Job satisfaction is not something I've written about here on this blog yet. Which is kind of remiss of me - it's at the heart of why I started this little coaching business.
Job satisfaction has a lot of different facets to it. Feeling you did well in the work tasks you filled your day with. That your work was for something or someone - a cause, perhaps - beyond yourself. That your job enables you to work in line with your identity. It could simply be that it enables you to earn enough to cover your bills. Completely valid.
After I'd left my old role and an appropriate replacement proved elusive, I realised that to achieve the things that add up to job satisfaction for me, I'd need to create my own role for myself. I've never been lucky enough to experience that magical thing I've heard about, when someone has a role in an organisation created just for them! (Sigh.)
But starting my coaching business wasn't just about achieving job satisfaction for me. It was (and is) also about helping others to find job satisfaction too. Because my sense is that all the data, both local and global, tallies with what I observed myself and what I hear all the time - the experience of work these days is often as a drain on energy, rather than something that's nourishing, and the distance between a person's work and any tangible benefit to another individual or community is just too tenuous. Helping people smooth the rough edges of their day-to-day experience of work, to feel more satisfied with the work they did and their job at the end of it, feels like a tangible contribution I can make.
Job satisfaction is a big topic though, so this post is only going to scratch the surface!
Where we're at with job satisfaction - what the data says
In New Zealand, I would say we've got quite a bit of work to do on job satisfaction, especially for our younger workers. SEEK's 2024 happiness at work index found that, overall, 62% of the 1,000 workers surveyed were happy at work. Those who identified as baby boomers were the most happy at work (76%), followed by Gen Xers (69%) and Millennials (54%). But only 52% of Gen Zs said they were happy at work.
Similarly, the New Zealand Public Service Census in 2025 revealed that only 56% of under-35s working in the public service were satisfied with their work. For the public service overall, the figure was 62%.
Globally, Manpower Group's Global Talent Barometer found for 2026 that the 'current job satisfaction' of the more than 13,000 workers surveyed across the world was 55%. Sheesh.
But what does 'job satisfaction' really mean, anyway?
To some extent, the answer to this one is, it's in the eye of the beholder. Job satisfaction is different from person to person.
One of the go-to definitions of job satisfaction is that it's the feeling an individual has when they experience three things in combination in their work: autonomy (choice), relatedness (connectedness to others), and competence (effectiveness, and mastery). If these three things are present, then individuals will grow and develop, have wellbeing, and intrinsic motivation - adding up to a feeling of satisfaction, in this context, with their jobs. This is the 'self-determination theory' of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, two psychology researchers and professors from the University of Rochester.
A second way of viewing job satisfaction is the one suggested by industrial and organisational researchers, that job satisfaction is made possible when there is a high degree of 'person-organisation fit'. That is, when there is a strong relationship between the values, beliefs and practices of employees, and the culture of their organisation. As the research evidence bears out, you're less likely to leave an organisation if your ways of thinking and doing are a good match for those of your organisation. It's probably where some of our sense of belonging in a job comes from, which will in turn have an effect on our level of job satisfaction.
Dr Kathryn Page in her new book Good Work published earlier this year proposes that job satisfaction is also that second type of success at work that is about meaning and mattering. When the work has a clear purpose, and an impact that makes a difference for someone. When we do work that is characterised by giving (though it needn't be non-profit work), rather than having. She writes, "…it's a shift from self to service, from accumulation to contribution, and it's where many of us find a more lasting kind of fulfilment."
The facets of job satisfaction I listed near the beginning of this post suggest I myself have got a fairly eclectic definition of job satisfaction. What does it mean to you? Do you know?
Before we go any further, I'd like to take a wee opportunity here to say that I know that for many, many people, identifying what job satisfaction means to them and pursuing it in any job search is an unaffordable luxury. I realise that just my spending time thinking and writing about job satisfaction pegs me as being highly fortunate, but I am cognisant that, for many, having a job that keeps the bills paid is already a win.
But I do want more satisfaction at work - what can I do?
In answering this question, I want to encourage you to look inside your current role for ways you could reframe it. To see if you could push out the 'walls and ceiling' of your job that restrict what you do and how you do it, and optimise what's already good about it. Looking for a new job or changing career is always an option when trying to achieve an increase in your job satisfaction (and if you're taking that route, go you!) But on the other hand, it could be you're ignoring as-yet-uncovered job satisfaction without realising it, and it's not always easy to find a new job (especially if you want flexibly, or part-time).
Sometimes relatively simple and easy-to-overlook options can make a really big difference to your satisfaction at work.
Try to make more progress on meaningful work
One of my recent blog posts described the study of American researchers Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer that showed that making progress at work was the single biggest determinant of job satisfaction for the participants in their study. They called it the Progress Principle - that what happened at work, whether workers made tangible progress on important work, or whether they felt stymied or experienced setbacks, determined how good (or not) they felt about their jobs.
Amabile and Kramer also found that this progress doesn't have to be huge - even the 'small wins' have the power to change our perception of our workday and our jobs. So, try every day to notice the little things that have gone well, how you have inched forward on this or that project. It really counts in changing our feelings about our work. Not worthy of a bottle of prosecco, or fireworks, but notable nonetheless.
Recraft your job
The interesting research of Jane Dutton (University of Michigan) and Amy Wrzesniewski (pronounced like 'vres-niev-ski') (Yale School of Management) into how to change your job to make it more meaningful - that is, ‘job crafting’ - has shown that you can reshape your job in three ways: by crafting the tasks you do, changing the people you connect with in your role, and how you think about your job.
Let's talk very briefly about the first of these: task crafting. If you're not 100% thrilled about your job, why not try changing the type of tasks you do? You could add something more interesting, subtract something or find a way to outsource the worst of it, or swap tasks with a teammate? Or, would you reap more job satisfaction if you were able to broaden the scope of one of your task? Lastly, is the number of tasks on your plate the right amount? What I'm about to say might not be what you're expecting… do you need more tasks because you're bored and need extra challenge? Just an idea.
Incorporate more 'flow'
Czech-American researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (pronounced like ‘cheeks-sent-me-high’) research into 'flow' found that experiencing more flow led to greater satisfaction. Flow is that state we get into when we're doing something at just the right level (not too easy, not too hard), when we're completely absorbed, and when what we're doing is rewarding in and of itself. This is true in our work as well. When you get into that state of flow from time to time in your work, it rewards you with feelings of competence and enjoyment, and you're more likely to feel satisfaction with your job.
Do you know what activities at work lead you into a flow state? Have a think… This is something I've been tracking in my morning journalling over the past year, and for me, I’ve noticed I get into flow by writing (this blog post, for example), and unexpectedly, playing in my website's Editor mode!
Whether you love your job, have fallen out of love with your job, or are currently between jobs, I hope that this brief foray into the different facets of job satisfaction has given you some new ways of thinking about it. And even some new ways to get more of it. It's not a topic that's taught in school (let's be honest, teachers have enough to do already) and it's not something we are introduced to once we start work. But because of the feelings of well-being it can bring, it's worth mulling over, with the knowledge that if it’s evading you in your current role, there are ways to improve the situation.