4 signs your employees are unhappy and how to handle it
Most employees are unhappy with their jobs. Depending on your perspective, this statement either comes as a huge shock or seems like common sense.
But a recent study by Mental Health America and the Faas Foundation showed that 71% of surveyed workers were so unhappy with their jobs that they were actively thinking about or looking for another job.
Of course, some of that could be idle dreaming about a better job. But if your employees are considering finding a new job, particularly in a competitive job market like Nashville, then you need to be able to recognize the signs of a truly unhappy employee and intervene.
According to Mental Health America’s Mind the Workplace study, the reasons for unhappiness can fall into a few different categories:
- Poor management: in the unhealthiest workplaces 49% of workers said their supervisors failed to recognize skilled employees, 48% said supervisors didn’t support them during hard times and only 5% said management always promotes safe working conditions
- Coworker conflict: Only 1% of workers in the unhealthiest workplaces said they always trust their team to support them at work and 43% said management fails to address other coworkers not doing their work
- Culture disconnect: In the unhealthiest workplaces, 56% of employees said their work environment was always focused on trivial activities and just 7% said their company always had realistic expectations
But how can you recognize the signs of an unhappy employee before they find a new job?
Silence
One sign that employees are unhappy in their jobs is complete silence around the office. Take a listen outside your office. Are employees talking to each other? Communicating and collaborating with their teammates? Of course some work environments may require extreme quiet, but what about the break room? Are employees bolting down their meals in silence?
Silence can also extend into meetings. Are employees failing to offer up new ideas? Are you only giving them a chance to answer questions rather than inviting an open discussion?
If you are running your office like a library, and you aren’t a librarian, then you need to reconsider the company culture. Employees that don’t speak up, don’t have friendly interactions with their team and don’t feel like they can participate in discussions with management are most likely putting the finishing touches on their resume.
Maintaining mediocrity
A telltale sign of engaged employees is a desire to continuously improve and achieve better results. If an employee is okay with just maintaining the status quo, chance are they aren’t very engaged with their role.
This doesn’t mean your employee isn’t talented or couldn’t find inspiration to achieve again, particularly if they were once enthusiastic about improvement. It means you need to talk to them about what could be causing their satisfaction with average performance and see if you can solve the problem. Maybe the employee is better suited to another role on their team or within the company. Maybe they feel like you aren’t supporting their efforts, or another team member is bringing them down.
Rather than seeing mediocre performance as a character flaw in your employees, treat it like an opportunity to find solutions that inspire improvement and better business outcomes. If performance doesn’t improve after a sincere attempt at fixing the issue, then it could be time to have a more serious discussion with that employee.
Deliberate failures
No one wants to have an employee that doesn’t follow direct instructions, particularly in high-stakes or dangerous roles. But an employee that deliberately fails to follow important guidelines in their job, consistently misses achievable deadline or seems to not care about their role can still be salvaged.
Most of the time, employees that exhibit this behavior are simply unhappy with the role, their coworkers or their supervisors. Rather than dismissing employees for insubordination, talk to them about the reasons behind their behavior and try to listen with an open mind. Their answers may not excuse their behavior, but it could give you valuable insight into culture or management issues that need to be addressed.
Outright insubordination is toxic, but you should give employees a chance to share their grievances before firing them to see if the relationship can be mended.
Poor health
Mental Health America’s Mind the Workplace study showed a correlation between poor employee health and unhappiness in their jobs. The unhealthiest workers were the unhappiest with their jobs and 48% said they were actively looking for work elsewhere. It seems like the main culprit for this correlation is workplace stress. In the unhealthiest workplaces:
- 68% of workers said stress always affected their personal relationships;
- 49% said they always feel like they could be let go at any time;
- 44% said they were afraid to go on vacation because they might lose their jobs or things might fall apart; and
- Just 1% said they never face isolation because of a toxic work environment.
If your employees are missing 3-5 days of work per month due to illness, it could be a sign that toxic workplace stress is weighing on them.
It’s important to realize that this kind of stress is NOT the fault of employees. Sure, one worker who is particularly bad at managing their time may cause themselves undue stress. But when multiple employees are displaying signs of poor health due to stress at their jobs, it’s a culture issue that needs to be fixed. You’re probably already experience high levels of turnover if employees are that stressed out.
Fixing a workplace culture that causes employee unhappiness is difficult. It requires soul searching by management and a commitment to working with unhappy employees rather than firing them. But if you can make your workplace a happy one, you will certainly experience more engaged employees and better business outcomes.