Tammy Erickson, a workplace expert and author of Plugged In:The Generation Y Guide to Thriving at Work, advises that if you’re unhappy, see if you can upgrade your contribution to the company, or find a way to be more creative about your job.

via How to Survive in an Unhappy Workplace – Management Essentials – HarvardBusiness.org.

Sometimes it’s not about how much you’re getting from your job, but how much of a difference you feel like you can make. If you don’t feel like your work has value, it’s hard to get excited about it. But you usually do have some control over that.

photo credit: michelhrv

As much as we might like to look for a silver lining, sometimes we get stuck in jobs that, let’s face it, we hate. But in the face of certain circumstances like oh, I don’t know, a down economy and a tough job market, we may feel we must persevere. But how?

Luckily, CAREEREALISM has your back. In a feature called 6 Strategies for Surviving in a Job You HATE, they call attention to some techniques to help you muddle through somehow. Some of their advice is:

• Time For One’s Self: [...]  It is vital to set some time aside each day, particularly before heading into work.

[...]

• Decompression: Failing to “blow off steam” and letting frustrations build up can be dangerous not only to yourself but to others as well.

[...]

• Keep On Keepin’ On: Anything worth doing at all is worth doing well – even if it’s something you hate. Not only will this give you a sense of accomplishment and pride in yourself, it can also help you down the road should you need a reference.

Been there? Got advice? Sound off in the comments.

photo credit: Wagner Machado Carlos Lemes

If the rows and rows of self-help books at the local bookstore are to be believed, we should all be trying to improve ourselves in various ways every moment of every day. And sure, there’s something to be said for allowing yourself to evaluate your own skills and characteristics with unflinching honesty and making efforts to improve areas that matter, especially if something you do (or don’t do) negatively affects other people.

But a post in the wonderful blog Dumb Little Man puts forth that, for greatest gain, we should concentrate on our strengths, not our weaknesses:

It’s so intuitive – “I’m worst at tasks involving my weaknesses, so my greatest potential for development is in these areas. If I work on those things, I’ll become rounded!” Too bad it’s incorrect. Your strengths represent your natural ways of responding to the world; by going ‘with the grain’, instead of against it, you’ll find it easier to perform the amount of practice necessary to reach expertise in your chosen field.

It’s such a great observation, and so easy to overlook. After all, it’s easier to build on momentum than to counteract inertia. I give this advice to my clients when it comes to marketing, as well: concentrate on what’s going right, and figure out how to piggyback off of that in as many ways as possible.

What’s more, as they point out further into the article:

strengths-use leads to happiness. Achieving this happiness means both finding tasks that are suited to your strengths, and finding ways to involve your strengths into the tasks that you do.

Does this mean you shouldn’t look in the proverbial mirror every so often and give yourself a good hard review for potential areas of improvement? Not at all. But it does suggest that the majority of your time is best spent developing your talents and becoming even more of a rockstar at them.

photo credit: kainet

How would you like a three-day weekend every week? That’s the upshot of the four-day work week where each work day consists of 10 hours instead of the 8 in a 5-day work week.

We’ve talked about the Working 4 Utah initiative before, where the state has instituted this 4-day schedule across some 70% of its workforce, but now that the program has been in place for a full year, GOOD has circled back to review and is reporting several key benefits, of which our favorite, predictably enough, is this:

4: Happier, healthier workforce

Lori Wadsworth, a researcher at Brigham Young University, surveyed Utah workers who’ve transitioned to the 4 x 10 schedule and found that 82 percent prefer it. And, according to Wadsworth, “Utah employees actually show decreased health complaints, less stress, and fewer sick days.” And while absenteeism has dropped, productivity and quality of service have improved—customer complaints, for example, at state agencies like the DMV are down. Early evidence seems to quell the initial fears that 10-hour workdays would “burn out” employees.

Of course, on the entrepreneurial side of our audience, where there’s more and more push for the  four-hour work week (popularized by Timothy Ferris in his book of the same name), the idea of working four tens probably has little appeal. But if you’re in a traditional office environment, as we know many of our readers are, we’re curious to know if you’d be interested in this arrangement.

Would you prefer a schedule of four ten-hour work days each week to the standard five eight-hour days? Let us know why or why not in the comments.

photo credit: *Zara

I’ve been thinking about happiness at work lately. Having started my own company just about six months ago, and being happily busy and productive, the relationship has been obvious to me between doing something you love and being happy at work. Duh, right?

But it’s more than that: there’s a feeling of empowerment in having chosen my occupation rather than letting it choose me, and being busy with work that I feel good about. I mean, that’s not earth-shatteringly novel either, I realize, but the difference is huge: I went from being a passionate advocate for doing the right thing in multiple environments where that made me a pain in the CEO’s butt to now being a passionate advocate for doing the right thing as CEO of my own company.

Realistically, not everyone is going to start their own company, or will even want to, but we all still need to find happiness. So how do you reconcile happiness with long days doing work you sometimes may not love?

