Is My Job Miserable?

There is a lot of difference between the two words ‘bad’ and ‘miserable’.

Anybody doing any type of job can be miserable. Suffering from severe Sunday night blues or feeling disgusted coming to office are all symptoms of this. You come home defeated, not wanting to go back and dreading it.

What causes this feeling of miserableness/ unhappiness?

Absence of these 3 important things can make you unhappy at work.

1. Your manager/ boss/ reporting manager has no interest whatsoever in your work and life. Mind you, I have also mentioned life. It is really necessary to know a person in order to bring the best out of him/ her professionally. For example a worker may be sick or having some difficulty, say managing a new born baby. Your manager does not know you or cares about you and ignores you as an individual, as a human.

2. Knowing that your work makes no difference in anybody’s life. Irrelevance, which is a killer. We may not be a doctor or a teacher doing a service to society but even if we know that we are helping others- customers, team members, subordinates, seniors. Not knowing this will make us unhappy.We have to think how our work can value add?

3. When you suffer from, 'Dunno where I am goin syndrome'. No feedback on how we are doing at work. We cannot wait for appraisals just to know how we are doing. Praises and Criticism are required on a regular basis. If we have a mentor figure at office who always gives us an unbiased opinion of our work and who knows what we do and how we do it. Now the question lies how do we get this feedback?

There may be other things as well but statistics reveal that more than 75% people quit jobs because of their managers and not for other reasons like money, better job profile etc.