#45: How do you make your work fun and fulfilling?
Prakash Baskar
Ex-Chief Data Officer - Transforming companies by developing and enabling intrapreneurs to win with data.
"Is it possible to make work fun and fulfilling even if you are an employee with a full-time job?" Indeed, if we know how to add variety to our work and create value for the company in the process.
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Fun and fulfillment do not seem to exist in the context of work anymore. Work is usually considered tedious, boring, problematic, challenging, or even a necessary evil that people get through to pay their bills.
But it doesn't have to be this way.
The usual advice is to find our passion and align our work with it, and then everything somehow falls into place.
But finding what we are passionate about can be a longer process, and it changes over our lives, depending on what else is going on.
The challenge is that many must understand how to make work fun and fulfilling. While courses, training, and coaching programs aim to impact technical or business knowledge, there needs to be a structured approach to teaching this.
Eventually, after a certain time in a role, boredom and frustration, along with a feeling of being under-appreciated or under-recognized, set in.
We decide that the company or the manager is not good enough to enable growth in our careers, and we jump to other companies, only to find the same thing repeated.
Moving jobs is not bad, but it is crucial to know the right reasons behind why we want to move jobs.
So, how do we make our work enjoyable, fun, rewarding, and fulfilling? We need two V's.
1. Variety
Job descriptions are valid only as of the point in time when they were written. The challenges and opportunities facing a business constantly change; new players come in, and your skills and capabilities evolve with new learning.
Unfortunately, too many employees take job descriptions so seriously that they fail to look for opportunities to change what they do daily. Month after month and year after year, it is the same stuff; boredom sets in, and they think that getting a job at another company will help solve this problem, only to find the same cycle repeated all over.
Sounds familiar?
Your role evolves when you focus on learning, connecting, and experimenting. You do not have to depend on your manager or company to make your job enjoyable and exciting. Opportunities will find you when you start showing up differently.
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But it is hard to do, as most of us have been conditioned to expect a title change, promotion, and a pay hike to do anything different. All those will come when we change how we approach variety and make ourselves more valuable.
Seeking variety means gaining a comprehensive understanding of our company's business functions, which is a must. Continuous learning adds consistent value, and we go from an employee to an Intrapreneur.
A person who works with an Intrapreneurial mindset and approach has value anywhere they go, not from a position of entitlement but from excellence.
You do not have to believe my words. Practice this approach and see the change yourself.
2. Value for Company
Now that we have variety and all that exploration and learning has made us valuable, it is crucial to see how to create value.
Doing the work that we must do does not make a person valuable to the company. You must increase the perceived and real value simultaneously.
That is possible only by enabling outcomes aligned with and supportive of the broader goals of your manager, business function, and the company. Excellent work will still be wasted if it is not aligned with the current and near-term needs. Visible outcomes are a must. For that to happen, you must be visible and vocal.
And the reverse is also true here.
When an employee is able to add value in one area, they easily get on the internal-mobility, high-performers, and rising-talent-to-watch-for lists that are formally managed by HR or informally maintained among CXOs. This enables rapid mobility and growth within the company.
If you are ambitious, driven, and committed to becoming the leader you can be, I invite you to explore the DATAPRENEURS NOW, NEXT, or MASTERY programs at hub.datapreneurs.com
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