Job satisfaction is a fickle thing. If you work in a job that doesn’t challenge or stimulate you, it can become a kind of torture to show up every day. If you’re stuck in this kind of rut, keep reading. We’ve got seven ways you can boost your job satisfaction without quitting your job.

Spend Time with Upbeat Coworkers

There is always someone in the office who is perpetually unhappy. Avoid that person. Instead, find that chipper, upbeat person, and hang out with them. Happiness is almost infectious. That will make your job feel less tedious and frustrating.

Branch Out

Nothing kills satisfaction like monotony. If you feel like your days are interchangeable, look for ways to break up the routine. Find a committee to join or get involved with planning a party for a coworker.

Takeaway: If all else fails, start a committee. Building something often creates satisfaction.

Embrace Gratitude

Even if your job isn’t fantastic, you probably don’t hate everything about it. Maybe you like your coworkers, or the company has great insurance benefits. Take a few moments to remind yourself about the things you’re grateful for about the job.

Eat Healthier

A carb and fat-heavy lunch will make you feel lethargic, which makes it easier to feel dissatisfied with your job. Choosing healthy meal options like a garden salad with grilled chicken gives your body resources.

Takeaway: Eating healthy will serve as a mood booster.

Fix the Problem

Is there one specific task or process in your job that makes you hate it? If it’s not a core element of the job, talk to your manager about ditching that task or process. Most managers will embrace changes likely to make you more efficient and engaged.

Stop Procrastinating

We often use procrastination to avoid starting unpleasant tasks, yet this avoidance breeds stress. Stress breeds dissatisfaction. The stress and anxiety only grow worse as we contemplate the approaching deadline for the unpleasant task. Make a plan for doing these unpleasant tasks and getting them off your plate. The sooner they go away, the more satisfied you’ll feel about your job.

Takeaway: You also get the added benefit of giving your heart, nervous system, and adrenal glands a break.

Build In Easy Wins

Working on long-term projects can create dissatisfaction because the results remain off on the horizon somewhere. Create some short-term goals that you can accomplish each week. These easy wins can give you a psychological boost and increase job satisfaction.

Quitting your job isn’t the only solution to job satisfaction. Sometimes actions as simple as eating a little healthier and changing whom you hang out with can boost your satisfaction. In other cases, you may need to take more challenging steps like weeding out procrastination or creating a committee from scratch. There is, however, almost always a way to make your job more satisfying.

Have you already tried a bunch of these steps and still can’t find any job satisfaction? That means it’s time to look for a new job, and Gallman Consulting can help.

Every company wants to be the company that’s always flooded with resumes, yet most aren’t. If this sounds like your company, you’re probably wondering what to do. Keep reading to learn five ways you can transform your company.

Flexible Schedules

An exceedingly small number of families conform to the traditional model of an income-earning husband and stay at home mom. That means the traditional, rigid 8-5 schedule works for almost no one. While some job categories must adhere to a fixed schedule, you’ll become a place people want to work if they’ve got wiggle room in their schedules.

Takeaway: You can build some minor flexibility into rigid schedule jobs by including a no-penalty grace period of 10-15 minutes at the beginning of each shift.

Wellness

Some companies probably still encourage 80-hour workweeks, but that is a path to losing good employees. Your workers don’t want to burn out on the job or have heart attacks. They want more balanced lives that leave them healthy and active. Encouraging health and wellness activities will make your company more desirable for potential employees who want those balanced lives.

Provide Development Opportunities

No one wants to feel like they’re stuck in a rut in their job. This is especially true in jobs where there is a small chance of promotion or no clear path to it. Left to their own devices, employees will seek out professional development elsewhere. Offering professional development signals that you take a healthy interest in your employees’ progress.

Takeaway: If you don’t provide development opportunities, your best employees will find another way.

