Jobs may be bad because of low pay; they may be dangerous; require really hard work; or they might be just plain stinky. Bad jobs are caused by the work itself and there is nothing wrong with having a bad job. It needs to be done, someone has to do it and we have all had our fair share of them.
Miserable jobs, on the other hand, are not caused by the job, the pay or the working conditions. A miserable job is miserable because of what the boss does, or to be more accurate, by what the boss does not do. The following is a simple three-step guide for bosses to ensure their employees have miserable jobs before they quit or get fired.
Step one
Make sure employees are not aware of how significant their jobs are to other people. A minimum wage cashier who knows how his or her job impacts the welfare and happiness of customers is far less miserable than an overpaid movie star who has no idea how his or her acting benefits mankind. Money has little to do with happiness at work (unless it is not enough of it). Understanding the value to customers of a job well done has everything to do happiness and productivity at work. Therefore, bosses take note, step one for making jobs miserable is to keep the job’s importance to others a secret from the employee.
Step two
Do not agree upon performance goals with employees and definitely do not give immediate feedback to employees when they meet or fail to meet agreed upon benchmarks. Wait until the annual performance review. Or, better still, do not have annual reviews. This immediate feedback or lack thereof partially explains why professional athletes tend to be happier and less miserable than movie stars. Football players know immediately how they have played whereas movie stars have to wait until the Academy Awards. Employees as well as bosses, take note. Step two for making each other miserable is to avoid benchmarks and immediate performance feedback. Keep them guessing how well they are doing.
Step three
Finally, do not get to know your employees on a professionally personal level. Do not under any circumstances get know about their families, their likes, their hobbies and what they did over the weekend. Ignore the Gallup study that Keli Hite McGee referenced in this space two weeks ago that shows people with best friends at work are seven times more likely to be engaged at work than those without a best friend. To ensure that employees are miserable at work, under no circumstance treat them as human beings. Either ignore them or stay cold and aloof. This also goes for employees helping their bosses to be miserable.
Another Gallup poll of more than 1 million employed U.S. workers concluded the No. 1 reason people quit their jobs is a bad boss or immediate supervisor. No matter how good a job is, a bad boss can easily make it miserable.
When the Web site Badbossology.com did its own online survey of 1,118 people, it found that fully half of us working slobs would fire our own bosses if we could and nearly 30 percent of us would have our bosses seen by a workplace psychologist.
Charlie Dexter is a professor of applied business at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Community and Technical College. He can be reached at charlie.dexter@alaska.edu. This column is provided as a public service of the UAF Applied Business Department. Copies of this column can be found at www.AlaskaLS.com.
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