The Secret to Happiness at Work Your job doesn't have to represent the most prestigious use of your potential. It just needs to be rewarding.

very year, Gallup asks a sample of American adults what might seem to be a rather loaded question: How much do you like your job? The results may surprise you. The portion who say they are "completely satisfied" at work has risen dramatically over the past two decades, from 41 percent in 2001 to 55 percent in 2019. In 2020, despite the fact that millions of Americans had shifted to remote work, 89 percent said they were either "completely" or "somewhat" satisfied. I teach graduate students who have carefully envisioned their ideal career, many of whom are training to enter jobs in business or government. They find this statistic surprising because, like so many of us, they generally assume that to be satisfied, you must hold your dream job—one where your skills meet your passions, you make good money, and you are excited to get to work each day. No way 89 percent of people have this, right? But this belief is based on a misunderstanding of what brings job satisfaction. To be happy at work, you don't have to hold a fascinating job that represents the pinnacle of your educational achievement or the most prestigious use of your "potential," and you don't have to make a lot of money. What matters is not so much the "what" of a job, but more the "who" and the "why": Job satisfaction comes from people, values, and a sense of accomplishment.

o doubt a substantial chunk of the job-satisfaction percentage is due to the fact that having any job at all makes people happier. Unemployment is one of the biggest sources of unhappiness people can face. Using data from the General Social Survey, I found that American adults who reported that they were "very" or "fairly" likely to lose their job in 2018 were more than three times more likely to say they were "not too happy" with their life than people who felt they were "not likely" to be let go. Several studies have linked a country's unemployment level with suicide-rate increases. In 2014, economists found that a one-percentage-point increase in unemployment lowers national well-being by more than five times as much as a one-point increase in the inflation rate. When one has a job, the factors that most affect satisfaction have little to do with the line of work. First, there are the uncontrollable variables: One studyin the Journal of Applied Psychology of identical twins reared apart found that about 30 percent of job satisfaction is genetic. Then, there are the practical variables: Economists have found that wage increases raise job satisfaction, but only in the short term. The effect decays quickly as time passes. In all careers, regular wage increases are better for happiness than infrequent, larger raises. Read: The new economics of happiness Some of the squishiest aspects of a job are also the ones that make it most rewarding: the values held by your company and your co-workers. Research has shown, for example, that all over the world job satisfaction depends on a sense of accomplishment, recognition for a job well done, and work-life balance. Teamwork, too, has a strong influence in collectivist cultures, but less so in individualist ones. The late Harvard psychologist Richard Hackman found that job satisfaction was strongly, inversely tied to leader-centricity: In one of his studies, musicians who worked in symphony orchestras, where many conductors rule with an iron fist, were 21 percent less satisfied with their growth opportunities than players in leaderless string quartets. Listen as Arthur Brooks and Jenn Lim, the CEO of Delivering Happiness, analyze the barriers to feeling that your work serves a higher purpose. Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google | Pocket Casts Decades of studies have shown that the people most satisfied with their work are those who find a fundamental match between their employer's values and their own. This is especially true when the values have special moral, philosophical, or spiritual significance. For example, a 2012 study on Iranian nurses found that the happiest ones believed their work was "a divine profession and a tool by which they could gain spiritual pleasure and satisfaction." Many of my colleagues feel the same way about the vocation of higher education, and as the late philosopher Michael Novak wrote, that sense of a calling can be found in business as well. Read: Four rules for identifying your life's work Researchers who have looked for clear relationships between job satisfaction and the actual type of job one holds have overwhelmingly struck out. CareerBliss, a company dedicated to helping people find greater happiness at work, has published survey results of the "happiest jobs" and the "unhappiest jobs," as rated by those who hold them. Its most recent rankings, from 2018,show the happiest jobs to be quite disparate: teaching assistant, quality-assurance analyst, net developer, marketing specialist. The unhappiest jobs are similarly grab-baggy, and fairly unrelated to education and income: accountant, security guard, cashier, supervisor.