Copyright TIGERS Success Series
By Dianne Crampton
“Dear Diary… my boss is driving me crazy and has been making me miserable! Very little is being accomplished at work and quite frankly I’m exhausted and my attitude stinks! I need to update my resume and look for employment elsewhere where my skills are valued and appreciated.”
For over the past 15 years, Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, co-authors of The Progress Principle, have studied and researched what makes people happy and engaged in the workplace. They used a 21st century version of a centuries old classic to conduct their research of employee satisfaction and engagement in the workplace – the diary. However in this case, it was an electronic diary that recorded entries from randomly selected business professionals. 238 employees from seven different organizations recorded their confidential entries every day for several months leading to an impressive 12,000 days of insightful data! And boy….did Amabile and Kramer get some good reads.
I’m supposed to do what, by when??
By analyzing the diaries, they compared employee’s best workdays with their worst. What seemed to resurface again and again on worst day entries was that the employer kept team members from making progress in their job duties or from engaging in meaningful work. Employees aren’t asking for anything complicated or extravagant here; they just want a sense of accomplishment when they walk out the door at the end of the day. Many employers unwittingly smother morale, creativity, and productivity by changing the scope of jobs, deadlines, and priorities. Yet with cost effective tools, these employers could open the flood gates of employee satisfaction to increase morale and reduce costly employee turnover.
So according to the overwhelming research collected, just what are the four warning signs of dysfunction in the workplace that is draining the life from its employees?
1. You can never accomplish anything!
When the diaries were analyzed, one thing stood out on an employee’s worst days the most: setbacks. Employees just couldn’t get anywhere on a project. They felt as if they made no meaningful contribution to the tasks at hand. One of the most effective examples of killing employee engagement portrayed in the research was a product development manager who routinely moved people on and off projects like chess pieces.
2. Conflicting and constantly changing goals.
Sure project goals evolve and change, but sometimes goals are a moving target when they change several times a day! And if an employee answers to more than one team leader, communication breakdown is inevitable. When goals are impossible to reach and team leaders aren’t on the same page with communicating projects, watch exasperation, futility, and job performance plummet.
3. Team Leaders and Managers are totally unaware of the pain they inflict.
Team leaders believe that bad morale is the result of poor work habits from a problematic, disgruntled employee. Managers and leaders don’t take into consideration that their leadership skills, actions, or words may be the root cause to squashing productivity. Sadly, many team leaders and organizations don’t have the formula for success that the elite, preferred employers have known for years.
4. Team leaders take the ostrich approach and then strike.
According to managers, there is no morale, employee engagement, or retention problems. Never has been, never will be. Period. A great example from Amabile’s and Kramer’s research is a classic statement made by a chief operating officer. When an employee asked about the organization’s morale problem, he got this answer. “There is no morale problem in this company. For anybody who thinks there is, we have a nice big bus waiting outside to take you wherever you want to look for work.” Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case. Many employees in this economy have heard different variations of this statement. Essentially the employer is stating, “if you don’t like it, there’s the door!” Mission accomplished – self worth, productivity, morale have all been sucked from the employee.
Employers stand to gain so much more by realizing employees want to make a valuable contribution to the organization. Plain and simple, employees don’t stick around organizations with lousy cultures. They want to move forward on projects…not experience a continual series of setbacks… and feel a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day.
They want to make positive entries in their mental diaries at the end of a work day.
