How To Completely And Utterly Destroy An Employee’s Work Life

We came across a fascinating workplace story in The Washington Post by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, authors of The Progress Principle.

Over the past 15 years, the team has tracked diary entries of 238 executives in 7 different companies.

Their bottom line: 

What we discovered is that the key factor you can use to make employees miserable on the job is to simply keep them from making progress in meaningful work. 

Consider this: on one-third of those 12,000 days, the person writing the diary was either unhappy at work, demotivated by the work, or both.

Based on their research, the team has identified 20 dubious behaviors of modern business leaders which are scarily true.

Our advice? Go through the 20 behaviors and see how many are operating in your business today.

Then think about how to:

1. Shift the “give and take” of your business to achieve a more gratifying balance, for your employees and your bottom-line
2. See and appreciate what your employees are looking for in their work lives, beyond a pay check
3. Uncover the hidden meaning that exists in your brand that can serve as the platform for a new, mutually beneficial relationship between your business and the people vital to its success.