According to Gallup Research, 70% of employees in the US don’t like their jobs. Some merely dislike their job and others absolutely hate every moment on the job. (See Gallup Poll Report).
For the 30% that say they ove their jobs, should we be jealous or consider them liars!
So, what happens to the 70% of the employees on the job?
Let’s take an example of Bob, who works for a large corporation.
He starts to tense up on Sunday evening as he anticipates the upcoming week.
During the night, he will toss and turn as he tries to sleep and then, upon hearing the screech of his alarm, will haul his broken body out of bed.
After going through his morning routine of showering and shaving, he grabs his backpack to head out the door.
After numbing his butt in horrific commuter traffic, Bob hauls his carcass in the office door a couple of hours later. By now, his bad mood has turned into a disaster.
Turning to work, Bob goes into a robotic routine by starting by checking email, he also jots down to-do items and then tries to focus through a pounding headache about what should be done.
His foul mood is interrupted when his boss comes by and asks when he will have the presentation done. What presentation? Oh, didn’t I tell you that we need a presentation by this afternoon for the new client we are meeting?
Boom! There goes the day as our intrepid employee opens up PowerPoint and finds his company system password has expired. Thirty minutes later he is updated with a new password and starting to pull documents from the computer network for the presentation.
After grinding through lunch to get the presentation done on time, the boss wanders by about 2:00 pm to let him know the presentation for the potential new client will be delayed a week!
After significant teeth grinding, Bob looks back at his to-do list and even though six hours has gone by, he has achieved absolutely nothing.
Three hours later, our employee friend leaves heads down the hall for the parking lot.
He passes a poster with the old joke ‘It has come to the attention of management that some employees who have died have failed to fall over. Please fall over when you die so we can tell the difference between dead and live employees.’
He pushes out the door and climbs into his SUV completely unfulfilled. A hard day of work and no feeling of accomplishment. He sighs as he slowly eases into the freeway traffic screaming along at 10 miles per hour.
He finally is home to the family and the problems thereof. A quick check of his business email late in the evening, he collapses into bed after 10:00 pm, it is clear that Bob is not ready to do this all over again Tuesday. He falls into a fitful sleep dreading Tuesday.
In future posts, I will discuss Bob’s story and why this is so unfulfilling and why he hates his job,