When the work is draining, even success is demotivating
“There is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.” — Camus
Why do many high performers report that they are unsatisfied, demotivated, burnt out? The reason is simple: their measurements are not aligned with their goals.
Burnout isn’t a result of just working too hard. It’s a result of solving artificial problems that don’t have any clear impact. It’s impossible to feel good about hitting the target when your only reward is getting back to the starting line, without having made any visible progress towards a meaningful goal.
But despite constant advocacy for tracking customer outcomes, most companies continue to set meaningless targets — such as output metrics — as their goals. It’s easy for managers to open a dashboard and track the number of Jira tickets completed, features shipped, stakeholder requests satisfied. These output goals are devoid of meaning for the teams delivering them: every “sprint” is just the team getting back to the starting line with no sense of their work’s impact.
Another factor is that every company is undergoing perpetual Agile transformation. Thousands of hours are sacrificed on the altar of Scrum or SAFe or some other Process, imposed on the delivery teams from the top-down, rather than something that empowered teams ask for on their own. As a result, the bar most delivery teams are asked to meet is “did you complete this ticket according to the process we’re making you do?” It’s hard to feel good about that.
The “so what?” factor
“Mr. President,” the janitor responded, “I’m helping put a man on the moon.” — Apocryphal
There are three dimensions that allow employees to feel that they are succeeding. Every employee should:
- Know what goal the business has set, and why
- Feel that the goal is meaningful
- See how their own work is helping move the business towards that meaningful goal
We can identify whether a goal is meaningful by asking “so what?” Why is this output important, beyond being something for us to do? What difference is our process making, in exchange for requiring the extra meetings and documents? In the spirit of the “five whys”, keep asking “so what?” until you arrive at a goal you can feel good about: we are working on Project Unicorn because it will improve our users’ lives, or at least our company’s revenue stream.
Process and metrics are not goals. Process is only a tool for reaching a goal, and metrics are a tool for measuring progress towards it. We should pick these tools based on the goal we want to achieve with them. A clear goal also lets us see when our tools are not up to the task; when the metric is measuring the wrong thing, or the process is not helping us achieve what we want.
This is why low-autonomy teams are so soul-grinding to work in: they don’t own “requirements”. They have output and process metrics set for them by executives: if you meet our brilliant requirements, and complete them all with our perfect process, then we succeed! The teams who are subjected to these processes and measurements have no visibility into the goal, no ownership of the outcomes, and no way to say: these tools you have given us are not fit for purpose.
Intense process scrutiny and low team autonomy is common in environments with low trust. Teams have requirements and processes forced on them externally because management does not trust them to make the right decisions on their own. But this is a self-fulfilling prophecy: when managers withhold the mandate to make decisions from the team, the team becomes indecisive and appears to be in need of top-down leadership. And therefore management does not trust this team to make its own decisions, and withholds the decision-making mandate. Instead, they give them process goals and output goals — the opposite of trust.
Negative externalities of draining work
Whether some given work is energizing or draining is no secret within a company. But draining work is tough to get rid of, because in the prevailing system, it’s seen as necessary. Teams are still beholden to the output metrics, processes, and requirements imposed upon them, no matter how ineffective. And lacking the ownership to fix these problems, employees become cynics. They stop believing that change is possible; it starts to feel like an abstract possibility that exists beyond their everyday work. This cynicism is chronic, and the perpetual mood of the team becomes “this is just the way that things are, nothing will ever improve”. People disengage or simply leave.
If draining work is seen as inevitable, it is at least avoidable. Individuals who become frustrated with work they see as pointless are often able to push it to their colleagues. In teams with low cohesion (AKA working groups) we can observe this in the “10x engineer,” so called because it takes 10 people to clean up the mess they make. In more cohered teams, this can also take the form of a self-appointed leader publicly taking ownership of the team’s outputs, and frame the others as “supporting” their heroic efforts. But this makes the work even more draining for those who get stuck with doing it not only for themselves, but on behalf of these “heroes” as well.
The way to get rid of draining work is not to push it off to someone else. In organizations where everyone is doing impactful work without having to “hack the system”, 10x engineers don’t need to exist.
We need to ask, “does anyone need to do this?” Only taking a step back from output and process metrics gives us the space to recognize whether today’s process is fit for purpose to reach the goal, or if the process has replaced the goal.
How to do more energizing work
“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” — David Graeber
Designers obsess with human-centered products, but your own process should be just as human-centered — and the “users” of a process are your colleagues. In output-focused spaces, centering the humans that you work with is a radical act. No one will explicitly give you permission or encourage it, and many will oppose it. It needs to be done intentionally, even if it “slows down” delivery and looks inefficient in the metrics.
Every workplace dynamic is different, so there is no one best method for taking ownership of the team’s process and making the work meaningful. The only commonality is that this is always hard. It won’t happen overnight, and you should be prepared to fail — so try to create an environment where you can safely fail until you can succeed.
Legacy orgs see customer-facing changes as the most risky, so it is usually safer to start with internal wins. Injecting qualitative data into the semantic environment can interrupt the same old cycles of draining process, and make even the cynics start to believe that change might be possible after all.
