What makes the difference between employees who are happy at work and those who are miserable? While the answer can include a lot of things, three notable causes worth considering are immeasurement, irrelevance and anonymity.
To illustrate how each of these topics can positively or negatively impact employee engagement, I will refer to Patrick Lencioni’s book The Truth About Employee Engagement: A Fable About Addressing the Three Root Causes of Job Misery.
The book is a fable about Brian Bailey – who, after an exceptional career as a CEO, retires when the company he led was sold. Think about what you would do if you unexpectedly no longer had a farm. You would go nuts! That is what happened to Brian.
After failed attempts at retirement, he became the weekend manager and part owner of a struggling downscale Italian restaurant called Gene and Joe’s. In the next few sections of this article, we explore how Brian identified and corrected the three root causes of job misery.
Immeasurement
As he started as the weekend manager, Brian visited with Joe, the remaining owner from Gene and Joe’s. Joe described his employees as “a motley crew. At least the ones who stick around.” After two nights of observing, Brian told Joe he wanted to make a major change. Joe was relieved but confused when Brian explained the major changes as wanting to “give the employees a clearer sense of what is expected of them.”
During his first meeting with the staff, Brian confirmed that the employees were clearly miserable at work and then told them, “I’m here to tell you that my job is to get you to like your jobs. To look forward to coming to work.” Brian concluded the meeting with, “In addition to being on time, I want everyone here to start measuring what you’re doing. … And don’t worry. I’ll be helping you figure out what you should be measuring and how we are going to go about doing it.”
After a discussion with each employee, measurements were developed for each employee.
- Order takers at the drive-up window: Number of orders without errors and number of customers who smile when ordering
- Servers: Tips and number of impromptu positive customer comments
- Cooks: Timeliness of finishing orders and positive customer comments on the food
Irrelevance
As employees began to measure their performance, their attitude and the performance of the restaurant began to improve. Brian then called another meeting. He began by stating, “I want you all to figure out who is the beneficiary of your work.”
Using questions and group input, the staff identified who each benefited.
- Servers: The customers in many ways, not just by serving food
- Dishwashers: The customers by providing clean plates and silverware
- Cooks: The customers by cooking excellent food and all employees by making their jobs easier
Anonymity
Brian discovered his third cause of misery at work partly by accident. An early event that Brian observed with horror was the staff quickly closing the restaurant when a bus approached near closing time. As staff motivation was slowly improving, a bus again arrived at closing. By habit, the staff raced to close the restaurant. However, Brian “flipped on the dining room lights, to the horror of his employees. Then he went to the door, opened it and waved the bus full of hungry basketball fans inside.”
“Though [the staff was] initially less than excited, as soon as the customers started coming inside, the mood changed,” Lencioni writes in the book. “Within 10 minutes, the dining room was as lively as it had been just an hour earlier, and the crew regained their momentum.”
As a reward after the bus departed, Brian traded Italian food with a Chinese and a Mexican restaurant nearby, and the crew gathered to eat. As they talked, Brian made an important observation.
“It was the first time that he could remember hearing them (the employees) talk at any length about their lives outside Gene and Joe’s," he said.
Brian’s theory about the changes
On the two-month anniversary of his work at Gene and Joe’s, Brian’s wife, Leslie, took him to dinner to celebrate. Leslie asked how work was going and asked him about his theory. Here is what he shared.
- Immeasurement: Brian felt comfortable about the first part, saying, “Basically, a job is bound to be miserable if it doesn’t involve measurement. If you don’t get a daily sense of measurable accomplishments, you will go home at night wondering if your day was worthwhile.” The discussion then turned to what to measure, and Brian added a very important point using the experience of his employees at his earlier company. “But they didn’t measure everything. We didn’t want them creating a bunch of bureaucratic tracking systems for every little activity. … The key is to always measure the right things. If you measure the wrong things, people still will lose interest.”
- Irrelevance: Brian began by explaining irrelevance as “the feeling that what you do has no impact on the lives of others.” In conclusion, Brian stated, “Every person that works has to know that what they do matters to another human being. … If a manager has any responsibility in the world, it’s to help people understand why their work matters.”
- Anonymity: Brian shared his third job misery by driving Leslie to a warehouse-looking building that housed a soccer field where two employees from Gene and Joe’s were playing soccer. Brian explained to Leslie what had happened after serving passengers on the bus and how he “started learning things about them that he wouldn’t have imagined. How can a person feel really good about going to work when they don’t feel like anyone there knows who they are? Or cares?” Brian said. “It’s really the person’s manager who needs to know them. Co-workers too, but the manager is the key.”
This is a key to what we have often referred to as connection when discussing motivation.
Brian soon moved on to other challenges to test his misery theory – immeasurement, irrelevance, anonymity – and ended up in London, England. One evening, Brian opened a package with the restaurant as the return address. Inside were two T-shirts. Beneath a picture of two smiling faces were the words "Migo and Joe’s Pizza and Pasta. Here. There. Everywhere.” Migo was one of the “motley crew,” as Joe described his staff, when Brian came to Gene and Joe’s.
Implementing these concepts on your operation
How can you eradicate immeasurement, irrelevance and anonymity at your farm or agribusiness?
Immeasurement is reduced by meeting frequently with employees to establish and review clear performance expectations for his or her position. Frequently connecting employees' tasks and responsibilities with the farm’s vision and with meaningful outcomes can reduce irrelevance. Like Brian, you can reduce anonymity by getting to personally know your employees.