Coincidentally, in some of the blogs I read regularly for inspiration, I ran across a theme this week pertaining to work and happiness.

Gill Corkindale in HarvardBusiness.org had a piece on When Work Doesn’t Make You Happy that addresses that very question, and finds that choice, to the extent that we have it, is key:

“It all comes down to choice, and this is where I believe happiness lies. In choosing — as far as you are able — what you want to do and how you will do it. While not all of us can choose our work and colleagues, we can all choose how we approach things — with an open, optimistic, and positive outlook or with a frustrated, irritated one.”

In a somewhat similar (but perhaps more direct) vein, Jason Seiden, in a piece called Screw Your Career Path. Live Your Story, advocates embracing the surprises in life and finding your true self in the way you live out your choices:

“It’s time, as individuals, to remember that we are each protagonists in our own stories—not fictional ones, either, but real, live, actual, here-I-am-in-the-flesh-stories. [...] Only protagonists can know surprises, friendship, obstacles, twists, victories, villains, daring, love, temptation, loss, luck, setbacks, choices, laughter, tears… only protagonists can know success.”

And finally, from the managerial perspective, SmartBlog on Workforce covered the happiness-productivity connection in a piece called 3 ways to maximize your workers’ happiness — and performance:

“The secret to maximizing performance is to create an environment in which your employees are happy. A happy employee is highly engaged, flourishing and has achieved an acceptable work-life balance.

We know that high employee engagement leads to high performance. Recent studies by the Corporate Leadership Council, Towers Perrin and Development Dimensions International, show that a highly engaged workforce results in a 20% improvement in employee productivity, a 50% reduction in unplanned attrition and a 23% increase in customer satisfaction.”

It’s as if there’s been something in the air to make us all think along the same lines.

What about you – have you been thinking about the link between happiness and meaningful work, or between happiness and productivity, or perhaps the three-way link between happiness and meaningful work and productivity? What conclusions have you come to, different from what we’ve quoted above?

photo credit: Valerie Everett

It’s about as cliche a desk accessory as it gets, but a framed photo on your desk of something that inspires you may be just the thing you need to keep you focused and driven to succeed.

A few jobs back, I was overextended, managing three of the company’s top five goals within my small team, but it seemed worth it because I believed something good would come of it in the end, both for the company and for me professionally. But to try to make it all work, I was putting in really long hours at the office. Which meant that the very reasons why I wanted to succeed — to enjoy my life with my husband at our beautiful home in relative comfort — were out of my reach when I needed the motivation the most.

So I spent a couple bucks on having good quality prints made of some of my favorite snapshots of my husband and my home, and put them in good frames. Sure, I could have just made those images my computer screensavers or desktop wallpapers, but then I wouldn’t have them there in my peripheral vision all the time, just waiting to remind me about why I was there in the first place. Which also reminded me, after I’d put in a long day’s work, to go home and enjoy what I was working for.

Now that I work from home, I don’t need the reminder in such a visual way, but I do occasionally take a break from my desk to go hug my husband or take a stroll through our garden.

Maybe your inspiration is different: maybe yours has to do with places you want to go, or things you want to do. Maybe mementos of the past keep you focused on the present. Whatever it is that keeps you going, find a way to remind yourself frequently.

How do you remind yourself what really matters? Share your tips in the comments.

photo credit: alexik

Do you have friends at work? Studies show that people are generally much happier in their jobs when they have friends at their workplace.

This week, it might be worthwhile to try to strengthen your relationships at work: have a laugh with a friend at work, and plant the seeds of friendship with a casual coworker.

Penelope Trunk wrote an excellent blog post about having friends at work a few summers ago with a list of steps to go through to make it happen. One of my favorites in the list is this:

Find coworkers with shared vision and values.

This situation is probably most common at a nonprofit like Project: Think Different: “Everyone is linked together based on a passion for what we’re doing,” says, Raipal. “We all have a strong desire to change messages in pop culture.”

CareerBuilder on CNN.com has a great breakdown of “the good, the bad, and the ugly” of friendships at work, and it includes this should-be-obvious note:

Don’t, however mistake these initiatives as an open invitation to socialize all day. Keep your friendships in check and remember… you are at work to work!

(Socialize a bit, of course, but turning the average workday into an excuse for an office party is simply not sustainable — silly picture I chose for this post notwithstanding.)

Perhaps you’re even luckier than most, and you not only have a friend at work, you have a best friend at work. USAToday.com has an article on the advantages for business when coworkers are best friends.

Best friendships are good for business. Companies are coming to discover that, yet are at a loss at what to do about it. Group-hug Tuesdays? That idea sends chills down managers’ spines.

As well it should. No one wants to be required to befriend coworkers. Yet there certainly are management tactics that can promote the environment needed for coworkers to find like-minded peers and become friends. From the same article:

Brian Le Gette, CEO of Baltimore company 180s, is a believer in workplace friendships. The maker of sunglasses, ear warmers and gloves has a young, active workforce, and the company sponsors employees in Frisbee golf tournaments and a charitable rowing competition called dragon boat races that had 22 co-workers practicing for long hours after work.

