Unix: Why you love (or don’t love) your job

You might miss out on an opportunity to move into a more interesting and promising position because your company would have too much trouble trying to replace you.

Highly Desirable

The highly desirable category includes:

flexible telecommuting
encouraging fitness and well being
good work-life balance
feeling that your knowledge and skills matter
believing that you are learning valuable skills
training opportunities
caring about and investing in your growth

Priceless

The priceless category includes a number of items, many of which are hard to assess without an insider’s knowledge of the group you’d be working with. This group includes:

• coworkers – a job that comes with honest, caring and supportive coworkers is a dream come true
• effective teamwork – the group you work in should have functional ways to track work and “pass the batton”. There’s almost nothing that pleases me more than being able to confidently turn over a task to someone else when my plate is just too full and to know that my coworkers can depend on me to do the same for them.
• a feeling that your work amounts to something beyond just profit for your company (e.g., believing that your company's work is of value in the grand scheme of things)
• having a sense of purpose
• getting recognition beyond the pay check
• having a stake in your company's success -- options or profit sharing
• respect
• time to explore issues of particular interest to you – companies that allow you to spend some portion of your time pursuing issues that you are particularly interested in get an extra big check mark in my book. If you are allowed to innovate and are rewarded if your innovations turn into profit-making opportunities for your company,
• encourage breaks (even naps) – only one place that I’ve worked cared enough about employee comfort enough to set up
• a break room with dim lighting for staff to take naps. While there’s clearly a trust issue here, I’ve found that a ten minute mini-nap in the middle of the day can restore my energy level.

Before you jump

It’s a good idea to rank your current job even if you aren’t ready to move on. Review what works for you and what doesn’t work for you and take the time to determine whether your current job can be fixed before taking that leap into the job market.

Here’s a good survey that might get you thinking about the things that weigh you down or lift you up at work. While it doesn’t cover as much territory as I have in this post, it can provide you with a happiness score that might get you thinking about what you value at work and what is missing.

Have I overlooked anything? I’d love to hear your ideas about what you value about your current position and what you rank most highly when evaluating new opportunities.