A Culture of Recognition

Study after study and article after article talk about how people desire recognition at work, often more than they crave a raise. It’s a big ask in companies where managers often struggle to manage their existing workloads. Carving out time to provide employee recognition can feel impossible. This priority must start from the top and may require bringing on more managers to lighten the workload. The upshot is that inculcating a culture of recognition will create a vastly happier group of workers.

Be Trustworthy

It’s a sad truth that managers and supervisors will sometimes tell outright lies to get subordinates to do what they want. They’ll exaggerate how soon something must be finished or pretend higher-ups are angry about the degree of progress. While this might work in the short-term, it drives a permanent wedge the second the lies get exposed, as they almost always do.

Takeaway: Always keep things on the level. It only takes a single lie for a supervisor, manager, or business owner to lose credibility forever.

The key to becoming a company where people want to work starts and ends with never treating people like a number. If you treat everyone like a human being and show a modicum of human concern, people will flock to your company.

Put in the work to become one of these companies.

Many people fear writing a resume. Some people fear to make mistakes, and others fear the possibility of rejection. All too often, though, people fear the writing itself. If fear has made you put off writing your resume, let’s try to put that fear to bed. You can write a stellar resume by following a few basic guidelines that we’ll cover right now.

Hit the Essentials

Every resume must cover certain ground. You must include any relevant education, licenses, or credentials. You need a work history, although you can generally keep it to the last ten years. Don’t forget to add your contact information.

Takeaway: Not hitting the essentials makes you look unprofessional, but now you know what you need.

Get to the Point Quickly

Whether your resume goes through an HR department or to a hiring manager, it’s landing in front of busy people. Don’t make them work to understand your meaning.

For example, don’t write: “Provided supervisory oversight for a project team that ultimately delivered a boost in revenue of $500,000.”

Instead, write something like: “Managed project team that created $500,000 in new revenue.”

Highlight Recent Accomplishments

If you’ve been in your industry for 15 years, you’ve got a lot of experience behind you. Don’t try to fit everything you’ve ever done onto the resume. Highlight recent accomplishments. Did you step into a supervisory position and finish a job during a crisis at your last job? Mention that.

Takeaway: Highlighting recent accomplishments sends the message that you aren’t just phoning it in every day.

Reuse Keywords from the Job Description

Many people stumble on this one. Keywords are just important phrases, usually related to a skill or industry jargon. For example, a warehouse might mention a specific software program they use for inventory management. If you know that program, mention it by name on your resume. Including these keywords makes your resume more likely to get to the interview phase of the process.

Look at Other Resumes before You Start

New to the job search process? Never written a resume before? If this is you, the process can prove difficult because you don’t know where to start. The easiest way to get a handle on writing a resume is to look at other resumes. The good news is that there are tons of free example resumes all over the Internet that can help guide you while you write your own.

Takeaway: It always helps to see how someone else has done something successfully.

Don’t let writing anxiety or other fears stop you from pursuing a better job. You can write a stellar resume. Hit the essentials and be concise. Highlight any recent accomplishments. Work in some keywords. If you struggle to get started, look for some examples online. Before you know it, you’ll have a stellar resume.

Once you prepare your stellar resume, it’s time to look for jobs. Check out Gallman Consulting career opportunities and we’ll help you place that resume with the right employers.

Much has been said about the power and benefits of habit and routines, including lower stress and more productivity. Yet, habit and routine can also have a dark side. They encourage us to become stagnate in jobs or situations that we don’t love or that don’t empower us. Trying something new means abandoning our routines for a while or developing new ones.

Let’s look at three larger benefits.

Boosts Your Creativity

As great as routine and familiarity are at making sure we pick up the kids and make lunch for work, they can also start wearing down our creativity. It turns out that creativity depends a lot on fresh experiences. Trying something new gives your brain fresh material to play with and can lead to new bursts of creativity.

