How many people wake up in the morning and look forward to coming to work? Do you? Do your employees?
It seems like a basic question, but employee happiness is often overlooked when companies are taking a hard look at their day-to-day operations and what will ultimately make their business most successful. The truth is, many employees are unsatisfied at work – and, what’s worse, they think being miserable is the norm.
Even in a business climate of “do more with less” and “crazy busy,” it doesn’t have to be the norm. A good manager can drastically affect this, which means huge changes to the bottom line for business owners and goes a long way to improving employee fulfillment and retention.
Lately, we’ve been chatting about this topic around the office. There are numerous books on this topic, and Patrick Lencioni’s “Three Signs of a Miserable Job” sums it up well by explaining the pitfalls a manager can address to make their employees feel more fulfilled.
Anonymity:
As a manager, do you really know your people? Get to know their interests, how they spend their spare time, where they are in their lives. According to Lencioni, people who see themselves as invisible, generic or anonymous cannot love their jobs, no matter what they are doing. A manager’s interest must be genuine and continuous. This may take time – not every employee may be apt to share every detail of their life, so it may take time to find an area where they are comfortable opening up.
Irrelevance:
Do your employees know how their work impacts others? Do you? Talk to your employees over and over and reinforce this in one-on-one conversations. Even though it may initially feel hokey, employees need to hear how their work makes a meaningful difference in the work of others. It may be that the person impacted most by what they do is their manager, and if so, they should consistently hear that.
Immeasurement:
Do your employees know how to assess their own progress or success? This could vary depending on the job but a few examples are tips, return business or speed of service. These should be discussed and determined by the employee and the manager together.
While all three pieces are important, I thought the “anonymity” factor was both the most basic and the most thought provoking. After all, it’s the personal connection that employees make with their manager that can make all the difference.
This idea isn’t new, but it’s being studied more with the hope that unsuccessful managers can be trained to turn their bad habits around and in turn get employees out of their rut. Google has recently gone as far as to hire social scientists to study the problem among its employees. Laszlo Bock, Google’s vice president for “people operations,” explained the basic idea to the New York Times:
“You don’t actually need to change who the person is,” he says. “What it means is, if I’m a manager and I want to get better, and I want more out of my people and I want them to be happier, two of the most important things I can do is just make sure I have some time for them and to be consistent. And that’s more important than doing the rest of the stuff.”
Sources:
Managing Your Employees from Miserable to Motivated
