Asked how he writes his stories, Neil Gaiman, author of the Sandman graphic novel series, told Tim Ferriss that he forces himself to become bored. He goes down to the “lovely little gazebo” at the bottom of his garden, sits down with his fountain pen and his notebook, and forbids himself to do anything but write. He can look out at the world but he can’t go online or try to complete a crossword puzzle or call a friend.
He can do nothing or he can write, and after a few minutes of staring out of the window and watching the grass grow, doing nothing loses its charm. Writing—with all its difficulties and its frustrations—becomes more interesting.
And so boredom drives creativity and improves productivity.
It’s not an entirely new idea. Booker Prize-winning novelist Anne Enright has also described the productive benefits of having little to do, as has sculptor Anish Kapoor and musician Kate Nash. But while the boredom may be a good starting point for creative work, can it be beneficial for commercial work? Businesses generally try to avoid letting their workers grow bored. Time spent staring out of windows is time not spent writing code, pitching a customer, or drawing a design. Bored time is unproductive time and best avoided.
A couple of researchers though, have recently wondered whether it’s possible to turn workplace boredom into something positive.
The researchers, Carina Schott of Utrecht University, and Caroline Fischer of the University of Twente, define workplace boredom as “an unpleasant individual state resulting from the inability to follow desired goals occurring during work or work-related situations.” The state includes “affective, cognitive, physiological, and motivational implications” and “arises from an attention failure that is hard to ignore and attributed to the environment.”
It happens when work is complex, monotonous or meaningless, say Schott and Fischer, and when we fail to find satisfaction in an activity we have to perform. The “key mechanism” of boredom is “attention failure,” a sign that progress towards a goal is unsatisfactory and that we should try doing something different instead.
We notice we’re bored when time drags, when attention wanders, and when we find we have to put a lot of effort into continuing a task. Thoughts drift away from the job at hand to areas that may or may not be work-related. When we’re bored in the office, we might imagine a better way to design a spreadsheet, for example, or just think about where we’d like to go during the next vacation.
Or we can walk away. Boredom might also inspire a trip to the breakroom and a chat with a colleague. Or it can lead to “cyberloafing”: a quick read of the news, a scroll through social media, or a browse on a shopping site.
Schott and Fischer argue that all of those coping mechanisms can produce positive results.
Day-dreaming, whether it’s about an upcoming presentation or a pina colada on the beach, can generate creative solutions to work problems and produce innovative ideas. “Hence, employees’ task-unrelated thinking may make organizations better able to adapt to a changing environment or innovate,” say the researchers.
Time Around the Water Cooler is Time Well-Spent
A chat in the breakroom can result in better professional networks, stronger team ties or more knowledge-sharing across company silos. Even flicking through Twitter in the middle of writing a report has been found to produce new ideas, higher creativity and wider connections.
The most promising boredom-coping behavior though, may involve changing task engagement. Refocusing attention on the task, increasing or changing the task’s complexity, or introducing gamification can all help to increase task-related imagination, say Schott and Fischer.
Those benefits don’t always occur though. The researchers warn that changing task engagement might not always lead to higher work engagement and can even lower engagement. “This means task performance might not always benefit from these adaptions directly. However, there might be positive effects on the individual level such as higher well-being or organizational level through networking.”
So boredom happens when we struggle to accomplish a task or when we feel that the task we’re doing is pointless. We cope with that boredom by day-dreaming, chatting with a co-worker, or redesigning the task to make it more interesting.
All of these responses can bring benefits that not only make the workday more bearable but also help the business. They lead to the generation of new ideas, the broadening of employee networks, or a new way of tacking a problem.
According to the researchers, these benefits are the result of the relationship between job demands and job resources. Job demands include aspects of the job that drain energy, such as complexity, pressure and unclear roles. While job resources are those aspects that help employees manage their job demands, such as autonomy, support from colleagues and bosses, and the significance of the task.
“The interaction of demands and resources is crucial in determining work-related outcomes,” say the researchers, and they listed the resources that they believe turn boredom into new ideas.
The researchers note that job resources can be identified at the levels of tasks, work organization, interpersonal and social relations, and organizations. Task level resources include job feedback and skill discretion. Team empowerment is an interpersonal level resource. Organizational slack and “adhocracy culture” are organizational level resources, and a generalist job description is a work organizational level resource.
Job feedback, say Schott and Fischer, “helps to decrease the consequences of one of the three stages underlying the formation of boredom, namely the inability to engage attention and to participate in a satisfying activity.” Explaining the importance of a boring task, for example, can make it feel more significant and less dull.
Skill discretion allows workers to employ their skills, be creative and learn new things. “It presents a resource that is mostly based on autonomy, the opportunity to learn and behave creatively.” Team empowerment enables workers to feel that they have an important role in a team, while organizational slack—in the form of unallocated funds or time—reduces pressure and gives workers space to explore new ideas.
Job descriptions that are general, such as “Creative Officer” or “Growth Manager,” give employees the freedom to add new tasks or complete their tasks in their own way, using tools and methods that they prefer. And an adhocracy culture is made of “managers who grant autonomy, stimulate growth and variety, risk-taking, and adaptability.”
The Resources Your Team Needs to Beat Boredom
If deriving benefits from boredom at work depends on the presence of a particular set of resources, managers can act to ensure that those resources are always present.
Workplaces can foster skill discretion, for example, giving employees the opportunity to gain new skills. Human resources should offer training and courses, especially to staff in the dullest jobs. Managers should discuss boredom frankly in their feedback, and suggest ways in which staff can make use of their time as they stack shelves or enter data. “In doing so, supervisors communicate an organizational culture that does not taboo or punish boredom but rather cherishes it as part of the work because of its positive aspects,” say the researchers.
Teams should enjoy more autonomy in their decision-making and in the way they divide their labor. Large organizations often have hierarchies which silo staff in defined roles and limit their ability to try something new—until they leave the company. A systems analyst, for example, might always be analyzing the same systems. Creating a looser structure could allow those analysts to take on other roles in addition to their main position. The company would benefit from another pair of hands and a new perspective, while the systems analyst gets to beat the boredom of a repetitive job by broadening their experience and learning new skills.
Increasing organizational slack so that staff have the time to be bored and the space to produce positive consequences from that boredom is harder. Time has a monetary value that risks being wasted if the company isn’t maximizing its employees’ output. Schott and Fischer suggest making work processes more efficient—the answer to every manager’s attempt to cut costs. They warn though, that “automatization can especially present a source of boredom in itself and should therefore be accompanied by alternative work tasks. That way employees are enabled to ‘flee’ from the mere control of software once in a while.”
And in addition to giving staff broad titles and the space to interpret them, managers can also adjust the organizational culture by talking openly about their own experiences with boredom and how they benefited from them.
None of those steps are going to remove boredom entirely from the workplace. Every job has boring moments. Whether an employee is filling shelves in an Amazon warehouse, writing code for a social platform or preparing a brief for a legal case, there will always be tasks that are dull and boring and prompt long looks through the office window.
Creating structures that enable staff to make the most of those moments should help to turn boredom into benefits that help both the employee and the company. And it might just produce a best-selling graphic novel too.
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