Reduce Fear

The prospect of trying something new often brings with it the vague but persistent fear of some failure. Fear has a way of growing and infecting your view of other things, even the familiar. When you try something new, you decide you won’t be afraid of that potential failure. You start teaching yourself to be less afraid of everything else. You can even pick something where failure means nothing, like taking up abstract painting. Also, if you get it “wrong,” no one will know.

You Improve Product You

In a sense, you are the product you sell to an employer. You bring skills, experience, and knowledge to the table. When you try new things, you expand your skills and broaden your experience. You improve the product that is you, which can make it easier to secure a raise or a better job. Of course, that means you must pick new things that have some relevance to your job or desired career path.

Trying new things has other benefits, such as making you a better-rounded person or simply improving your self-knowledge. Still, it’s a solid first step in boosting your creativity. It can help you master your fear. Learning new things can also make you a better catch for potential employers.

Tens of millions of people quit their jobs every single year. While this might appear as a simple situation for the employer, it isn’t. You can’t just lock them out of your network and disable their ID card after their last day. It would be best if you had an offboarding process to make sure that everything that needs to happen actually happens. Still, you might wonder, why does this matter?

Retaining Organizational Knowledge

When employees leave, they don’t just take their personal effects with them. They also leave with all of their accumulated organizational knowledge. The longer an employee has been there, the worse the loss for the organization. A good offboarding process works to avoid this wholesale loss. Part of any good offboarding process is getting the employee who leaves to train their replacement. This helps pass along at least some of that organizational knowledge.

Maintain Employee Morale

Any departure can send overall employee morale into a dive, but especially if the persona leaving was a high-performer or well-liked. Letting employees find out about the exit through gossip will only make things worse since they can get false information, such as the employee was fired. A formal offboarding process includes reaching an agreement about how to disclose the information to everyone. This lets you and the departing employee exert some control over how the information is received.

Managing the Details

There will be many details you must attend to when an employee leaves. An offboarding process makes sure you tick all those boxes. For example, you must revoke any network access they have to non-public materials. You need to collect any devices, keys, or passcards you issued and remove them from the active employee database. Plus, you must schedule and conduct an exit interview before they leave. A formal process gives these activities structure and coherence.

An offboarding process serves several important functions for your company. It helps ensure that you retain organizational knowledge. You exert some control over how other employees find out, which lets you avoid some damage to employee morale. It also helps you perform all the small tasks that must happen when an employee leaves.

Did you recently wrap up offboarding a valuable employee and need to find a suitable replacement? Contact Gallman Consulting today to find their successor.

Here’s Why December Is The Best Time Of Year To Apply To Jobs

The end of the year is a time of family obligations, shopping, and traveling. Your kids may need new clothes, or you need to find your spouse that vintage thing they love. It’s easy to assume that everyone involved in the hiring for businesses is doing the same things. Yet, it turns out that December may be the best time of year to apply.

Let’s look at a few of the reasons why.

Fewer Competitors

In 2018, around a third of all Americans traveled for the Christmas holiday. Thanksgiving often sees mass travel, as well. Traveling, even if only in your own state, takes planning and time. While people do that planning and then visit their families, they often aren’t actively pursuing new jobs. Yet, many companies still need to fill empty positions, especially in retail, shipping, and always in tech.

Seasonal Work Spikes

Seasonal work may not be exactly what you’re looking for, but it sure beats unemployment around the holidays. Gifts for all your friends and family won’t pay for themselves. Plus, seasonal positions spike around the holidays. Target and UPS alone are looking to hire on around 225,000 seasonal workers this year. Plus, as with all temp positions, there’s always a possibility you’ll be asked to stay on if you impress your boss.

Extra Money in the Budget

Many companies employ a use-it-or-lose-it budget approach. That means that anyone in the business that still has money in their budget must find something to spend it on or risk a small budget the following year. For any department that’s been running understaffed, the manager will want to fill empty positions if it’s even remotely possible. It also means that applicants with fewer qualifications have a better chance of getting into the room with the hiring manager.

