do so.
Job satisfaction, lot of times,
is a euphoria in reverse because we allow ourselves to be vulnerable to believe
that it doesn’t exist and choose not to explore possibilities of dealing with
it. In majority of the instances, the hardships thrown by a job does more good
to an individual than what it takes in return. Each individual has to carefully
assess multiple aspects of job before reaching to the conclusion around the
satisfaction derived from it. Sometimes, the dissatisfaction from a job is like
a mirage which we can see clearly but very soon we realize that it doesn’t
exist anymore.
However, if we are quite certain
that the current job is like a long chewed chewing gum, there is no point of
chewing it further unless a complete makeover is possible. If we continue
chewing it, all it’s going to do is to make our jaws pain. We need to make sure
that the terms of our satisfaction levels are defined, controlled, planned,
executed and monitored by us. No one else can make a job satisfy us as per our
needs and wishes. So at the end of the day, job satisfaction is nothing but a
reconciliation of ground realities with our priorities, making sure that we
understand and make efforts to resolve the non-reconcilable items and finally
act/react with prudence if few items are still not reconciled. This term is not
different than happiness which in itself is very vague and can’t be achieved
unless we learn to be happy in whatever we do than doing things which makes us
happy!!!
