(Thanks to Andy Kaufman for inspiring this week’s article)
Those of us who have raised small children are familiar with the complaint “I’m bored!” which is almost as annoying as “Are we there yet?”. This is more common currently than when I was growing up. Expressing boredom in those days was like issuing an open invitation for your parents to assign you some “interesting” chores. These days, parents are more likely to avoid the problem by providing distractions such as smartphones or tablets.
But what happens in the work place when a team member is bored? This happens a lot more with knowledge work than you might expect. And even with projects which are supposed to be unique endeavors, team members can find the work tedious, especially if they are doing the same work they’ve done on many past projects.
There are many published statistics about the proportion of workers who are disengaged. Sometimes this can be the result of mistreatment by their managers, insufficient pay or a general lack of trust in the company or leadership team. But boredom can also be a cause of disengagement and might be one of the easier issues to address if it is diagnosed early enough.
While there are many potential symptoms of boredom including an increased volume of complaints about work, doing work which is not in scope, distraction and even absenteeism, these visible signs might also be related to one of the other causes of disengagement.
Directly asking a team member whether they are bored or not is unlikely to help unless there is a high level of perceived safety and a culture of radical candor in place. Few of us would openly admit to being bored as this might be seen as a career-limiting move!
However, by asking open-ended questions about the team member’s work, it is possible to determine whether their disengagement is boredom-born. Here are a few starting points:
- What do you like best about your job?
- If there was one thing you’d want to change about your job, what would it be?
- (Give them a piece of paper to draw on) Could you draw a simple pie chart for me, showing me how of your current role challenges you, how much is interesting but easy, and how much you could do in your sleep?
If you are fairly confident that they are bored with their work, the next step is to determine whether the work itself is boring regardless of who performs it or whether it is boring just for this specific team member as this will affect potential responses.
If the work itself is boring, options to address it include:
- Splitting the boring work with others on the team to free up capacity for work on more interesting activities
- Empowering the team member to change how the work is done or to reduce the amount of manual effort involved to make
- Helping the team member reframe the work by tying it to a higher purpose. The apocryphal story of the school custodian who enjoys his work because it creates safety for the children comes to mind.
If the issue is not the work itself, but the work assignment, understanding what the team member would like to be doing would be the first step. Assuming the desired work is not too far a leap for them, helping them to come up with a development and transition plan might be one way to rekindle their enthusiasm. But if they are being unrealistic, as their leader it is important to be candid in providing a reality check.
All jobs possess some boring activities. However, ignore chronic boredom in a team member at your own peril.
“There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.” – G.K. Chesterton
(If you liked this article, why not read my book Easy in Theory, Difficult in Practice which contains 100 other lessons on project leadership? It’s available on Amazon.com and on Amazon.ca as well as a number of other online book stores)
Easy in theory, difficult in practice 