While traditional folklore might hold that no one hires during December, that’s not true anymore. Many big companies increase their hiring during the holidays. Plus, managers often have extra money in their budget they must spend or risk losing the next year. You also face less intense competition from others, as people back off their job hunt in favor of planning and attending family events. In other words, December is a great time to apply for a job.

Even the calmest and more experienced person can get a case of the nerves before an interview. It’s often worse for people early in their careers or who want to change careers. It feels like the person or people on the other side of those desks hold your future in their hands. This nervousness can undercut your interview performance. So, we’re going to take a look at 5 products that can help you overcome your nervousness ahead of time.

Portfolio

In this day and age, you can get a stylish portfolio or padfolio at a very reasonable price. Of course, the real advantage of the padfolio is that it helps you get organized by getting all of your papers into one spot. Takeaway: Knowing you’ve got copies of your resume, licenses, or other paperwork can relieve stress going into an interview.

Meditation Apps

There are numerous meditation apps out there designed solely to help you calm your mind. You can load one onto your phone and take it with you to the interview. Take five minutes before you go in for the interview and use the app to help reduce your nervousness.

Noise Machine

Many people struggle to sleep the night before a big interview. That lack of sleep can make you irritable or anxious. A noise machine can help you tune out distractions in your home or environment and get better sleep. Takeaway: Better sleep isn’t just good for keeping nerves under control before an interview; it’s crucial for your overall health.

Fidget Toy

Keep a small fidget toy in your car or pocket. It gives you something to focus on other than being nervous right before your interview. Just make sure you put it away before you get called in for the interview.

Navigational System Device or Map System

 If you’ve never used your phone’s map system before or a navigational device, now is the time to start. Most phones use navigation, and many even offer alternative routes based on real-time traffic data. It helps ensure you get there on time.
Takeaway: You should test the map function the day before to make sure it works right and gets you where you need to go.

Feeling nervous before an interview is normal and happens to almost everyone. The key is to find products or routines that help you keep that nervousness at a reasonable level. A little nervousness can make you look high energy. Too much nervousness makes you look anxious. Aim for the former.

If you feel less than engaged at work recently, like you’re just putting in the time, than you’re not alone. Around 7 in 10 workers in the US feel some level of disengagement from work. If that’s not the kind of employee you want to be, keep reading for some quotes that will help you stay motivated at work.

“Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.” ~Robert Collier
“A year from now, you may wish you had started today.” ~ Karen Lamb Takeaway: The only way you can finish something important is to start. If you keep putting off the start, you’ll never finish.

“Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.” ~Earl Nightingale
“Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” ~Will Rogers
“A dream doesn’t become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination, and hard work.” ~Colin Powell
“Almost every successful person begins with two beliefs: the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so.” ~ David Brooks Takeaway: In many ways, motivation is the belief that you can make the future better. Even if you only make it better for yourself and your family, it’s still better.

“Be humble. Be hungry. Always be the hardest worker in the room.” ~Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson
“Don’t watch the clock. Do what it does. Keep going.” ~Sam Levenson
“Believe you can, and you’re halfway there.” ~Theodore Roosevelt
“Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.” ~ Dale Carnegie
Takeaway: Failure tells you that you took a wrong turn somewhere. Figure out where you took that wrong turn and don’t do it again.

“Happiness does not come from doing easy work but from the afterglow of satisfaction that comes after the achievement of a difficult task that demanded our best.” ~Theodore Isaac Rubin

Staying motivated at work can be difficult, especially if you feel disengaged. Just remember that many people feel disengaged at work from time to time. You can choose to be motivated. If you need a little help with that motivation, check out the list of quotes above. Success stems from consistent hard work, not occasional flashes of effort.

Have you been trying and failing to stay motivated at work? Can’t seem to find any inspiration? It might be time for a change. Let Gallman Consulting help you find a more motivating workplace for you.

