Continuing the theme of career and personal change, here’s an excellent book for anyone contemplating the possibility of a new career: Career Detection: Finding and Managing Your Career by Brian McIvor. It covers everything from identifying your transferable skills and benchmarking your expertise to dealing with rejection and creative alternatives to the CV. It’s part of a series of management books specifically designed with busy managers in mind.

You can even try before you buy, by downloading a sample chapter. Brian has over 30 years experience as a management skills training specialist, plus a long association with the Open University Business School, which is how we met. His areas of expertise include:

• Career planning and development
• Interpersonal and communication skills
• Corporate communications including corporate video and multimedia

For more details, see Brian’s website here.

Image: thinkpublic reused under Creative Commons Licence.

Gallup-Healthways has recently issued details of their Well-being Index – a survey of over 100,000 Americans which shows that employees who are unhappy at work take, on average, an extra 15 days sick leave a year. Yes, that’s right, an extra 15 days a year.

The survey assesses well-being at work by asking employees about

i) job satisfaction,
ii) whether their boss is authoritative or collaborative,
iii) whether there is openness and trust in the workplace and
iv) whether their individual strengths are recognised.

Just over a fifth of full-time employees apparently reported working in a negative environment. Even if only a half of those surveyed are full-time, this still equates to an enormous amount of lost productivity.

Clearly this has significant cost implications for business and for the economy in general; so any organisation, profit-making or otherwise, which doesn’t take employee well-being seriously should probably think again.

I really liked this article from Australia’s Herald Sun yesterday, about the relationship between money and happiness. As you’d expect from that part of the world, it gets straight to the point; over a certain amount, money doesn’t make you happier.

The article suggests that what people who work hard really want is more time, and advises that the way to create more time is to ‘outsource’ all the jobs that someone else can do for you more cheaply than you can do them yourself. OK, that’s logical to me so far. But then it goes on to say that you should use the extra time you’ve created through outsourcing to “focus all your energy on bringing home the bacon…..After you’ve hit the economics of enough, money has little use, other than as a tool to allow you the economic advantage of creating the life you want with the limited time you have left”.

Hmmm? Run that one by me again?

Surely if time is so precious the last thing you want to be spending it doing is more work? Unless, of course, you’re absolutely passionate about your work, and have the kind of job that you’d do even if you weren’t paid at all. Which is really my point – wouldn’t it be better to find a job that you enjoy doing, where you can use your strengths every day, and which brings out the best in you? It might sound a bit pie-in-the-sky, but it’s perfectly possible for the vast majority of people to achieve this with a little coaching support. You just need to know what your strengths are.

Thanks to Viv T for the article

Image source: bogenfreund

In response to Yang-May’s question about which jobs were at the bottom of the happiness and satisfaction league tables, here’s the information according to the American General Social Surveys* (GSS) carried out between 1998 and 2006:

The question asked was ‘On the whole, how satisfied are you with the work you do – would you say you are very satisfied, moderately satisfied, a little dissatisfied, or very satisfied?’

The mean score ranges from 1 (very dissatisfied) to 4 (very satisfied).

The same survey also asked about general happiness:

The question asked was ‘Taken all together, how would you say things are these days -would you say you are very happy, pretty happy or not too happy?’

The mean score ranges from 1 (not too happy) to 3 (very happy).

The survey results reveal that the least happy and least satisfied are those people doing unskilled manual or service jobs, including customer service assistants and people who handle complaints.

Research suggests that job satisfaction and well-being are less to do with salary or status of a job, and more to do with how much control you have over the job you do. Even though the amount of stress you experience tends to increase as you rise through the ranks, so too does your autonomy, and is it this, or the lack of it, which affects your sense of well-being and satisfaction.

What’s interesting is that even the lowest scores aren’t really that bad….

If you have any further thoughts or comments on these survey results, we’d love to hear them.

According to the American General Social Surveys* (GSS) carried out between 1998 and 2006, the top 10 careers which provide the most job satisfaction are as follows:

The question asked was ‘On the whole, how satisfied are you with the work you do – would you say you are very satisfied, moderately satisfied, a little dissatisfied, or very satisfied?’

The mean score ranges from 1 (very dissatisfied) to 4 (very satisfied).

The same surveys also asked about general happiness:

The question asked was ‘Taken all together, how would you say things are these days -would you say you are very happy, pretty happy or not too happy?’

The mean score ranges from 1 (not too happy) to 3 (very happy).

This reveals that the most satisfying jobs are mostly professions, especially those involving caring for, teaching, and protecting others as well as the creative pursuits. Since people’s feelings about their work usually have a significant impact on their general happiness, it’s not surprising that some of the same professions appear in the Top 10 for general happiness too.

It’s interesting that the clergy appear top of both tables, suggesting that finding meaning in your work is a crucial part of both job satisfaction and happiness. Psychologists Judge, Thoresen, Bono and Patton (2001) have shown that job satisfaction and performance are correlated. According to Wrzesniewski (2003), if jobs which give people meaning (for example because they make a contribution to the wider world) are linked to high job satisfaction, and job satisfaction is linked to work performance, people who find meaning in their work are more likely to perform better than those who don’t. So it’s in the interests of all organisations to help employees create meaning in their work.

Incidentally, the bottom occupation for job satisfaction in this survey was roofing, which unfortunately was 2nd bottom for general happiness too- only 25% of roofers said they were very satisfied with their jobs and only 14% were very happy…

*The General Social Survey which has been conducted since 1972, collects basic information from across the United States in order to monitor social trends. The GSS is based on interviews of randomly selected people who represent a scientifically accurate cross section of Americans. A total of 27,587 people were interviewed for the job satisfaction and happiness section of the survey.

My thanks to Rochelle Melander for this information.