Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep57: Why you are unhappy at your job.

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Corporate Survivor Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your career confidence, build your skills and value, increase your salary, and the many lessons we learn in the corporate world. For more career support, click on over to www.mayping.com. This is Mayping, your corporate leader turned career coach. I hope you enjoy, like and subscribe. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of My God of Ping, a careers podcast you should listen to if you want to grow your corporate career. So today I have a very interesting topic I want to talk about.

Starting point is 00:00:43 And that is really, really yeah this very interesting question do you feel unhappy at your job and secondly why why do you feel unhappy at your job and have you actually given it any thought on why you might be feeling those sort of negative feelings at the workplace maybe towards just the entire nature feelings at the workplace, maybe towards just the entire nature of the job itself, or maybe towards certain people, and maybe towards the culture, and so forth. So today's topic is actually inspired by a question on LinkedIn. So again, My Career Insight was featured by the LinkedIn news team. So the question really is this, right?

Starting point is 00:01:31 What is really the root cause of unhappiness at the workplace? Because based on multiple surveys conducted, consistently the results is really about, okay, people are unhappy, but I think it's more important to really ask the question, why? And personally for me, I have been working in the corporate world for a really long time, starting from a junior associate all the way to leadership positions just in my 20s alone. So I think that just looking to the scope and expansion of the entire corporate ladder kind of gives me a bit of an insight as to why certain people feel this sort of negative feeling so really in today's episode I really want to share a little bit of those perspectives with you and and pretty much these were some of the comments that were also featured by the LinkedIn news team so let me just have a look at it on my phone here. So, yeah.

Starting point is 00:02:28 So the main point I want to get you guys thinking about is expectation gap. So a lot of times the root cause of unhappiness at work really boils down to expectation gap. So the question is why? Because a lot of times, right, when you are in a very specific role and when you're very busy or very unhappy or frustrated, basically all the negative feelings that you're feeling right now, it's very easy to just kind of like get caught in your own situation and only see kind of like what's in your circle. So today I really want to challenge you to take a slightly different perspective based on the three main reasons why people are unhappy at work based on the LinkedIn poll. So I'll go through the three very quickly and then we'll deep dive into each and every one of them. So based on the poll,

Starting point is 00:03:22 number one, bad management, number two, poor work-life balance, and number three, low pay. So based on this poll, it's saying that these are the three most common reasons why people are unhappy and dissatisfied in their role. So I think my, I'm a person who always believes in like seeing both sides of the coin. So I think before we start blaming, you know, bad management, like blaming why the company is like forcing me to work long hours and why is the company paying me? Yeah, low pay or whatever. Maybe consider, right, actually before you even take on this job, right, be the new job or maybe in a new role in the same company, before you even took on this position, what did you actually

Starting point is 00:04:12 expect to get out of this? What did you expect? And more importantly, what is considered fair? Because fairness is something that is very subjective, right? When, you know, something doesn't go our way, we tend to think that, oh, you know, it's really unfair. So I want to challenge that thought and, yeah, ask yourself what is considered fair, right? Ask yourself what is considered fair first, and then let's see on the other side, maybe what does the team or your boss or your company defines as fair,

Starting point is 00:04:44 and maybe we can start from there. All right. So let's actually deep dive into each of the three causes of unhappiness at work. Bad management. So bad management, question for you. And I want you to be honest in answering these questions for yourself as well. So if you think that, you know, you're unhappy at your workplace because of bad management, then okay, so what are the qualities that you would define as for a good manager? And if you are dealing with bad management right now, what steps have you actually taken to try to communicate with management, maybe a team leader or a manager to help them understand some of the trigger points, like what are the causes? And basically,

Starting point is 00:05:31 my point here is that are you communicating with the causes of your unhappiness and stress at work, which is likely your boss or like certain colleagues and maybe like, you know, some potentially some senior people as well. So the main point is that before we conclude you know bad management so kind of ask yourself what have you done to meet this person halfway and number two the number two constant complaint of unhappiness at work is poor work-life balance so nowadays i think in the pandemic a lot of people are experiencing the lack of work life balance because most of the time we are spending at home right so the question i actually want to ask yourself ask you is okay so if you are not enjoying your work-life balance what that what that mostly means is that you have a lot of work. There's a massive workload that you cannot handle, right?

Starting point is 00:06:26 So that's usually the cause that's causing you to work on weekends or like work longer hours on a day-to-day basis. So first thing, consider if you are actually being productive. So are there any other ways that you could be doing what you're actually doing right now? So are you using using the most efficient and effective techniques to deal with your current workload so that you can actually have work life balance? So this could be an issue around skills gap.

