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Happily Ever After Work

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Article from ADMIN 75/2023

By Ken Hess

The quest for job satisfaction.

I have a small group of former co-worker friends that still maintain contact. However, our geographic diversity makes it impossible to gather at a local restaurant for those occasional intellectual exchanges. The other evening, we had a conference call to catch up on our jobs, families, vacations, and miscellaneous topics. One of the job-related topics we touched on was how our expectations of a job and job experience are often quite different. We decided we needed to modulate our expectations or sharpen our job choosers. Fixing one or the other would result in huge improvements in job satisfaction.

Job satisfaction, to some, might seem to be an oxymoron, but it shouldn't be. Job satisfaction should be more than just a phrase used by journalists and HR people; it should be a thing that's sought after by employees and promoted by company executives. I know it's a time-honored tradition to hate your job because they pay you to do it, but we spend one-third (or more if you're a system administrator) of our life at work, and we shouldn't hate one-third of our life experience.

Job satisfaction leads to life satisfaction, because if you hate your job, it will affect the rest of your life – yes, even your sleep. It affects your relationships, parenting, interactions with outsiders, and energy levels. Being unhappy in your job has many negative consequences on the quality of your life, including shortening your life expectancy.

Some companies tout what's now called work-life balance. Work-life balance is one of those things that works on paper but isn't necessarily attainable in real life. Writers often create entire articles around maintaining a work-life balance, but they aren't system administrators, are they? I just read an article about work-life balance where the writer lists, "Find a job that you're so passionate about that you'd do it for free." I'll make a note of that and then crumble it up and toss it in the trash can. Most of us

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