Job satisfaction is associated with a increasing employee loyalty and a boost to its productivity. Every company tries to devise different strategies to ensure this, seeking a more cohesive, committed and high-performing workforce. However, the focus of such plans is not always the right one.
One of the most common mistakes is confusing job satisfaction with happiness at work. They are not the same. Job satisfaction is an attitude, so it must contain both cognitive and affective components (Eagly and Chaiken, 1993). However, there has been a history of misalignment between the definition of this construct and its measurement. Thus, when measuring satisfaction in a company, the first step towards designing an effective strategy, indicators that ignore its effects are used, posing the cognitive component as the predominant approach.
To collect job satisfaction metrics within the company, tools such as the following are used:
Both request descriptions and evaluations of job characteristics, rather than focusing on the feelings or emotional experiences that take place during work or within the work environment.
The result is that the degree of employee job satisfaction and the factors influencing it are not well understood.
On the other hand, happiness is not a term that has been widely used in academic research on employee experiences in organisations. And this is not for lack of interest in this aspect, but rather due to the conceptual confusion which arises from considerable overlap with the concept of Job satisfaction.
Happiness or positive affective experiences in the workplace are related to:
Furthermore, it must be taken into account that, apart from individual differences between people, issues related to happiness vary depending on forms of work.
Happiness at work reflects hedonic experiences or positive beliefs about an object (e.g., job satisfaction), emotional engagement, the experience of positive emotions while working, issues related to learning/development, growth, autonomy, and self-actualisation.
Finally, it is important to highlight that, although job satisfaction is usually directly related to management and its decisions, employee happiness depends more on colleagues. In fact, data from a study recently published by JKSTalent show that:
As has been mentioned in preceding lines, flexibility and autonomy lead to happiness at work. However, the advantages of equipping staff with these two attributes go further, constituting the basis for Development of job satisfaction.
Autonomy can be guaranteed in many different ways, although, among the most effective are the following:
For its part, flexibility is not an issue solely related to the length of the working day or its distribution; there are other ways to guarantee it, such as Flexible remuneration.
All these steps help the company to advance towards a model where your employees' job satisfaction is on the rise, although, it should not be forgotten that, ultimately, feeling satisfied with the position one holds in the organisation and the tasks assigned will depend on each individual. As it is a matter of attitude, happier people will find more satisfaction in their work, as demonstrated by Nathan Bowling's research which confirms that if people are, or are predisposed to be, happy and satisfied with life in general, then they are likely to be happy and satisfied in their jobs.
