Get this, the difference between happiness at work, engagement and job satisfaction can have three very different meanings. You can have job satisfaction and still be unhappy at work!
There are many people who do a great job because they have “a job to do” without necessarily loving it. In fact, isn’t this the case with most people, that is if they can stay long enough without the fear of their positions being eliminated.
Check out the survey below, but first watch this video…the guy has an accent so you may need to watch again to get all the words but I think you can definitely relate to this at least on part of your work day!
Are You Unhappy At Work? (Like this guy)
Here is a survey about happiness at work. It goes into detail about happiness at work, engagement and job satisfaction. They wanted to verify that they were assessing something that operated differently and not just dealing with something that wasn’t job satisfaction and engagement.
Here is what they found:
1. The results we got show that the concepts are all different. Happiness at work predicts performance very strongly: job satisfaction and engagement don’t work in the same very consistent and linear fashion.
2. People who report high levels of happiness at work automatically also report high job satisfaction and high engagement. But when we investigate people with high job satisfaction or high engagement we can see that they aren’t necessarily happy. For example you can be highly engaged doing tough and unpleasant stuff because you’re focusing so intently on it. But that may not make you happy: in fact high engagement and low happiness is often associated with high intention to quit and low energy. This finding suggests happiness is a bigger and therefore more important concept than job satisfaction or engagement.
3. We’re pretty sure that people report high engagement because they feel they ought to (in other words there’s a social desirability response to the question).
4. Job satisfaction and engagement are ‘old’ concepts which were developed in 60s and 70s when organizations were very different. The research they are based on was done inside organizations whose structures and approaches were much more hierarchical with a much more command-and-control approach. This is no longer relevant in flatter or lean-and-mean, pressurized organizations of the 21st century.
They finish the survey by saying that “The data for job satisfaction and engagement surveys is often collected in a manner (using a Likert scale) which results in a bi-modal distribution. For example:
‘As an employee how satisfied are you with your organization?’
Many things can contribute to not being happy at work. Whether you feel a very low job satisfaction or just plain unhappy, maybe you can try speaking to someone in your office to help change the environment or a change of position. This is something you need to look at and honestly assess if it’s just time to move on to bigger challenges.
So whether or not you are unhappy at work, if you could change one thing about your job what would it be?