Starting point is 00:06:55 And that is also something I see when I work with a lot of my clients as well. And the other components that, OK, fine, now you're swamped with a lot of work, then is your boss aware of this right a lot of times i think we we tend to struggle on our own and we feel so helpless because we think that oh nobody can help us the thing i want you to really think about today is that have you asked for help have you tried to reach out and say hey i have been doing all these things but i don't feel that i'm progressing or i'm just not sure what is the best way to go about it so the point i'm trying to make here is that don't continue to struggle on your own like are there

Starting point is 00:07:37 any points in time that you are actually commun you know aligning with your boss in terms of expectation and you know just to make sure that the amount of effort that you're putting in is justified because otherwise right you may think that something is important and you put in your day and night trying to deliver that piece of work and you completely sacrifice your work-life balance it affects your mental health you are frustrated then then you you suddenly you know then maybe you know a couple of weeks later when you speak to your boss you realize that oh actually this thing wasn't that important in the first place so that's why right i mean if you've been following my content for a while you'll notice

Starting point is 00:08:20 that i consistently say communicating with your boss is so important. Aligning expectations with your boss, super, super duper important. And then we can continue by really making sure that you are using the right techniques to be able to manage your workload accordingly. Okay, so let's move on to the third reason why most people complain that they are unhappy at their job. And of course, money, money, money money so we're talking about low pay so this point i actually want to tackle it in two separate angles is the first one is um you that you're a new joiner and the other one is you know you have

Starting point is 00:08:55 somebody who's in the team but over time you've just like gathered more work so if you are a new joiner and you feel, hmm, before I joined, I thought the pay was fair. But now that I joined, I don't really think that it's that fair. Right. So again, like I said at the start of the podcast, right, expectation gap. So if you're in this situation, and I think this is really a piece of advice to all you job seekers out there, please make sure that when you're, you know, doing the interview process, you are actually clarifying the actual scope of the work before you happily sign the job offer. So we all want a new job, but what we don't want is to make sure that you're jumping into a new role extremely blindly as well.

Starting point is 00:09:41 So I think that's something to really, really remember. Then, like I said, another component of the low pay is if you're in a position of negotiating your pay at the beginning of before you join the company then practice salary negotiation techniques i was actually having a conversation with a client yesterday and she did receive a job offer but she felt that based on the the compensation that was proposed to her the salary that was proposed to her she felt that it was actually not enough to justify for an amount of work that is required of her so instead of just saying like a complete no to that opportunity because it's a pretty good one it's

Starting point is 00:10:22 just that you know the pay was not on par with what she expects so we actually spent the one-on-one session just like re-strategizing exactly how to position the salary negotiation better from a holistic perspective so that's for one of my clients yesterday and over this week as well i also had one client who managed to negotiate a more than 30 pay rise because of the nature of the work that she's taken. And of course, really positioning her value really well in her resume as well as her interview. So, right, low pay sometimes could be tackled even before you join the company. So I was saying earlier. Okay, second point on the low pay.

Starting point is 00:11:02 If let's say you are part of the team already, but due to the nature of restructuring, you suddenly ended up getting more work and that happens as well. So again, right, these are conversations that you need performance conversations with your boss because this is how you can really position your value in terms of like how you are continuing to contribute to the team and making an impact. In fact, for most of my one-on-one clients, I always tell them like at least every three to six months, we must have a positioning conversation and I help them to sort of like restructure based on the work that they have taken and how to position that maybe for more pay or maybe a promotion and a couple of my clients are actually going for a promotion by the end of this year as well. So don't just take on the work and hope that your boss will just discover you and then complain at home and feel frustrated and unhappy because you have a low pay. My advice, take action, but don't take blind action.

Starting point is 00:12:08 Positioning is very important here because if you're just seen as just another person who can do a job, it's going to be very difficult for you to make more money. It would be very difficult for you to be seen as somebody who is irreplaceable. But all these things actually is really down to positioning and you know really based on like the three points that i've just shared with you the foundation is this expectation gap so even like when i do my two-week trainings

Starting point is 00:12:37 right like i have a two-week training called boost your confidence at work the first part of the training we always go through expectation versus reality because there is no point going through the tools strategy and methods if we don't tackle the mindset at the start it doesn't matter what i teach you because you have already fixated maybe something that is incorrect that you will use this sort of mindset to see every single thing that you are facing at the workplace. So the unhappiness will just keep adding on. But that's why the mindset shift is something really important that needs to be tackled at the start. Right. So, again, I really encourage everybody to always think about another perspective and always think about what is the other side of things? And more importantly, like how can you like what can I do

Starting point is 00:13:27 to maybe get more information and you write to better position myself and like to better, yeah, to better request and understand if there are any opportunities where I would actually be actually be compensated for the effort that I'm actually putting in. So for those of you who are actually watching this live, thank you so much for joining the live recording. You can always find the replay on my YouTube, Spotify and Apple podcast. So on my YouTube right now,

Starting point is 00:13:57 I'm in the process of updating the captions and subtitles so that hopefully it'll be a lot easier for you guys to watch. And again, I really want to thank linkedin news team for really picking up this comment that um i shared in terms of the expectation gap i think that's something that a lot of um working professionals don't really think about and i can also understand it because when you're so caught up in your own situation it's very difficult to like break outside the box so i hope that with today's episode it has given you a little bit of perspectives in term in terms of like okay maybe it's that mindset shift that i need to tackle first before i go into the nitty-gritty of feeling like you know really sad

Starting point is 00:14:39 for myself so with that i hope that you guys found this episode super duper helpful and i will see you guys next week cheers bye

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep57: Why you are unhappy at your job.

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