Create our own happy working environment

A young person confessed in me his problems at work. He told me he is suffering in his work place due to victimization at work because he and his boss cannot get along. At a recent confrontation between his superiors and him, he was told he underperformed, even though he brought in the second highest revenue to the department. He was told his achievement is "just lucky" and has nothing to do with his efforts. In fact he was told that he was not enthusiastic at work. Something is wrong somewhere. If a worker brings in results, how could he have underperformed?

His problem makes me reflect back on my 30 years of working experience in the government service. On reflection, I think one most important part of our working life is the working environment. However, there is no such thing as the perfect working environment. The only person who can provide a working person a "good " working environment is ourselves.

One prerequisite is a person needs to like his job. He needs to be able to identify what he wants to accomplish in his job in order to feel the kind of enthusiasm and commitment that makes his working days worthwhile. Once he has the self motivation to achieve his goals at work, his enthusiasm will shine through and "bad bosses" or "bad colleagues" become secondary. He would have created for himself a "good working environment".

Also some bosses tend to want to show their weight and pick on things like coming late to work, coming late for meetings, etc. This can be easily eliminated by not breaking the rules at all and not giving any reason for bosses to use these against him.

I had realized quite early in my 30 years of working life that resigning is not an option for me as I needed to earn to pay for my commitments, i.e. the housing loan, the car loan and most important of all, the expenses for my 3 children who I practically brought up singlehandedly.

Motivating ourselves to create our own happy working environment is important as there is no such thing as a "perfect working environment". Once we are happy at work, our enthusiasm shines through and the "rewards" of personal fulfillment comes naturally.