For many organisations, 2009 has been the year of the slashed budget. With pressure from the uncertain economic climate bearing upon them, leaders and managers have been forced to trim the fat wherever they can.

When budgets are tight, investing in the wellbeing of staff may seem a non-essential expense that can be easily cut. However, there are some very simple things that leaders and managers can do that cost nothing, but have the power to profoundly affect job satisfaction within your team.

Patrick Lencioni’s wonderful fable for leaders, The Three Signs of a Miserable Job, addresses the mysteries of what it is that makes a job fulfilling.

Lencioni suggests that job satisfaction isn’t as simple as we might think. Some of us may assume that being highly paid, or doing something we love makes job satisfaction a given. Similarly we may think that a miserable job is one in which carries a low salary, or involves apparently menial tasks - such as in a restaurant kitchen, or a mailroom.

Lencioni, however, sees things differently. To start with, he points out that a miserable job is not the same as a bad one.

A bad job is really in the eye of the beholder. Depending on your perspective, it can be a job demanding hard physical labour, working outside or dealing with the public. Or it could be a job that involves managing people, long hours in an office or a long commute. It could, in fact, be any job at all.

But a miserable job is easy to define - it’s the one that you dread going to each morning and can’t wait to leave each evening. Lencioni makes the point that miserable jobs are found everywhere and that being miserable has nothing to do with the actual work a job involves.

‘That’s the thing about misery at work. It makes little sense and knows no bounds. No one is immune.’

So what are the three signs of a miserable job? Lencioni identifies them as:

Anonymity
Simply put, when people feel anonymous, invisible or generic at work they cannot experience job fulfilment.

However, when that person feels valued, known and understood, their satisfaction and fulfilment is naturally increased-and the person with the most influence in that area is a direct supervisor or manager.

Combating anonymity is as simple as getting to know your people, taking a personal interest in who they are, what their life is like, what is important to them. The key is to take a genuine interest, not an artificial one.

Irrelevance
Having a sense of relevance is all about feeling and being needed-knowing that what I do has an effect on the lives of others. As a leader, ‘who am I helping?’ is the first question to encourage your people to ask themselves. When someone is able to determine who they affect-customers, colleagues, other departments within the organisation, or significantly, their manager-they will believe that their work has meaning and relevance.

Immeasurement
This is a term created by Lencioni to describe an employee’s lack of clear means of assessing the success or failure of what they do:

‘Employees need to be able to gauge their progress and level of contribution for themselves. They cannot be fulfilled in their work if success depends on the whims of another person, no matter how benevolent that person may be.

Employees who can measure their own progress or contribution are going to develop a greater sense of personal responsibility and satisfaction than those who cannot.’

So what are the benefits of building a culture of job fulfilment? According to Lencioni, they include:

increased productivity-fulfilled employees work with increased enthusiasm and passion
greater retention-people choose to stay in a fulfilling job longer
lower costs-when your employees are happy and stay in their jobs longer, recruiting, hiring, retaining and termination costs are naturally reduced
cultural differentiation-building a culture of job fulfilment differentiates an organisation or business from its competitors, creating a competitive advantage.

But the bottom line is not the only realm where benefits are felt. There is also a definite and positive flow-on effect associated with managing for job fulfilment.

Not only will the members of your team take their increased feelings of wellbeing into personal and other areas of their lives, but the effect is contagious in the workplace. Happy employees… ‘take greater interest in their colleagues, helping them to find meaning and relevance in their work, and find better ways to gauge their own success, and they do all of this without specific direction from their bosses.’

Lencioni’s model for combating the three signs of a miserable job provides a simple, effective means of increasing job satisfaction within a team.

When the people you lead know that they are valued and understood, that their job matters in someone’s life and that they have an effective means of measuring their own progress, their sense of job satisfaction and fulfilment will be enhanced and the health of your team and organisation will be increased.

This simple, very cost-effective framework can enable you as a leader to make a profound and lasting impact on the people you manage. Imagine what that could do for your sense of job satisfaction?

Patrick Lencioni’s other work includes his books The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and Death by Meeting.