If you regularly experience the Sunday blues, it’s likely you’re not the happiest at work. While this may not seem like a significant issue, feeling dissatisfied in your role can take a significant toll on your mental wellbeing and lead to serious issues like burnout.
There are plenty of reasons you could be feeling so-so about your job. Maybe you don’t enjoy your work and struggle to stay motivated or perhaps you do enjoy what you do but feel disconnected from your team and colleagues. The good news? You could boost your satisfaction at work by making a few simple changes.
Here, we explore four ways to improve your happiness at work.
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Build relationships with your colleagues
Getting to know your colleagues can make it easier to communicate with them at work and could open the door to new opportunities. For example, you might build a relationship with someone in a more senior position who could offer helpful advice or even become a mentor.
Link your work to your intrinsic values
Unfortunately, work isn’t going to be fun every second of the day. However, aligning your nine-to-five with your intrinsic values and the things that are important to you will make it more enjoyable and help you stay motivated.
There are a number of ways you might want to link your work to your values, and these may vary depending on your role. For example, if you work in the medical or teaching field, helping others might be an intrinsic value that aligns with your job.
Find out what motivates you
If you don’t take the time to determine what in your role motivates you, you’re more likely to see your work in a negative light. Developing a sense of meaningfulness or connectedness in your role and within your team could go a long way to improving your happiness at work.
Consider moving
Print specialists instantprint recently surveyed 2,000 workers to find out where in the UK has the happiest employees. If your role is feeling lacklustre, consider moving to one of the best-ranked areas.
According to instantprint, the city with the highest rate of happy employees is Manchester with 27% deeming their satisfaction with work as “very high”. Central London wasn’t far behind with 26% of those asked reporting that they were “very satisfied” with their current role. Oxford came in a close third as 25% of those asked said they felt “very satisfied” with their jobs.
Other cities found to have a high rate of employee happiness were Cambridge where 20% claimed high satisfaction, Bristol where 20% gave a rating of 5/5, Liverpool where 27% were “very satisfied”, Edinburgh where 21% reported they were highly satisfied, Chelmsford where 36% gave a 5/5 rating, Newcastle with 22% of workers feeling satisfied at work, and Derby where 23% claimed to be happy with their current role.