Job Satisfaction

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!!!