We’ve all had our fair share of horrendous job experiences. After Week 4’s discussion on our worst job experience, I can now quantify and identify why my job was so horrible. My worst job has to be when I worked in a kitchen. (Out of respect for the establishment, the restaurant name or location will not be named.) If you don’t know, a kitchen job is a hot, high stress, and fast paced working environment. In many ways, you are a glorified robot, only completing 5-6 tasks a day.

My job on entrée varied shift by shift. If I was on broil, I would be in charge of cooking. This meant my entire shift would consist of cooking various proteins such as steaks, chicken, and fish. If I was on call, my shift consisted of my calling out orders to my broil cook and setting up plates for my finisher. If I was on finish, I would collect plates from my caller and plate the various foods. Although my workplace tried to improve my skill variety, I was doing very on a shift by shift basis. This system also hindered the task identify as well as task significance. Although I was in charge of making the product for the customer, there were chefs that will kick you off the station and take over if you couldn’t keep up. This made you feel insignificant overall. There was very high autonomy as you can expect to work 10-12 hours a shift because of poor scheduling. These reasons culminated in a terrible working experience at such restaurant.

The only reason why I stayed with my job was the fact that you were provided abundant amounts of feedback. This feedback was given live and after every shift. Supervisors are very unfiltered and will explicitly explain your performance that shift. As a result of this feedback, I was intrinsically motivated to always improve regardless of the poor working conditions.

Understanding what makes a job bad is important for me as a future employer because it allows me to set policies that both motivate and empower my employees, in order to have the best working conditions and most productivity imaginable.