Episode 067 – Is being happy as an employee possible? | Kristina from Employay
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Financial Independence Europe Podcast! Today we talk with Kristina Mayer-Walcker: she works for a leading Digital Bank and is also the host of Employay – a podcast about leadership, employee satisfaction and company culture. Today we talk about how people can be more satisfied and happy in the workplace, how to improve happiness and how to find out when it’s time to move on to somewhere else. This episode is packed with a lot of actionable advice and personal stories. Hope you enjoy it!
We also talk about:
- The new work movement
- Agile methodology
- Remote working
- How to know when to leave
- The future of employment
- The importance of managing free time
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Being happy with your current job vs. waiting to quit to be happy
Being happy as an employee for Kristina has come after a journey that started from a condition of dissatisfaction and anxiety about the future, and went through a period of deep and difficult introspection and self-knowing, after which she learned a lot about herself and her strengths, passions and goals. Then she started searching for a job that better suited all of that, eventually finding a new company and role that opened up a lot of new possibilities. Finding happiness in everyday work of course puts the search for FI in a completely new perspective, and gives the option to find an optimal balance between present and future well being.
What can you do to improve happiness in your job situation
There are multiple ways to try to influence the current job situation in a positive way: the quality of the relationships with employers and colleagues of course play a key role, and facing possible issues in this area could lead to a huge improvement in happiness. Finding the right way to communicate with other people in a working environment is not always easy, and some people simply are not compatible with your way of working. Again, finding issues to work on and potential detectors of incompatibility between you and the environment begin with examining yourself and finding if there are aspects of your personality that can be improved as well, and taking the bigger picture of your career into consideration.
Self-employment vs. being an employee
Kristina sees self-employment as a choice that could be not the best for everybody. Many factors have to be considered, from the type of job to the state of the market, risk of being sick and so on. For some jobs, it can be easier, for example, jobs with more technological content and know-how involved: in this case, it can be a good choice even for people at the beginning of their career – companies like N26 of Facebook have been founded by people who just left university after all. And of course personal character and aversion to risk play a big part in the decision to choose a career as a freelance or entrepreneur.
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