You come home from work to find yourself moaning about the routines, the annoying customers or the irritating suppliers and you are just so fed up at work, perhaps because you don’t see how what you do ads any value to the organisation, that you sit down in front of your computer and start looking at the online job sites.
But what if it didn’t have to be this way? What if you could find away to change your job without actually changing job?
Researchers for an article in Harvard Business Review who looked at employees of all levels working with a range of organisations found that employees who took time to review their jobs and then made changes to the way they worked, ended up more “engaged and satisfied with their work lives, achieve higher levels of performance in their organisations, and report greater personal resilience.”
Here are 3 things you can try to do to change your job before deciding to quit:
- Sit down and really think about your job. Make a list of all the tasks that you have to do each day then highlight those that you enjoy doing the most, those that are average, and those that you hate doing. Is there a way that you can do more of the tasks you love and delegate some of those you don’t like doing? Bear in mind that you can never get rid of all the tasks you don’t like doing – we all have to do some things that we dislike! Try taking on different tasks within your scope of work or switching tasks with one of your colleagues in order to make everyone more productive.
- While we can’t always choose who we work with, we can choose how we interact with them. When you look at the list of tasks that you wrote down for 1 above, who else is involved and what sort of relationship would you like to have with them. This is where you need to focus on what you can do; it’s easy to say that someone else is difficult to work with but this is about you, not them. What can you do to create a more positive relationship with the people you work with?
- Change how you perceive what you do. How do you add value and who benefits from what you do or do you see yourself as a small cog in a big wheel? Changing the way you view what you do can have a big positive impact on your job.
If you really are fed up with work, try to use the above tips to change your approach and create a position where you are more satisfied, productive and happy.
You can also contact me for a career check.