Is all of this old hat for you? Are you a natural at making friends in the workplace? Leave us a note in the comments and let us know your tips for establishing workplace friendships.

In the interest of fairness, Fog Creek’s compensation policy is open, public, simple, and accountable. Many companies try to obfuscate the rules they use for determining compensation in hopes that they won’t get caught paying some people too much and others too little. Some companies actually consider it a firing offense to reveal your salary!

We feel that in the long run, this can only hurt us through negative morale, high turnover, and destructive office politics. Therefore, the policy in this document is publicly available. People have a right to know what the levels are and what they mean. Everybody has a right to know what their colleagues’ levels are.

It made me wonder what the Corporate Idealist crowd has to say about that approach. Your thoughts? Please share in the comments.

photo credit: dan taylor

Jeff Stibel writes over at the Conversation Starter blog at HarvardBusiness.org about 7 Ways to Be Happier at Work. We’ve talked before about how to feel good about your work, but you can just about not cover this topic enough. One of my favorites on his list is this:

Do things differently. Part of the problem at work for many people is boredom. We are stuck in a rut where we come in and do the same thing over and over and over again. Get your enthusiasm back by doing things differently. Make every effort to learn, to grow, and to challenge yourself. Take on more responsibility or attempt something you never thought you were capable of doing. Even if your responsibilities don’t allow for much flexibility, try a different approach to your existing responsibilities.

I once managed someone who needed coaching to improve his work process, but he so resisted change that we decided to try making one very small change in his work process each week. Each Monday, we’d decide if the change from the previous week had become enough of a habit yet to try adding a new change, and most of the time it hadn’t. He was so entrenched in his old way of doing things that it was all but impossible for him to accept even the slightest variation.

That’s not an isolated example in much of the workforce. People in general are distressed by change, and they avoid it at nearly all costs. But when you resist change, not only do you miss out on the benefit Jeff Stibel mentions of breaking out of a rut, you also stand to miss out on new possibilities when the culture around you changes. If your reaction to change is to dig your heels in and cling to the old ways, you may be thought a hindrance to progress. As Scott Robinson writes at TechRepublic:

Culture change in corporations is often breathtakingly rapid because only the largest multinational corporations can get away with gradual change. Change is never easy, and it can be traumatic for some, especially when it’s rapid and broad in its scope. But a company streamlines its in-house culture to redesign the way it does business.

In other words, it’s often get with the program or get out of the way. Understandably, the greatest resistance to change usually comes from fear: fear of the unknown, of what will happen to our individual roles once the changes sweep over the land. And in this time of economic uncertainty, that fear can be strongly exacerbated by looking around and seeing friends and loved ones out of work. But by far the best way to ensure that you’re not a corporate casualty is to adapt as smoothly as possible. If you can’t visualize yourself as a full participant in the new corporate structure or new corporate culture, it may be difficult for others to visualize you there.

Our best bet, then, when we see change coming our way, is not to cling to the old ways, but to view the change as an opportunity to learn, grow, challenge ourselves, and yes, ultimately, be happier.

photo credit: Orin Optiglot

One of the defining characteristics of work/life balance revolves around the issue of choice. We all really want the choice to work when we want, where we want and how we want. Or we want the choice to vacation as we wish, go to events that are appealing, or meet up with friends we love.

And, if our life is balanced enough between what we do to make money and then what we do when we spend that money, we feel free. We feel like we’re in control of our lives and careers and that we’re able to do better work and maybe even be better people.

Of course, when we don’t feel like we’re maintaining a healthy work/life balance, we can feel helpless. Out of whack. Frantic. And then we may not be able to do our best work or even live our best life.

There’s a growing body of research that says too many choices are bad for us. Too many choices can be paralyzing, confusing and may actually mean that we make a worse choice. Does this then mean that in order to have a proper work/life balance we should actually not seek to have more choices about how we spend our time? Should I erase the first two paragraphs of this post?

No. Instead, we need to best navigate between the choices that matter and the choices that don’t.

Maybe I think I want a gig that allows me to work from wherever I want. Maybe I like to be able to choose to work from home, a cubicle, a coffeehouse or a moving train. Or maybe that decision doesn’t mean that much to me. After all, no matter what, I’ll still be working. Sure – our environment can have a direct effect on our productivity, but maybe it’s not that big of a deal.

Maybe instead I’d like to be able to choose the kind of work I get to do. Maybe I’d rather be able to choose the clients I get to work with, the kind of marketing campaigns I put together or the kinds of products I sell. Because those choices deal directly with the kind of work I’m doing, they may make the work part of my work/life balance a little better, which could allow me to spend my life time at places I enjoy (like my home, a cubicle, a coffeehouse or a moving train).

As you reflect on your own balance this weekend, think about which choices are most important. Then, begin to build your work around those choices. Take a deep breath when you feel like you don’t have any freedom in certain choices and if possible, dismiss them as unimportant. Or at least let them be sacrificed on the altar of choices that matter.