
…in sick starts to seem more and more appealing. So does whiling away the workday playing solitaire. But productivity-sucking coping mechanisms, while they may help you feel better in the moment, ultimately create a vicious cycle: A job is even worse when you feel like you’re bored and bad at it.
You don’t just want to know where you fall on a scale of one to five — you want to know exactly how your employer is defining one, five, and all the scores in between. “It’s important that you hear not just how you’re doing, but how close are you to the bar, and how high the bar is,” Klein says.