Assessing your personal happiness at work is an essential practice. For many of us, our job not only takes up a lot of our time, but is a significant part of our identity.
Imagine the impact on your overall happiness if you dreaded going to work everyday?
Conversely, imagine how wonderful you would feel if your work was energizing and engaging?
In our last blog, we looked at the first step to assess your workplace happiness. It is a quiz, developed by the University of California at Berkeley’s Greater Good Center. This Center researches the elements of a meaningful life in a variety of areas.
If the results of that quiz show some adjustments are needed to increase your job satisfaction, the Greater Good Center provides a tool that can help you get more out of work. The basic idea is that you can take your current job and craft it in order to get more of what you want.
The concept of job crafting was developed by Professors Amy Wrzesniewski, and Jane Dutton. It is defined as self initiated, proactive strategies that focus on aligning your job with your personal needs, goals and skills, making work more meaningful.
The Greater Good Center has a Job Crafting Exercise that provides a step by step process. It involves:
Creating a current job “Sketch”: Diagraming your job tasks and prioritizing them by the amount of energy they require.
Identifying your strengths and passions: Taking time to reflect on what you are good at and what motivates you.
Creating a potential job “Sketch”: Taking the information from steps 1 and 2 and diagramming a more ideal version of your job. The goal is to leverage what you like in your current position to create a more satisfying, but still realistic job description.
Creating an action plan: Creating a detailed plan with specific goals and strategies. This will include outlining how to craft new tasks, relationships and cognitive perceptions about your work.
Our work life is an essential piece to our happiness. Take the quiz and see where you land. If you need adjustments, job crafting is the way to go. It may take some time to go through the steps, but it will give you a clear path forward to a more meaningful work life.
Photo by Rachael Gorjestani
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