What are you doing about a 22% job approval? HRD wrote an article earlier this year, “Alarming low: Only 22% of employees satisfied with their jobs.”
This leads me to question whether the work itself or unrealistic expectations of what a job should provide you, are driving this. People read these headlines and immediately assume that companies and leadership are one hundred percent responsible for these low numbers. I am not here to argue that they do not bear some responsibility (we will get to that) to increase job satisfaction; however, to say that individuals should not take responsibility to improve their job satisfaction is selling the average human short.
My question is, are we asking the wrong questions?
Instead of exclusively asking what the company can do to make me happier, collectively, we should ponder:
- What have you done to build better relationships with other employees and leadership?
- What have you done to understand the dynamics of the whole organisation, including stakeholders, vendors’ and clients’ needs, wants, fears and desires?
- What have you done to make yourself valuable and differentiate yourself as you work from home, at the office or in a hybrid situation?
How well do you understand the needs and pressures put on your leadership, and what can you do to make their lives easier?
We seem to think that the stresses in our lives are ours and ours alone, and only our wants, needs, fears, aspirations and desires matter.
That is a problem.
When we merely think about ourselves and our challenges, we negate the challenges of others, or worse, we cause challenges for others.
When we focus on our own happiness at the expense of everyone else, we can put undue stress on the system and create a bad culture, or at least contribute to it, frustrating others and ultimately making us unhappy and frustrated.
Here is a secret: leadership and ownership all have their own stresses. They all have families, significant others, or outside responsibilities, which causes pressure, and they all are being asked to do more with less. Sound familiar?
Ownership eats last.
Owners do not get paid until all of your salaries, vendors and suppliers are taken care of and after clients pay their bills. This adds enormous stress to ensure that teams are employed and the company remains viable.
This can sometimes lead them to make decisions that may seem unfair or unpopular. Still, as an owner, I can tell you that these decisions are usually made with no intentional malice and with the organization’s overall needs considered.
As a member of the organisation, you will not be privy to many, if not most, decisions until they have been debated, analysed and stressed over.
You may not find this fair, but ultimately, those decisions go way beyond the needs of individuals and look at the organisation’s overall health.
I am not saying that leadership should not be better at communicating decisions made and enabling you to understand why changes happen and how they affect the organisation . . . they should.
Managers’ and leaders’ priorities should be to protect those they manage and lead. It is essential to provide them with the tools to do their jobs effectively and enable them to feel valued and appreciated for the work done.
This is something every company and every leader can continually improve on. Still, those being led also need to realise that leaders are human beings just like them and far from perfect.
Companies need to learn how to communicate more effectively, care about each other and enable people to understand how their actions affect others at all levels.
We will never perfect communication, nor will we ever make everyone happy. Our goal is to do better and enable our teams, from the ownership down, to feel listened to, understood and valued. By working towards perfection, even if we never reach it, we can keep great employees and have workplaces that people want to be part of.
People must remember that the grass is not necessarily greener elsewhere but rather just another shade of green.