You get to work, start your day, and then, out of nowhere, you can’t wait to go home. Something has turned your energy into tension and anxiety. No, nothing legitimately tragic has occurred. You haven’t experienced one of the nightmarish scenarios you’ve read about from people who subsequently quit or were let go. It appears that a seemingly harmless action (or lack thereof) from a superior, client or co-worker has touched a nerve, and it’s not the first time it’s happened. I’m no self-help specialist, but as a veteran entrepreneur of a finance firm, I can safely say that almost everyone has their own triggers that are bound to arise due to the nature of their jobs.
Identifying these triggers will prevent them from ruining your entire work day and reveal what kind of work conditions are most conducive to your overall performance. Here are three triggers that I’ve found to be particularly prevalent in employees of office-based businesses:
1. Uncertainty With Time Management
Countless successful business leaders preach about the importance of time management. What many of them fail to do, however, is explain what effective time management actually means -- at least in its entirety. This ambiguous term doesn’t just refer to knowing how long a specific task is going to take or being able to organize all of your upcoming responsibilities into a schedule. When given a new task, experts at time management are able to instantly determine when they will have the time to accomplish that task and exactly when they should get started, which brings us to our first trigger.
Plenty of extremely intelligent and hard-working people aren’t experts at time management. So, when they are given a new task (one they didn’t see coming at this point of the day or week), they get stressed. They don’t know when they will have the time to accomplish the task, probably because they aren’t sure how long their other immediate tasks will take them. Should they just drop everything and get started right now? The thought of having to rush through new or routine tasks is never comforting.
Business leaders can usually tell when employees are caught off guard by the way they respond to sudden assignments. When I get this impression from my employees, I remind them when the new assignment needs to be finished (over the next few days, later today, etc.) and thank them for taking on the extra work. No business leader wants his or her employees to feel like their routine tasks are so easy that they should have no trouble increasing their workload.
2. Lack Of Feedback
Many employees thrive on feedback. When their superiors or clients exceed a certain period of time without providing any criticism or reinforcement, they feel like they aren’t performing up to par. This may be because they have lost previous positions with no prior warnings. From that day forward, a lack of feedback becomes a sign that they could be fired at any moment.
At my company, I try to provide as much feedback as I can to employees whose value cannot be accurately measured in short-term achievements. These employees are more focused on long-term contributions and therefore do not have the security of knowing they have reached their weekly or monthly revenue goals. I fill this void by asking how they are progressing toward their objectives and how they are feeling about their work in general.
3. Too Much Monotony
This one is similar to the aforementioned section. Getting bored of doing the same things day after day doesn’t make your responsibilities easier, even if you barely have to break a sweat to fulfill them. For the employees mentioned above, excessive monotony will make them feel like their boss or client doesn’t really care what they’re doing and would show no remorse in letting them go.
You might think that, because your employees aren’t complaining, they are perfectly content with their current routine. Every employee needs the occasional change or at least the notion that their role has not lost importance. Rather than simply asking my team members how they’re doing, I make sure to be more specific with questions like “Are you still okay with the work you’re doing?”
When You See When Employees Are Off Their Game
When you first looked at the title of this article, ideas that came to mind were probably more along the lines of “micromanaging” or “poor communication.” While these things are most certainly stressful, they are also more obvious than subtle. What the items on this list have in common is the initial notion of insignificance. This is one of the challenges of being a boss: You have to know when your employees are off their game before it begins contributing to the rest of the company. Don’t just assume that a crabby boss or unsatisfying work are the only reasons employees consider leaving their jobs.
