Finding happiness at work isn’t easy. Most people will work at a job they don’t like, at least for a little while.
Your job might be boring, frustrating, or tedious, but you need to make ends meet, or gain experience for the next steps in your career.
However, if you work at a job you really hate, and you can’t find any happiness at work, you’ve bought yourself a one-way ticket to burnout.
Even if your current role isn’t the one you dream of, there are things you can do to find happiness at your job. Some of it comes down to a mindset shift, but there are also actions you can take on your own and with colleagues to bring more joy into your workplace.
Before we get too deep into the ways you can find happiness at work, let’s be clear that there is a baseline you need to reach for a job to be tolerable—even if it’s not something you look forward to.
A livable wage. You don’t need to be making six figures in order to find happiness at your job, but you do need to be paid enough to cover your everyday expenses.
A decent manager. The number-one thing that can turn a fine job into a terrible one is a bad boss. Management that is abusive, dismissive, or manipulative is going to make it hard to enjoy your job, even if every other aspect of the work is what you want.
Work-life balance. You don’t need to love your job if you can find enough happiness outside of work. A job that doesn’t allow you to have a life outside of work is going to stifle your happiness no matter what.
Security. It will be very hard to stay happy at a job when you aren’t sure if you’ll be laid off, if the company will go under, or if you’ll have a new boss next week. For true happiness at work, you need some degree of security and predictability, even if the work changes day to day.
You don’t need to believe in your company’s mission to find meaning in your job.
Truthfully, many people don’t care about the company they work for. And a lot of people don’t even care about the work that they do—that’s why companies pay us to do it; we wouldn’t spend our free time processing invoices or filling pot holes or driving around delivery orders if we weren’t getting paid.
But even if you can’t find joy in the larger mission of your work, you can discover happiness at work by zooming out the lens. Where else can you derive meaning from your job, aside from the tasks you find unfulfilling?
The easiest place to find this kind of meaning is with the people you work with. The work you do (even if it isn’t exciting to you) may be exciting and helpful to others—the customers you interact with, the clients you serve, the colleagues you see every day. If you enjoy those people, then you can find joy in helping them, even if the work itself is unexciting.
If you aren’t able to find happiness that way, then think about how your job might be serving a larger purpose. Sure, it’s boring to stock shelves, but can you enjoy bringing a sense of calmness and aesthetic to your workplace by doing a good job organizing things? Maybe you have a tedious job helping people set up their internet—can you reframe it as a job helping people gain access to information and community?
Think about what matters to you, what kind of work you’d like to be doing. Then look for ways you can draw connections—even small ones—between the work you are doing currently and your deeper values.
Related: Want a Meaningful Career? 8 Signs That Have Nothing To Do With Money or Status
Reframing your work to help you find more meaning will help to a degree. But it’s not enough to live the fulfilling, joyful life you really want.
That’s why a big part of finding happiness involves balance. In other words, how are you using your free time to increase your sense of purpose and connection? Because these are the keys to happiness.
If your life outside of work consists mostly of eating, sleeping, and vegging out, then a meaningless job essentially translates into a meaningless (and joyless) life.
But if you find ways to bring happiness and meaning into your life outside of work, then you can view your job as a mechanism for funding your “real life,” the one that you attend to when you’re not clocked in.
For many people, the happiness they find outside of work comes from their social connections. Spending time with family and friends, or taking part in community-building activities can bring a lot of joy into your free time, making your working hours more tolerable.
For other people, meaning might be derived from a project—working on a novel, building up a new skill, attending classes, developing a side hustle. There are so many options to choose from, so here are a few articles to look at to help you choose an approach:
Protecting the life you build outside of work matters as much as building it in the first place.
Part of that comes down to privacy. You don’t owe your coworkers a full window into your life outside the job. Keep your hobbies, your relationships, your side projects—whatever they are—for the people you actually want to share them with. Not everything needs to become office small talk or company knowledge.
The other part comes down to where your head is once you’ve clocked out. It’s easy to let a bad meeting or a frustrating email follow you home and sit there, replaying on a loop for the rest of the night. But that habit eats into the exact time you’re supposed to be spending on your life outside of work.
This is often easier said than done, but there are some habits you can practice to help you leave work at work. Do something consistently to mark an end of the workday and a transition into your outside-work life: Take a walk, exercise, have a shower, just sit in silence for a few minutes. Your brain will start to recognize this psychological anchor means it’s time to turn off “work brain.”
Take steps to keep work from seeping into your personal life, namely by setting boundaries with colleagues and yourself. When you’re off the clock, turn off notifications from your work email and avoid responding to messages from colleagues after hours. They need to respect that you are not available when you aren’t being paid to be available.
As I already touched on, your relationship with your managers will have a big impact on your happiness at work, but the good news is you have more influence over that relationship than you realize.
You can develop a better working relationship with your boss through observation and communication. That’s the core idea behind managing up: adjusting your own behavior at work to build a better working relationship with whoever you report to.
Managing up doesn’t mean brown-nosing or saying yes to everything. Instead, you manage up by understanding what your boss needs, anticipating problems before they land on their desk, and being someone they trust.
Done right, it makes your day-to-day less stressful and gives your career more momentum at the same time. I’ve written a full breakdown of how to manage up, with real examples of what it looks like in practice. Here are a few similar pieces worth checking out, about how to read between the lines at work and get along better with colleagues.
If you’re already aware of specific things that would boost your happiness at work, have you taken concrete steps to make those changes happen?
It’s not uncommon for colleagues to complain to each other about workplace issues, but then fail to raise the issues in a way that might actually alleviate the problem.
In an ideal world, management would be able to see where these problems lie and address them directly. In the real world, it usually requires someone with patience and strong communication skills to make the problems known.
If you have ideas on how the workplace could be improved, share them. Don’t wait until you’re feeling resentful or jaded—be proactive, raise the issues before they become so large that they make you want to quit.
We have a lot of articles that can help you plan for these kinds of conversations:
What happens when you try all these strategies and still aren’t happy at work? The meaning you find in your job isn’t enough to light a spark. Your work-life balance is lopsided. You can’t stand your colleagues and your boss won’t listen to reason.
Looking for a different job might be the answer, rather than trying to shoehorn happiness into your existing work. That way, you can start out looking for the perks that make a job fulfilling from the start.
We have a number of articles on The Vector Impact that can help you with leaving a job and finding a new one. Here are some good places to start:
Happiness at work doesn’t come easily. Don’t feel discouraged if you aren’t thrilled about going into work every day; you’re in good company. However, much of your enjoyment at work is up to you. Changing your mindset, improving your life outside of work, and putting in the effort to better your working environment can turn a job that’s a slog into one that brings joy.
