3 Ways to Kick Job Misery

So how do we drive employee engagement? In his book, “The Truth About Employee Engagement,” Patrick Lencioni shares three causes of “job misery.”

I’m on a kick to read books on employee engagement. My reading list for the New Year is full of them. As the head of our company’s human resources function, my role is help drive employee engagement. The reason is simple—when employees are engaged, everyone wins.

So how do we drive engagement?

In his book, The Truth About Employee Engagement, Patrick Lencioni shares three causes of “job misery” (what a wonderful, yet terrible term). If you’ve ever been miserable in your job, you know how that feels. It is a slowly deadening malaise that strips you of confidence, passion, and dignity.

The bad news is that, according to Lencioni:

“Scores of people suffer—really suffer—every day as they trudge off from their families and friends to jobs that only make them more cynical, unhappy, and frustrated than they were before they left.”

This is not a fun way to live. But the good news is that job misery can be helped if you’re aware of its causes. According to Lencioni, three causes of job misery are:

• Irrelevance

• Anonymity

• Immeasurement

He writes, “If you can’t measure what you’re doing, if you don’t think it matters to anyone, and if you feel like no one is interested in who are you, you’re going to be miserable at work.”

Let's understand these three causes.

Irrelevance

Job irrelevance is "missing the reason why your job matters to someone else." Job misery occurs when you can’t see the difference your work makes in the lives of people.

Anonymity

Job anonymity is the sense that you are not known. When employees feel anonymous, they feel invisible, uncared for, and generic.

Immeasurement

Immeasurement is “the lack of a clear means of assessing progress or success on the job.” Without clear and objective means, employees are left to guess if they’re doing their work right. And performance feedback they receive appears to be subjective and wanton.

To drive employee engagement, decide on clear and measurable outcomes that the employee can track on his own without having to ask. That way, he can self adjust without having to be told how he's doing.

Let me ask you, “Do you have clear and objective means for measuring your performance?”

If you manage people, do they know on what they’re being measured?”

Cure: Knowing how your work is being measured is a cure for immeasurement at work.

No one wants to be miserable at work, but the good news is, no one has to be. Guard against anonymity, irrelevance, and immeasurement by putting the right practices into place.