In his book The Truth About Employee Engagement, Patrick Lencioni writes that there are three root causes that will make a job miserable:
- Anonymity — Employees need to feel that they are known as people with lives outside of work. “People who see themselves as invisible, generic, or anonymous cannot love their jobs, no matter what they are doing,” Lencioni believes.
- Irrelevance — People must understand how the work they do makes a difference for someone else, whether that be customers, colleagues, or aiding the manager.
- Immeasurement — It’s Lencioni’s made-up word to mean the opposite of measurement. To achieve satisfaction, employees must be able to measure on their own what progress looks like and be able to have frequent (daily) means of assessing success.
And who is responsible for this? Gallup research confirms: “It’s the Manager.” Supervisors play such a key role in ensuring the factors that make for a negative culture are not present. They can take a bit of time to really know their employees and make those personal connections to show that they care. Supervisors can help employees articulate the impact of their work and understand the explicit connections between what they do and who benefits– beginning in the onboarding process. Employee engagement and satisfaction also increase when supervisors help employees craft a workable measurement (quantitative or qualitative) so employees are able to see when they are making a difference.
The surprising thing to me was that this book was written in 2007, long before the hiring challenges and “Great Resignation” plagued employers. Yet, addressing all three of these issues can be done without cost! Invest a bit of time on a daily basis to do the most important work of a supervisor — keeping your great people committed to the organization.
Source: The Truth About Employee Engagement: A Fable About Addressing the Three Root Causes of Job Misery by Patrick Lencioni, 2007