Despite the unemployment rate holding at around 3.7%, it’s not all roses and champagne corks for those seeking employment. Job growth is notorious for regional differences and often centers in certain industries. If you happen to excel in information technology, things look great. If not, the job search can prove less friendly. If you’re stuck in the middle of an endless job search, how can you survive the experience without losing it? Don’t Take It Too Personally It’s true that you have some influence over your job search success in terms of proper preparation and connecting the dots between your experience and the position. The reality, however, is that getting the job isn’t just about you. You must compete not only with other external candidates but potential internal candidates. You may also face unexpressed expectations about personality or culture fit that you can’t ever prepare for. Those things have nothing to do with you or your performance, and you shouldn’t beat yourself up for not landing every job. Takeaway: Your interview happens inside a bigger picture of needs and expectations. You can only influence some of them. Look For Help Working in isolation taxes you mentally and emotionally. It can also give you a level of tunnel vision. After all, how many times have you looked at that resume? Do you think you’ll spot a typo in it after draft number 75? Getting some input from a third-party can give you fresh ideas and also help you spot lingering problems on your resume. Money starting to worry you? Consider connecting with a staffing agency for some temporary work to stabilize your finances. Takeaway: Don’t think you must do it all alone. Friends, family, and even staffing agencies can help you weather the process. Stay Socially Engaged As the job search wears you down mentally, it’s tempting to withdraw from your social network. Unless you’ve managed to land a job, no one wants to face questions about how their job search is going. Yet, you should make an active effort to socialize with your friends and family. Socializing can give your mental health a much-needed boost and support your physical well-being as well. Takeaway: Don’t withdraw. The momentary pain of fielding job search questions will be more than offset by your better mental health. Don’t Give Up On Your Job Search Just because the unemployment rate is low, it doesn’t mean everyone finds it easy to land a job. If you’re in the middle of an endless job search, don’t take it personally. Look for help from friends and family. Stay socially engaged with your social network. These things will make the process more bearable and potentially more successful.

Active dislike or severe disengagement from your job is normal. Around 66% of people fall into this category. Of course, disliking or simply not caring about your job is a hard way to live, given that you’ll spend the majority of your waking hours there. So, what can you do to get back on track when you don’t like your job? Give It Time If you recently moved to another company, don’t make a hasty judgment about the role. You need to give yourself an adjustment period for any new job or company. The expectations are different, as is the culture of the company. Many people discover that what they don’t like is the adjustment, rather than the new job. Change taxes a person mentally and emotionally. Once you find a balance with the new situation, the dislike often evaporates. Takeaway: Don’t assume you don’t like your job until you give it a fair shake. Don’t Measure Yourself Against Others Success isn’t a one-size-fits-all outfit. While your wealthy, lawyer of a sister might make you feel like a failure, that’s an unfair comparison. You must decide for yourself whether your accomplishments matter to you. Comparing yourself to others creates a me-against-the-world mindset that never leaves you satisfied. Ask yourself if it’s really your job you hate or that it doesn’t seem to measure up to what others do. Takeaway: Figure out what success means to you and then pursue the career that fulfills that definition. Find a New Job Sometimes, you’ll discover that you really do just dislike your current job. Poor management or a toxic work culture can make even a seemingly dream job into a nightmare. Just as importantly, no amount of money can make up for those failures in your workplace. You might also discover that you dislike your position because it saddled you with more responsibilities than you expected going in. In these scenarios, the best solution is looking for employment elsewhere. Takeaway: If you genuinely dislike your job, a new job is almost always the best solution. Dislike or disengagement from a job is comparatively common, but it’s not necessarily a death blow for your career. If it’s a new job, give yourself time to adjust. Don’t measure your job or success against someone else’s success. It’ll leave you permanently unhappy with your job. If you do dislike your job because of the job, culture, or some other job-specific situation, it’s time for a new position.