Bad Leadership Kills Employee Engagement
Working at Home Depot is not sexy.
It’s fine, don’t get me wrong. But there is no glamour. As a part-time tool rental associate, my workdays are not filled with wild adventure. Unless of course, you consider scanning a customer’s driver’s license into the computer system before handing them the keys to the cargo van exhilarating.
If so, I have the perfect job for you!
Okay, maybe I’m being a bit dramatic. There is an itty bitty bit of adventure. Sometimes I’ll get to swap out the battery of a riding lawn mower while an overeager customer stares over my shoulder with anticipation.
Now that’s sexy.
I’m kidding.
I’m sure by now you can tell I am not that enthusiastic about my job as a tool rental associate.
It’s a job. End of story. And it serves the purpose of putting food on the table, as well as a few glasses of cheap, but oddly delicious $3 Cabernet from Aldi.
So I guess I can’t complain on that front. I do feel grateful to have money in the bank even if it’s not much. But I want more. I want a job that speaks to me because honestly I feel hopelessly disengaged in this role.
It hasn’t always been this way though. There was a time when I felt purposeful, where I was eager to understand the ins and outs of department 78.
Engaged
During the 5-week winter break at the University of Illinois, I worked just shy of 200 hours in this department, which is nearly equal to the maximum hours allowed for a full-time Home Depot associate.
I spent countless hours hovering over the keyboard at my desktop computer reading endless SOP’s (Standard Operating Procedures) on how to run the department. I learned how to navigate the legacy operating system that for some reason still operates on the back end of the new streamlined program, despite being completely out of date and nearly useless except in extremely rare cases that defy logic.
I learned how to refund customer’s rental contracts and how to track down old tools that were not properly updated in the new operating system. I even went as far as neatly organizing hundreds of paper files into yellow hanging folders that perfectly corresponded with the layout of our department’s floor plan.
And finally, the pièce de résistance, hanging up whiteboards in our tool tech room that track the repair status of customer-owned and store-owned tools.
Honestly, I was quite proud of myself and the positive changes that I made in our department. It felt like I was adding a ton of value to the store and helping to create unity among my fellow department employees.
But I was wrong. Very wrong.
It didn’t change anything.
No one cared about the new improvements at all. Least of which, management.
It has now been a few months since this valiant effort and I have yet to hear a single inquiry about the new improvements. No mention of the possible value of the newly minted measures.
In fact, I received the opposite of praise. I became a burden to my superiors in the process of uncovering thousands of dollars of misplaced or stolen tools over the course of the last fiscal year.
My interest in salvaging a dysfunctional department became an annoyance to management as I attempted to provide the best possible service to our customers.
So I did what any other self-respecting employee would do. I stopped caring.
I learned that doing the best possible work was of little to no value.
I learned that growth and improvement were not worth my time.
I learned that improving organization and communication systems were wasteful efforts.
Maybe this experiential education was completely unintentional on the part of my store’s managers, but if you want to kill employee engagement I can’t think of a better way to do it.
If you take away an employee’s incentive to work you can say goodbye to their engagement. No engagement? Forget about any sense of greater purpose or meaning. Without a connection to meaning, you will eventually breed hopelessness. A cardinal sin of providing meaningful work for employees.
The Deadly Sins Of Meaninglessness
In Catherine Bailey and Adrian Madden’s 2016 article in the MIT Sloan Management Review, “What Makes Work Meaningful — Or Meaningless,” they identified 7 negative habits of leaders and managers “that seem to drive a sense of meaninglessness and futility around work” for their employees.
These 7 deadly sins as the authors aptly named them, were uncovered through an extensive interview process of 135 individuals from various vocational and professional backgrounds ranging in nature from lawyers to writers, actors, nurses, garbage collectors, and stonemasons.
In all, they interviewed individuals from 10 different occupational backgrounds in hopes of finding out what makes their work particularly meaningful, or meaningless to them.
