You’ve no doubt heard of the concept of a dead-end job. Maybe you feel like you have one at the moment. A lot of people go to the office and leave at the end of the day, doing little to no impactful tasks. This goes on for some time before they eventually leave their jobs in search of greener pastures. The concept of having no impact on anything while doing your job is sometimes referred to as job-sitting. It offers very little satisfaction and no incentive, except for the salary earned at the end of the month.
How Does Job-Sitting Impact Employee Engagement?
Job-sitting has a negative impact on employee engagement. Imagine going to work knowing that nothing you do will spark change, deliver results, earn recognition, or drive personal or professional growth. A job like that breeds carelessness and complacency. People would no longer care about what they do. People naturally strive for improvement and progress. If they’re told or shown that they won’t be achieving anything, they’ll no longer see the point of making an effort. So, how exactly does job-sitting lead to this?
It Lowers Work Engagement and Raises Anxiety
Job-sitting can make a once-enthusiastic employee feel like a ghost who wanders the workplace with a lifeless expression and a drained soul bearing the weight of underachievement. Often, the cause could be a lack of challenging tasks or stimulation. If a worker is constantly doing mechanical tasks that require no creativity or problem-solving, they’ll lose interest in their job. They’ll also feel their contributions hold little value to their team or the company as a whole.
What’s worse is if said worker is compared to others who have the opportunity to be productive and innovative. Such comparisons will hurt their mental well-being and decrease their sense of self-worth.
Reduced Job Satisfaction
An employee stuck with the same mechanical tasks often lacks a sense of fulfillment. It comes as no surprise, again, as routine lays the foundation for complacency. Another issue here is that such work often goes unnoticed and unrewarded. Even if the job is vital, if it seems like a low-skill job that anyone can do, the person doing it can go unnoticed.
Increased Fatigue
You’ve probably pulled all-nighters when you were studying for an exam. Acquiring all that knowledge probably left you feeling exhausted. However, learning new things, as tiresome as it may be, is an exercise that stimulates your mind. It helps your brain function better. It makes you sharp. In contrast, doing the same thing over and over again without thinking has the exact opposite effect. It’s the paradox of doing less but feeling more drained.
Counting down the hours to clock out signals an unhealthy environment. Likewise, sitting at your computer all day without any movement will also drain your energy levels.
Skyrocketing Turnover
Sooner or later, job-sitting employees will discover their self-worth and find more fulfilling opportunities elsewhere. This leaves employers scrambling to find a replacement. This often comes at a high cost. It’ll also take time to train any new hires.
The bigger problem? The employee who leaves can trigger a chain of resignations. There’s a higher chance of this happening if the employee is popular within the company. The situation can be made worse if their responsibilities are shifted onto other team members instead of hiring someone new to shoulder them.
How to Mitigate Job-Sitting
Now that we know the true extent of how bad job-sitting can be – for both the employee and the company they work for – we can figure out how to prevent, or indeed, to reverse it. Addressing it requires a strategic approach.
If planned proactively, a workplace can avoid job-sitting altogether. Even if a company hadn’t considered the possibility when hiring, they can still act to mitigate the effects if they appear. The worst possible course of action is inaction.
Review Workloads
The best way to avoid a job-sitting situation in your company is to plan everyone’s responsibilities in a balanced manner. Remember what I said earlier about constant intensive learning? You shouldn’t subject any employee to that. You also remember what I said about the paradoxical thing about doing less and still burning out? Mixing demanding and routine tasks in a balanced workload keeps everyone happy.
Encourage Skill Development
There’s usually a reason why certain employees aren’t entrusted with complex tasks. They’re either too new and haven’t acquired the knowledge needed to accomplish that task, or they’ve tried before and failed.
The latter may have been hard to stomach, especially if someone else has to redo the work from scratch a second time. Either way, the employee should not be made to feel that their failure has become a roadblock. They need to be motivated to revisit the failure and learn from it to do a better job the next time.
In the case of the former, managers or higher-level employees need to be encouraged to teach their juniors how to perform certain tasks, helping them develop professional skills. Inspiring them to learn outside of the workplace also has its benefits. It can help employees discover new skills and ideas that may indirectly benefit the company. An external perspective is usually much more effective than one that’s been familiar with internal processes for so long.
Promote a Culture of Activity
One of the most common issues in an office environment is the lack of physical activity. Spending long hours at a desk with little movement can lead to severe health issues. To counter that, offices can implement several programmes to help employees move around a bit more often.
Walking meetings are a good way to get employees moving. Providing standing desks is also a great way to help them get off their chairs while still being able to do some work. Creating weekly challenges like a step count competition with a prize for the winner can further encourage healthy habits at the workplace.
Offices can install some custom signs in the workplace to promote their wellness programmes, remind employees to stay hydrated, and get some rest during the day.
Final Thoughts
Job-sitting can have a significant negative impact on employees and companies alike. Employees usually feel disillusioned and gain no satisfaction from doing nothing but mechanical work. This leads to frequent burnout and high turnover rates. Companies, in turn, lose high-potential employees, increasing hiring and onboarding costs. While job-sitting has become somewhat common in the corporate world today, it can easily be remedied through better task management and by promoting employee wellness.
Author: Georgio Bolsajian – Content Team Lead, Square Signs
Photo credit: Cloudinary.com
