There is a great deal of misery in the workplace. It is very sad that free citizens of the United States are cooped up in jobs where misery rains down from on high almost every day. We need to get a handle on this or our competitiveness in the world is going to plummet like the morale at American Airlines.
What if?
If we could eliminate employee misery in the workplace, businesses would see substantial improvements in their profitability.
It’s a leadership problem
In most cases, it’s not the employee – it is leaders – who screws things up. Sadly, in most cases it is management who prevents people from being productive at work and robs them of their on-the-job satisfaction. Below are three signs of management malpractice.
Sign #1 – Creating roadblocks to productivity
Sign #2 – Smothering employees with conflicting directions and goals
Sign #3 – Trapping people inside a virtual cage, preventing important learning and interaction with employees and customers
A recipe for employee misery
In their article, “How to completely, utterly destroy an employee’s work life,” The Washington Post performed research from over 200 professionals across seven companies for several months. According to co-authors Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, “we collected confidential electronic diaries from 238 professionals in seven companies, each day for several months. All told, those diaries described nearly 12,000 days – how people felt, and the events that stood out in their minds. Systematically analyzing those diaries, we compared the events occurring on the best days with those on the worst.”
They discovered if you can prevent an employee from making progress on the job, you will make them miserable. Based upon their research, they developed the necessary steps to make employees miserable.
4 steps to make employees miserable
Step #1 – Never allow pride of accomplishment
Step #2 – Miss no opportunity to block progress on employees’ projects
Step #3 – Give yourself some credit (when you’ve developed your morale destroying skills)
Step #4 – Kill the messengers
Image Source: Freestock.com
