Personal job satisfaction

Posted on May 15, 2024 by Martin Hahn, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.

Job satisfaction is a measure of subjective well-being at work and research has uncovered the kinds of factors that lead to job satisfaction for the population in general. This is a good place to start but, on its own, this kind of evidence is not enough because each of us have such different requirements that generalisations are only useful to a point. This technique uses the empirical evidence as a starting point but encourages individuals to identify what is going to work for them.

The academic literature highlights seven key areas that tend to lead to higher levels of job satisfaction:

1 Task variety. This one comes up at the top of almost every piece of research into the topic. Having a job that you consider to be varied has been shown time and again to lead to satisfaction, but quite what constitutes ‘variety’ can be subjective. One call-centre operator might see their job as interminably repetitive, answering calls about heating problems all day, every day. Another might see it as incredibly varied as they never know who is going to be on the other end of the line and what their story is going to be.

2 Colleagues. Perhaps not surprisingly, the people you work with have a huge impact on your daily experience. Organizational research has shown that having a like-minded team with shared goals and commitment, and having a boss who is engaged and appreciative, makes a big difference. More important than that though is having someone you would describe as ‘a best friend’ at work.

3 Working conditions. This covers two groups of factors. First the term refers to the physical conditions: a pleasant office, a reasonable commute to work, a nice canteen for lunch. Alongside this the term also covers something about the ethos of the organization. You are likely to be happier at work if you are involved in an organization that promotes positive qualities such as creativity and collaboration.

4 Work load. Job satisfaction is hard to get if your work load isn’t right. For optimum work well-being you need to have enough but not too much work.

5 Autonomy. It is important to feel that you have some control over your job. This autonomy could cover a wide range of factors. It could be to do with flexible working and being able to manage your work around your other commitments; it could be about which projects you take on, which colleagues you work with and when your deadlines are.

6 Educational and development opportunities. It is important for individuals to feel that they are growing and developing. It is such a widespread desire that many scholars see this need for personal growth as a universal trait and a part of the human condition. For a job to be truly satisfying an individual needs to feel that they are making some progress, learning new skills and becoming competent. This could be achieved through external training courses or educational qualifications, but can as easily be achieved within the daily job if the conditions are right.

7 Congruence. The literature talks about a concept called ‘person–environment fit’, which is the degree to which there is a good match between the individual and the environment in which they are working. The academics have not quite come to an agreement as to which particular elements need to fit to achieve person–environment harmony, but three have emerged fairly conclusively as quite important.

The methodology of coaching

First, strengths; your strengths are things you do well. The evidence is clear that if you are able to use some of your key strengths at work you are likely to be happier. Second, values. If you feel that the things that matter to the organization are also things that matter to you, this is likely to increase your satisfaction levels. Finally, identity. If you feel that you can be yourself in the workplace, you are more likely to be happy there.

How to use It can be easy to conflate the factors that make a job impressive with those that make a job satisfying, but the point of this exercise is to make a distinction between ‘what I imagine will make me feel good’ and ‘what has actually made me feel good in the past’. People’s lists of ‘what I want from a job’ are often weighted towards the aspects that make them feel good about the job, at the expense of those that make them feel good in the job. This tool can be particularly valuable when working with clients who are looking for a job that will make them fulfilled but who seem focused on the extrinsic factors such as pay and location.

Step 1: what has led to job satisfaction in the past?

Ask your client to identify the best and worst jobs they have ever had. ‘Best’ and ‘worst’ should be defined in terms of their levels of job satisfaction rather than their levels of success. Starting with the one that they enjoyed most, ask your client to tell you what made it such a great job. The discussion should center on their personal experience and you are not after a list of what made it a good job objectively but an exploration of why they felt good on a daily basis and what made them positive about going into work on a Monday morning.

This should generate a list of perhaps half a dozen qualities. You could have a discussion at this stage about whether these qualities constitute a good model for their personal job satisfaction. It is important to stress here that you’re not trying to devise a list of the qualities they are looking for in a job; it is strictly focused on their experience of psychological well-being in the workplace.

Step 2: the empirical evidence

The next stage is to present your client with the seven-factor job satisfaction model (see above), based on the empirical research outlined above. Have a look together to see which of the factors on the research- driven list have been covered already in your conversation, and whether your client’s understanding of each aspect is in line with that described in the model. Then focus on those that have not been identified so far and explore the reasons for their non-appearance: it could be that these factors are not important to your client or just that they weren’t particularly notable in the experiences discussed. This could lead to an exploration about whether these factors may or may not be significant to them in future roles.

Step 3: a personal list of job satisfiers

When you have explored this in sufficient depth you should bring the two elements of the discussion together, asking your client to articulate their own list of factors that are likely to make them happy or fulfilled in their future roles. Invite them to list the key factors that they believe will have the most impact on their future work well-being, making sure that they have articulated exactly what they mean by each term. This list then could feed into a broader discussion about what your client is looking for in a job, or could be used as a checklist to help them analyse the relative merits of the occupational or job ideas they have.

Practice

The key to this tool is making sure that you establish clearly that this is all about happiness at work and not about how ‘good’ a job is. If your client is focused on the external trappings of a particular role, it may be worth spending some time making sure they are clear about the difference and stressing that you are not suggesting that they disregard the other factors, just that they should put them to one side for this particular exercise.

How it works

There has been a lot written about the notion of ‘career success’ and this is a concept that can be useful to discuss with your client as a precursor to this exercise. Career success in the academic literature is generally divided into objective and subjective career success. The former, objective career success, is defined in terms of the facts about someone’s career that can be spotted and assessed from the outside, and which can be easily compared with other people’s careers. It is usually described in terms of level of pay, seniority and the prestige of the occupation chosen. Determinants of objective success are levels of intelligence, education, training and the hours that you work. Objective success is generally described as being the result of either contest mobility, in which you simply need to out-perform your competitors, or sponsorship mobility, where you are given a helping hand by someone further up the ladder. Sponsorship mobility accounts for the success of those in graduate training schemes, those privileged through their social networks, and those who have a lucky encounter with a senior colleague or mentor who can put opportunities in their way.

Subjective career success is defined by the individual themselves and is made up of their perceptions of their objective success (for example, where objective success would be measured by how much someone earns, subjective success would be a measure of how well the individual believes that they are paid) and their levels of job satisfaction. A meta-analysis examining the factors that lead to subjective perceptions of success found a whole range of influential factors, including dispositional traits (in particular self-esteem), motivation, support from their supervisor and from the organization. But, by a mile, the key factor was shown to be expectations. Regardless of how prestigious, senior and well-remunerated an individual is, if their position surpasses their expectations they will feel that they are successful and, if they feel that they have fallen short of their expected career success, they will feel like a failure.

What’s the evidence base?

Job satisfaction is one area of the careers field that has been really well researched, but it is interesting to note that the research all gives slightly different messages depending on the agenda of the researchers. Organizational psychologists are particularly interested in the work factors that predict job satisfaction as these are the things that organizations may be able to control.

Much of the evidence described above comes from this kind of research. Other groups within psychology are more interested in the kinds of personality traits that tend to be associated with job satisfaction in which there is some evidence that certain types of people are more likely to be happy at work.