3 Signs of a Miserable Job

I am thankful that God has blessed me with a job, a calling, and a vocation that I genuinely enjoy. If you have had such a job, I hope you are thankful as well. Many people have jobs they do not like.

In fact, have you ever had a miserable job? You know the one I mean. A soul-sucking employment situation that makes you feel like an empty suit.  

If so, you are not alone. A recent Gallup poll revealed that 77 percent of American employees hate their jobs. Gallup also contends that this ailing workforce is costing employers more than $350 billion dollars in lost productivity. Americans are increasingly unhappy with their jobs.

These figures intrigued author Patrick Lencioni because they reminded him of his own experience. Says Lencioni,  

“I became interested in this topic because, as a kid, I watched my dad trudge off to work each day and became somewhat obsessed with the notion of job misery. Somewhere along the line, I came to the frightening realization that people spend so much time at work, yet so many of them were unfulfilled and frustrated in their jobs. As I got older, I came to another realization — that job misery was having a devastating impact on individuals, and on society at large. It seemed to me that understanding the cause of the problem, and finding a solution for it, was a worthy focus for my career.”  

His latest book, The Three Signs of a Miserable Job, is his attempt to meet the problem head-on.

One may feel particularly bad about the job when you pay taxes. I can imagine that many people in churches are in that situation as well. They do not like their life. They certainly would not call it an “abundant life,” as Jesus would put it.

You would think that the barometers of job satisfaction would depend on things like salary, job responsibilities and the possibility for advancement. Those are significant factors, but they are not the key values that determine whether you have a miserable job or not.  

“It’s important to understand that being miserable has nothing to do with the actual work a job involves. A professional basketball player can be miserable in his job while the janitor cleaning the locker room behind him finds fulfillment in his work. A marketing executive can be miserable making a quarter of a million dollars a year while the waitress who serves her lunch derives meaning and satisfaction from her job.”  

What makes the difference between a miserable job and a satisfying one? According to Lencioni, it is the relationships formed on the job, particularly the relationship between manager and employees, which determine whether your job is a dream or a soul-sucking nightmare.

Lencioni points to three critical signs that, when put together, form the perfect storm of vocational hell.

The first and most telling indicator of job misery is anonymity. “People cannot be fulfilled in their work if they are not known,” says Lencioni. People need to have a sense of being understood and appreciated for their unique personality and gifts, and that feedback needs to come from someone in a position of authority. If people feel invisible or anonymous in the workplace, particularly to their supervisor, they cannot love their job no matter what it is or what it pays. We are not talking about the need for constant praise here, just a sense that someone in authority cares about the people in their charge.

The second sign is irrelevance — not knowing that your job matters to someone, to anyone. “Without seeing a connection between the work and the satisfaction of another person or group of people, an, employee simply will not find lasting improvement,” remarks Lencioni. A job must have some kind of purpose and impact on others, even if it’s just flipping hamburgers. We all want to feel that what we do matters and that someone will miss us if we’re gone.

Lencioni invented the word “immeasurement” to describe the third sign. Immeasurement illuminates the fact that employees “need to be able to gauge their progress and level of contribution for themselves.” Employees do not want their jobs to be merely judged subjectively by the opinions of others, which can lead to politics and posturing in the workplace. They want to know how they measure up based on a set of agreed-upon criteria. Measurements do not necessarily have to be numerical, but they do have to be tangible. Take a bagger at a grocery store, for example. How many bags he fills on an hourly basis is one measurement, but there are others, such as how many times he makes a customer smile or the time it takes for the bagger to move customers through the line. Humans like to feel a healthy sense of competition, seeing it as an opportunity not only to measure performance but also to improve it.

The signs that Lencioni talks about all seem like elementary stuff that anybody who works with people should understand. It should be a given that leaders know their people well and care about them, help them see how their place on the team matters and give them markers to assess their progress. Unfortunately, it does not seem to work that way. It is little wonder, then, that job misery more often than not spills over into the other aspects of a person’s life. Health problems, addictions, broken relationships at home — these are just some of the byproducts of a miserable job.

God did not create us to work or live this way, for that matter. God made us to enjoy a fulfilling and life-giving relationship with God and with others. God created us to live with purpose and to measure our lives not in terms of the dollars we earn or the amount of stuff we own or produce but by the amount of love we give and receive.