Frustrating day vs Frustrating job

Scenario 1.

You’ve never owned Lego but somehow, as you jump out of bed, 25 minutes late on a Monday morning, you stand on a particularly pointy one. Your bus is late/bike has a flat/car is out of gas. Traffic. From. Hell. You check your mail but since you didn’t change your password in time, the system administrator has locked you out. An important meeting was brought forward and you’re not prepared. It’s the kind of day where if something can go wrong, it will go wrong. When it’s over, you slump into a chair and tell your friend or partner or attentive cat/dog/budgerigar that you’ve had the most frustrating day, and you can’t wait until tomorrow.

Scenario 2.

You lower yourself into the chair in your cubicle that will make your ass numb and your back ache within an hour. Your desk is beside the customer service phone team, so you slip on your noise-cancelling headphones, which is fine, as you still don’t really know anybody you work with and rarely talk to anyone. You log on, start the mind-numbing work that you’re sure will be automated soon, and try not to think what this means in light of the layoffs you hear people whispering about. Your boss is late for your one-on-one and in a bad mood, so you get in trouble for missing a project deadline (even though it wasn’t assigned to you). The two things you wanted to ask them about were getting enrolled in the health insurance program and your career prospects, but you know this is not the time to ask. Again. You just about make it through the day, and as you leave, you wonder if this barely-above-minimum-wage job in a multi-million-dollar company is worth it.

As annoying as your day is in Scenario 1 is, you know it’s a one-off. You’re resilient enough to shake it off and know that tomorrow won’t be as bad. It might even be a funny story to share over coffee or cocktails at the weekend. Scenario 2 is a different story. Facing the same frustrations every day, knowing tomorrow is going to bring more of the same is damaging for employee wellbeing and equally damaging for employers.

Frustrated employees with lower wellbeing are likely to have lower levels of  engagement, performance, trust in leadership, organizational commitment, innovation. From an organizational perspective, this can impact everything from customer loyalty to organizational performance, and from an employee’s perspective, this can impact their physical and mental health (which can often be significant and tragic).  

Identifying and understanding the frustrations that employees experience day after day is vital, not just for the continued health and wellbeing of each employee, but for the continued success and growth of your organization.

Not sure where to start?

Reach out, and we can discuss the diagnostic tool we developed to find and fix sources of frustration. Step 1, no Lego in the bedroom…