Being Miserable at Work Comes at a Cost

It's Expensive!

What flashbacks do you have when you think about your most miserable job ever? There was an NCIS episode where Abby and McGee go back and forth with one another sharing their worst jobs before joining Team Gibbs. It started out with the boring ones and rapidly morphed into the most disgusting ones - but that’s not what I want you to consider right now. I want you to think about that job where you just felt empty; one where you were all but sick to your stomach when the weekend was almost over.

Are you picturing it? Before I completely ruin your day, let’s think about WHY that particular job was so stinking miserable… Was it boring? Was it disgusting? Was the hardest work you’ve ever done? Maybe, but I’m guessing something else was driving the misery factor even higher!

For me, it certainly was one of the most physical jobs I ever had - but that wasn’t the part that sucked the most. It was a combination of slapping up a building with no real sense of pride in the finished product, a group of coworkers that didn’t come close to resembling a cohesive team, and a supervisor that was one of the most intolerable humans I’ve ever been around. Add those things to the physical demands that come with construction, plus the $8 per hour wage, and I think I could make a solid case for it actually costing me money to show up!

But those aren’t the only reasons I think being miserable at work is expensive…

If you’ve hung with me through the process of digging into Why Employee Engagement is Important, Onboarding That Gets Results, or The importance of Organizational Culture, you know that each of those things have a direct, tangible impact on a company’s overall profitability. And while I truly believe we can have an immediate impact on each of those things regardless of where our position falls in the org chart, there are indeed times where our impact only goes so far. That said, we can still play a key role in whether or not the folks on our teams - the ones who work with us the closest - have that sick feeling in their stomachs on Sunday evening or look forward to picking up where they left off the previous week!

Don’t tune me out! I haven’t completely lost my mind… Moving forward here, we’ll work through some things we can each work to avoid as well as some simple steps we can take action on right away to begin building an environment that doesn’t make our team members wanna throw up! And just maybe we’ll eliminate the cost of misery in the process…

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