Job Crafting Could Be the Secret to Loving Your Job

Whatever the work is that you do, you work within some sort of a system. There are suppliers who might irritate you and not deliver what you need on time. There are customers who might be internal or external to your company — and are often ungrateful and complaining. Then there are the actual processes that you do — your job duties, the value that you add, the ins and outs of your daily work and how it connects to the larger mission of the organization.

Quite often, while our customers and suppliers can cause us grief, we know that we can’t change them and so we get frustrated, upset and angry, thinking, “Why am I working here at all? I hate this job!” That’s when your eyes start wandering over to the online jobs site, and resumés start flying out as you seek employment elsewhere. But the problem with that is that there may still be grumpy and difficult suppliers, customers, coworkers and so on. What’s an honest working person to do?

But what if job satisfaction isn’t really about those external factors? What if happiness and joy in your job came from within and those processes that you do every day? What if you could stay where you are, and craft a better job for yourself? Many people do — and here’s what they know about creating great work for themselves, without even leaving their desk: