Hi,
In last blogs the essence of having a goal and underlying plan cannot be underestimated. In addition it is essential to do the things you love most, including in your work. The likelihood of success will be great if we find this. I have also highlighted eight essentials we need to achieve full job satisfaction. As we are all different, priorities cannot yet be given to these essentials. However, I will continue to look to the most occurring priority settings. Your feedback to the list will help and will therefore be much appreciated.
My eight essentials for Job Satisfaction, not in sub sequential order were:
- Salary:fulfil human needs, wealthy life, and fair towards efforts/investments.
- Recognition:Tasks that matters and being recognized.
- Contribution:Work in teams, comply with clients’ requirements.
- Adding Value:Achieve a better product or service, increment client satisfaction.
- Responsibility:Involvement in decision-making. Your opinion count.
- Leadership:Influencing, make others perform better, coaching and mentoring, develop leaders
- Development:Autonomy, growth
- Pleasure:Collaboration and fun
Essential 1 and 2, Salary and Recognition:
An honest salary compared to efforts, services, experience and competences will result in satisfaction. If the salary is dishonest it will result in disappointment and in the end demotivation. In addition the market situation will be an important element in judgement about an honest salary. It is key to have benchmarking information. Mirroring can be done but care must be taken to compare only to peers. Same age, same level of experience, same competences in comparison to delivery of added value may result in a fair comparison. A comparison could lead to false mirroring results. If a peer is delivering more, a higher salary may be justified. The other way around, if a peer is delivering less, a discussion to have your salary raised may well be valid. Preparation is key. The consequence of outbalance could be dissatisfaction and demotivation with a negative business impact including yours and your leaders.
Recognition is at least as importance as salary, if not more. It’s great to receive a compliment or recognition for good work delivered. Knowing that we will be appreciated will give us more confidence and job satisfaction. Contra dictionary to recognition is the receipt of criticism. In particular unfunded criticism or feedback with strong sense negativity will result in demotivation impacting our job satisfaction. As a team leader I’m keen to recognize good performance and deliveries and to speak out. If feedback need to be provided regarding needed improvement I will prepare such conversation well and always focus on constructive feedback in the interest of the business as well as the individual.
Honesty and building trust is key in order to build good relationships. Salaries and positive recognitions will contribute to job satisfaction in both yours and your business interest. Better individuals’ performance will give better business results. It is more than complicated to build good relationships with a variety on people in an organization and it is very challenging. It is providing me job satisfaction. I have read the book “How to make friends and good relationships” from Dale Carnegie. It inspired me and is helping me even today.
Example:
Once a person received a recognition award for a good performance. He told me he was very happy with it and spent it well to some things he normally didn’t do in life, such as an extraordinary dinner in an exclusive restaurant. It is very nice but the impact of it is short. On the other side I have seen a colleague receiving negative performance feedback at the end of the year, which felt dishonest. It included examples, which could be easily resolved at the moment of occurrence during the year. The impact of the feedback was much bigger and it took a significant period of time to recover and find motivation again. The individuals’ behaviour is for now left out of this example, including how to rise after a fall. I will come back to that in later blogs.
The point is that honest salaries as well as raising recognitions will help individuals to achieve job satisfaction and stay motivated. This is off course in the interest of the business and company’s performance.
In my next blog I will write about contribution and delivering added value. I hope to see you then and I will look forward to feedback, providing us hopefully some mutual learning! Thank you very much in advance!
Treasure your relationships, not your possessions. – Anthony J. D’Angelo
Your Job Guide 