Most of us are on break right now, with 2016's hard work behind us or at least on hiatus. Presents are opened, tried out and tried on; plans to see Rogue One are being made; and large stocks of cookies and candy are dematerializing all over the country. Everything is as it should be.
Are you feeling any differently than you did a week ago? Stand still a minute and see what you can notice about the last few days. No longer worried about blinking in case you fall asleep when your eyelids closed, even for a second? Newly reminded of your kids' favorite pajamas? Unclear about where you left your phone? I wish you the pleasure of all of these and more.
I also wish that the next time you find yourself in your cubicle, things will feel different and much, much better. That your 2017 will register higher and higher on your pleasure, satisfaction and adventure meters. I know no spells to offer, but a few quick thoughts about how much the days that make up your career can feel better as well as more personally rewarding.
Pleasure is a realistic goal for your work, if you are willing to grant yourself time to rest and think. You may have already been filling in your 2017 calendar with planning meetings etc., but there's still a lot of open space. Mark out at least one no-tech weekend each month when you do no emails, catch up on nothing and just plain step away from it all. Nice but unnecessary? Check out Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less for the details. Also, schedule time each day to take a break from meetings, emails and calls. You'll have to mark it on you planner if it's actually going to happen. Your work will benefit from it in ways that others will notice.
Satisfaction can be your career goal, just as much as advancement. Treat yourself like you treat your company's employees. Look at how the classic job satisfaction dimensions from employee research apply to you in your job and career. Ask yourself these 12 questions, and resolve to give all of the questions a positive response by mid-2017. No matter how far you have gotten in your career, your answers to these questions matter. And if you have no option but to answer that your manager will not provide you with recognition or help you develop, then you must create a work-around -- a mentor or skip-level or cross-functional teamwork or, or, or. Don't kid yourself. The lower you let your satisfaction drag, the more likely your performance will suffer from your increasingly obvious displeasure.
Adventure equals pleasure for those who enjoy creativity. If you do know what I'm talking about, get yourself the experience this year. There are so many research-based insights that you can apply to introduce valuable changes in your work, and you can find them by just reading a bit about behavioral economics. Traditional compensation philosophy has not been influenced enough by the last 10 years of insight into human behavior, perhaps because we don't want our core belief in the validity of the pay-for-performance philosophy to be challenged.
Here's a bit of content from the introduction to a behavioral economics text. Imagine how much you could improve the meaning of pay for performance in your company through deeper understanding of how to influence your employees' performance. Imagine how much you could improve HR's influence on business results if you could put such research to work:
"Behavior economics (BE) uses psychological experimentation to develop theories about human decision making and has identified a range of biases as a result of the way people think and feel . . . We . . . live in the moment . . . we tend to resist change, are poor predictors of future behavior, subject to distorted memory, and affected by physiological and emotional states . . . social preferences, such as those expressed in trust, reciprocity and fairness . . ."
On your way to 2017, take the time to think about the life that you want and the work you'll be willing to put in to get it. At the very least, make this crucial commitment to yourself: "Exhaustion is no longer an option."
Margaret O'Hanlon, CCP collaborated with Ann Bares and Dan Walter to create the DIY guide to compensation leadership, Everything You Do (in Compensation) Is Communications @ https://gumroad.com/l/everythingiscommunication. Margaret is founder and Principal of re:Think Consulting. She brings deep expertise in compensation, communications and leadership to topics like total compensation, performance management and compensation implementation discussions at the Café. Margaret is a Board member of the Bay Area Compensation Association (BACA). Before founding re:Think Consulting, she was a Principal at Willis Towers Watson.
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