I found several similarities between my experience of meaninglessness in my current role as a tool rental associate at Home Depot and Bailey and Madden’s findings through their qualitative research.
Disconnected From Value
The first, and most egregious of the 7 deadly sins happens when leaders disconnect people from their values.
People can become disconnected from their values in several ways in the workplace, but take away their ability to work with integrity and you will certainly find yourself spreading meaninglessness to the masses.
According to the research, “a recurring theme was the tension between an organizational focus on the bottom line and the individual’s focus on the quality or professionalism of work.” (Bailey & Madden 2016)
I find this point to be extremely salient in my current work experience. After being turned away for attempting to improve systems and regulate checks and balances within my department I found that integrity and professionalism of work ethic are less important than the bottom line.
After all, why spend money on improving the reliability of rental equipment when we can skirt by on what we have? That mentality is easy to hold onto when you don’t have to look customers in the eye and apologize for the same products failing every time they get used.
Taking Employees For Granted
The 2nd deadly sin occurs when leaders take employees for granted.
“Feeling unrecognized, unacknowledged, and unappreciated by line, or senior managers was often cited in the interviews as a major reason people found their work pointless.” (Bailey & Madden 2016)
I couldn’t agree more.
When hard work goes completely unrecognized it naturally follows that employees will conclude that hard work is not necessarily appreciated.
With that mindset, how can you expect employees to work hard for your company?
People need some semblance of acknowledgment to find meaning in their work.
And I’m not talking about buying a gift card to a nice dinner for a hard-working employee, or a shoutout at the weekly department meeting (Although this might do wonders for morale). A simple nod of acknowledgment or a slight interest in what is being done by your employees would be a game-changer.
Definitely do not make the mistake of making employees feel bad for attempting to improve the system in which they operate. I can attest that nothing imbibes a feeling of meaninglessness like complaining to your employees that caring about quality control is a burden not worthy of investment.
Overriding Peoples Better Judgement
Overriding peoples better judgement is sin number 5 from Bailey and Madden’s list, but for me, it comes in at number 3.
Bailey and Madden tell us that “quite often, a sense of meaninglessness was connected with a feeling of disempowerment or disenfranchisement over their work and how it was done.” They reference an interview with a nurse who was obligated to perform procedurally incorrect medical interventions by a superior despite better judgement.
Personally, I feel this sense of disenfranchisement every time I rent out our insulation blower to customers who are planning to re-insulate their attics. I know the machine is a piece of garbage that fails roughly 90% of the time it goes out on the job.
Management knows about this. I even offered a solution in the form of an updated machine from the vendor that currently provides our failing unit. But they would rather bleed out slowly by refunding contracts to customers and discounting their insulation purchases rather than make an integrity move and invest in a new machine.
Everything has a cost.
In this case, taking away an employee’s agency to act with integrity comes with the cost of losing faith in an organization that prides itself on a customer-first motto.
A Final Word
As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’ve only touched on three of the 7 Deadly Sins of Meaninglessness. Please don’t take the absence of an explanation for the final four sins as a sign that they are not equally egregious, because they certainly are. I just don’t necessarily feel as if all of the 7 sins apply to my particular situation. But since I know you’re curious, the other sins are as follows:
Treat People Unfairly
Give People Pointless Work To Do
Put People At Risk Of Physical Or Emotional Harm
Disconnect People From Supportive Relationships
If you want to find out more, I’ll leave it up to you to take that next step and read through their article. Or perhaps I’ll do a follow-up article in the future.
For the managers and leaders out there who might be reading this, I highly suggest taking this message to heart. If you find yourself wondering why your employees or subordinates aren’t willing to go that extra mile for you on the job, consider how your actions might be impacting their sense of meaning in their work.
In my life, I have found that most people are willing to put in hard work on the job no matter the circumstances, and they find all sorts of ways to discover meaning through their efforts.
However, everyone has a breaking point. I’m not entirely sure if it is within a manager, owner, or leader’s job description to provide meaning for their employees, but I am certain that robbing them of their ability to find meaning is not.
