April 2010 Weddings
Dear Community,
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
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Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Do you like your job?
This is totally stolen from the What's Cooking board...but I thought it would be interesting to post here.
According to this book, The Outliers (which I now want to read), for work to be meaningful, and therefore enjoyable, it needs three things:
- autonomy - i.e., independence; you get to make your own decisions
- complexity
- a connection between effort and reward
How many of these does your job have? Do you like your job?
Re: Do you like your job?
I definitely have all three and yes, I like my job. Sometimes I love it and sometimes I hate it. When kids tell me I made a difference in their life or I taught them something... I LOVE my job.
I teach sophomores and juniors (English).
I'm an Academic Advisor at a High School, meaning it is my job to support the guidance office and create programs and workshops to prepare students for college. Our population is largely first-gen hispanic students, who are "underserved" when it comes to preparedness for college and financial aid. I LOVE my job.
I definitely have independence to make my own decisions, of course with support of the Guidance Director and Principal. I am the first person to be in this brand new position, so I'm totally creating a college readiness program from scratch (I used to be a college admissions officer, so not too complex for me, I have a ton of knowledge and resources to share.) And it's totally rewarding, I love working with the students. They are amazing and motivated and I hope that I'm inspiring them to reach for the stars!
There are alot of challenges here, with the demographics that we have in our neighborhood, and lots of achievement and discipline issues, but I mostly work with the top students. They are amazing and I can't wait to see where they end up next fall!
Do you agree with these 3 factors?
Haha you must be reading my mind getting us to evaluate our job. I don't make most decisions, I have a little (not much) complexity, and usually I have an effort/ reward.
I do not like some aspects of my job, ie my WTF it's so slow!!, and I need to keep using the fuel of that frustration (along with other frustrations about my one boss and pay) to keep myself motivated to get the CIA tests completed. Sigh. I need more hours in the day to work on this.
April 2010 Siggy Challenge: Next Vacation Destination
April 2010 Siggy Challenge: Next Vacation Destination
My job probably only has the first one - Autonomy. We get to work pretty much on our own and make out own decisions (although there are certain situations where we have to discuss with our supervisor)
The job isn't very complex - It's just investigating auto claims. If they have too many problems we just refer them to SUI and someone else takes over.
There is no connection to effort and reward. We get paid below average of what other adjusters get paid. Whjile the employee benefits are great, the pay sucks. And honestly, I don't really feel like I'm making a difference in my job. Which is why I'm going back to school to pursue something that IS meaningful!
I like where I work, I don;t like my job at all.
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A10 Siggy Challenge: Next Vacation Destination: San Francisco!
Hahahaha!!! I didn't see this until after I wrote my WTF!!! We must all have work on the brain today :-)
But, yes - like most people there are days when I love it and days when I don't want to get out of bed in the morning, but overall I do enjoy my work, very much! I am an Executive/HR Assistant at the Private Equity firm where I work now. This is a "second" career of sorts for me, as I spent my "younger days" climbing the corporate ladder and enjoying great success throughout my 20's and 30's doing so. I thought that this would be a nice job to work at, make some nice bucks and basically mosey along. Not!!
As I mentioned in my WTF post, what started out as a nicely paced, cozy set up has quickly morphed into a serious deal where I support one of the "big dog" deal teams, who generate more than half our firm's new deal revenue each year. These guys are on the go and it seems I'll be right there wth them - so much for kicking back :-)
Specifically, my job does have those three components as well as a great work/life balance culture, work from home options, serious year end bonuses and that good stuff, so, apart from leaving now each day with my tongue hanging out, not too much to dislike. But like any job, there are days when I just don't feel like it. Thankfully, those have been few and far between, and I just have to manage those moods when they come about :-)
I know I b!tch about my job a lot, but I don't hate it. In fact, I used to love it I just sort of hate what it's become in the past year or so, BECAUSE:
(1) Autonomy. I kind of have this in that I have full freedom to make tactical decisions on my cases, make decisions with my clients and go forward on whatever path we want and dont' need supervisor approval or anything. But a lot of what I do depends on prosecutors agreeing, and they never agree, soooo.... yeah.
(2) Complexity. ZERO! Well, every now and then a cool issue comes up, but generally in felony court it's like okay buddy all the evidence is against you, this is the plea offer and it's not going to get any better. Want it? Of course you do because if you don't take it you risk 10000 years in prison! Set for plea, lather rinse repeat.
(3) Effort/Reward. Another big fat zero. I get paid less than my coworker who is hardly ever here, and the same as a coworker who is constantly getting client complaints. I have always tried to work hard regardless of my meager govt salary, but it's hard to stay motivated when others who are sucking get a higher raise than me! Sometimes I get a great deal for a client and they are really grateful but that is often rare.
THIS so much for me, too - and add in bosses that appreciate you. It doesn't have to be with money, but just recognition of good work is a good thing, and NOT recognizing co-workers who do poor work.
Interesting. I agree that those are a good 3 factors but there should be a few more.
I've now worked at the same law office for 11 years and I pretty much know what I'm doing like the back of my hand. There are a few rare moments where something new comes up. But like Rach said, it's pretty much, rinse, lather, repeat.
The freedom I have is without question the best thing. My boss could care less when I arrive/leave.
Sometimes I miss have coworkers but I know that I am blessed in not having to deal with the drama like some of you have.
Shmel's Blog
I don't LOVE my current job. The people I work with sometimes stress me out, but I love what I do. I have 2 & 3 and 1 is my issue. With fighting insurance regulations as well as dealing with patient and family issues,sometimes I feel like my professional opinion isn't taken seriously.
I work in the rehab dept at a skilled nursing facility (nursing home/short term rehab).
DH & I at the Light Festival
Hmmm, not so much, but that is why I went back to school to get my masters (though I still time at my job because they helped pay for school).
1 - Autonomy - I used to have some, at some of the other wind tunnels here that I have worked out, but my current boss is a micromanager, which is beyond frustrating to deal with. Also, since I do work with something huge, complicated and dangerous (wind tunnel), and I work for the government, there are a ton of procedures, and bureaucracy that take make it hard to be autonomous in many respects.
2 - Complexity - There can be complexity, but again, a lot of my job is bureaucratic paperwork which is mind numbing. I do love when I get to deal with data, and write matlab programs, and get to come up with solutions to problems, but I really wish that I had more more of that in my job. A lot of running a test is pretty boring, it is more the prepairing for a test that is interesting. However my new tunnel does dynamics testing while running at transonic mach numbers, so I am hoping that it will be more exciting watching a test run.
3 - Connection between effort and reward - HA! I work for the government! It is unbelievable some of the stuff that I see, and deal with, which is SO disheartening. There are some AMAZING people that I work with, extremely intelligent and hard working, and then there are the people who go out of their way to make work harder on everyone (on purpose and everyone knows it, not even kidding at all). There is nothing anyone will do about the people who don't work at all, and often times those people get promoted to move them out of the way. Some groups do get noticed for good hard work, but not my group.