Guest Post By Brynn Chandler
Earlier this year I quit a job that I almost loved. My coworkers were my friends. My cube looked out onto the San Francisco bay. My salary paid my rent. We even had a fun committee (yes, I was a member) that organized fun outings each month. And the work itself? Well, it wasn’t the most interesting way to spend 8 hours of your day, but it did require some critical thinking and negotiation skills.
When I first joined this company, I was motivated to learn and perform well by my lack of understanding of the industry. I’m the type of person who doesn’t like to half-ass my work, and so I put all my effort into making sure I didn’t. But as the months rolled by and I neared the peak of the learning curve, I lost the urge to push myself. I could do my job efficiently and effectively almost on auto-pilot, and the work became repetitive and unchallenging.
For a while, I conceded to the daily mindless work because I loved so many other things about my company. But the repetitiveness of my days coupled with a lack of direction and performance measures made me start to go crazy. I was feeling more and more like Peter Gibbons from Office Space. As long as I didn’t screw up, it didn’t really seem to matter how well I performed my job just as long as the ball kept rolling. I wanted more. I wanted to keep learning and I needed to know what direction to go in. Unfortunately, my manager wasn’t much help there. He seemed to dislike his job even more than I did.
Throughout the year, there wasn’t a system to track your progress or how well you were taking care of your accounts. And at my year end performance review, I was simply told I was doing well. Again, my manager seemed to dread giving reviews more than my coworkers and I dreaded getting them.
In this somewhat recent Fortune Magazine Ask Annie article , I found that I belong to a trend in Generation Y employees.
I think this article hits a lot of great points. Although I’m unsure if Generation Y is in need of “all-day, every-day coaching”, I do think we want to be evaluated, to be given direction. We want to know how to do better, that our managers are paying attention to our performance, that our work is valued. A little dose of direction would have gone a long way in making me feel like a significant team member of my company.
Step up to the plate, managers. And so will we.
