Current News | News Archive | Feature Articles | About Us
The Role of Personal Practice in Work Satisfaction
|
By Michael C. Gilbert, May 30, 2007
In early 2007 we completed a survey of the readers of Nonprofit Online News (NON) and others on the topic of life work satisfaction. With a total of 433 respondents, we acquired a base of fairly useful data. This is the third of several reports from that survey. (Read the first report: "Meaningful Work Has A Price", and the second report: "Making the Most of Our Time")
One of the questions we asked was this: Do you have a reliable personal practice that brings you face to face with the most important choices about your life and work? We didn't specify what such a practice needed to be, only the key qualities of reliability, bringing to light important choices, a personal nature, and the connotations of the word "practice". There are a number of obvious practices that come to mind, such as meditation, career counseling, personal retreats, high level project planning, or journaling. But we left it open and there are probably as many variants to this as there are people.
This report concerns itself with how this single question related to other questions we asked and the implications of these correlations to work satisfaction. In other words, what might be the role of a reliable personal practice of reflection for people pursuing meaningful work? As our sample, we used the two groups created by the answer to the question about personal practice.
A. Happier at Work: Job and Career Satisfaction
Although there are a great many ways in which to learn whether and how people are happy with their work, we asked two questions from the 2006 Pew American Work Life Survey that directly addressed the topic: Overall, how satisfied are you with your job? How satisfied are you with the KIND OF WORK you do?
As with all of the cross tabulations in this report, we broke out responses to these questions by how the person answered the question about having a personal practice. The patterns discovered for each of the two satisfaction questions, although they differ in degree, are somewhat similar to each other.
The most striking result of this cross tabulation is the discovery that nearly five times as many people (22%) who have a personal practice are completely satisfied with their job as compared to those who do not have such a practice (3.7%). Although a simple cross tabulation forces no conclusions about why this is the case, it is still a powerful and important result.
The most likely explanations are that a personal practice either positively affects the sort of job we end up in (perhaps by encouraging more mindful choices) or it positively affects our attitude to whatever job we have or some combination of the two. It's somewhat less likely, although certainly possible, that a satisfying job makes the prospect of a personal practice more tolerable and thus more likely, but a strong case could be made for the reverse correlation as well, with dissatisfaction promoting greater reflection. In a complex, multivariate environment such as this, it's also quite possible that there are underlying causes that lead to these correlated factors.
The differences in career satisfaction are dramatic, but not as striking as those for job satisfaction. Almost half again as many people who have a personal practice (46.5%) are completely satisfied with the kind of work they are doing as those who do not have such a practice (32.8%).
B. Life is Short: Death, Work, and Personal Practice
There are more powerful ways than self-reported satisfaction to discover how happy someone is with their work, one of which is to learn what people say they would do if they had a limited time left to live. We asked two questions of this nature: If you knew you had two years to live, would you continue to do the work you do? And what if you only had two months to live, would you continue to do the work you do?
The patterns discovered here reinforce those of the previous questions. The differences between those who have a personal practice and those who don't are recurring and consistent. They are most dramatic at the extreme ends of the scale of satisfaction.
Nearly four times as many people who have a personal practice (24.3%) would continue to do the work they are doing without reservation, as compared to people without such a practice (6.3%). Similarly, more than three times as many people without a personal practice (17.2%) would drop everything about their current work, as compared to those who have such a practice (5.0%).
If anything, the results are even more dramatic in the context of the higher standards of an even shorter time. More than six times as many people who have a personal practice (19.0%) would continue to do their current work, as compared to those who don't have such a practice (3.0%). Substantially more of the latter would also drop their work entirely.
If we assume that a personal practice, in whatever form, encourages people to ask questions like these of themselves more frequently than they might otherwise, then we can see the possibility of explanations for these enormous differences. As we speculated earlier in regard to self-reported satisfaction, personal practice either leads people into work that is more deeply suited to them or helps people be more accepting of the work they have or some combination of the two. And as we mentioned before, it is always possible that some third factor or set of factors gives rise to both work satisfaction and a habit of personal practice, or in this case, even a different attitude about mortality.
C. Once and Future Career: Personal Practice and the Role of Change
The Pew American Work Life Survey included two questions about career change that we also used in our 2007 LifeWork Survey: Have you ever switched careers - that is, switched from one TYPE of work to another TYPE of work? (IF YES: How many times have you done this?) How likely is it that you will switch careers sometime during your future working life?
In trying to explore the possible complex causal relationships at work in the connection between personal practice and work satisfaction, we looked at the correlation between such practice and these two questions relating to career change. Of course, when it comes to teasing apart the causal factors, this only starts to scratch the surface. In particular, it looks at the connection of personal practice to career stability.
There is a moderate positive correlation between having two or more career changes and having a personal practice of some kind, with 42.8% of those without a personal practice having switched careers two or more times as compared to 54.1% of those who have such a practice.
What does this say about the causal relationship between career change and personal practice? Probably not much, on its own. It's possible that a personal practice (or the attitudes and behaviors that give rise to such a practice) lead to more rapid changes in people's careers, as they seek something which suits them and take risks that others might not take. On the other hand, frequent turnover as substantial as a career change might be something which encourages a habit of reflection such as a personal practice. Finally, there may be other factors that lead to both turnover and reflection, although given the other data, that factor is not likely to be some kind of innate dissatisfaction.
Overall, there is a slight negative correlation between having a personal practice and predicting that a future career change is likely. This is consistent with the evidence that supports the greater satisfaction in their work had by those with a personal practice, given that dissatisfaction can be a reason for people to surmise that they will change careers. Twice as many people who have a personal practice think it's not at all likely that they will switch careers. This also reinforces the notion that there isn't some kind of innate dissatisfaction or restlessness that accounts for both career change and a habit of personal practice.
Where To Go From Here
Every metric used in this study shows a dramatic positive correlation between a personal practice of reflection and happiness at work. It's reasonable to suspect that this is a causal relationship of some kind.
When it comes to the question of personally crafting a joyful and meaningful work life, this should be encouraging news. But there is plenty more research to be done to establish the nature of this correlation and its causal dimensions, in order to give people the specific tools and practices that might work for them.
Some of the questions we should ask include: Are there other factors that are as strongly correlated with work satisfaction? (We will look into those we have access to as we continue with our analysis of the 2007 LifeWork Survey results.) Are there other factors which contribute to the likelihood that someone will develop a personal practice and are those factors themselves sufficient to bring about work satisfaction? What particular "personal practices" are people using and are there any differences between them in these results?
In the meantime, readers can probably draw their own conclusions from these results and pair them with their own common sense understanding of the role of reflective practice. Whether you're an employer looking to improve morale and commitment, a counselor or coach working to help people fulfill their personal missions, or just, like all of us, someone who wants their work to mean something, you could do worse than consider adopting or deepening a regular personal practice of reflection.
If you found this article interesting or helpful,
please consider making a donation to Nonprofit Online News.
It will probably feel good!
Nonprofit Online News (http://www.nonprofitnews.org/) is a program of The Gilbert Center.
Opinions and observations by Michael Gilbert or the authors.
Contact Us