Research shows that boredom is the emotion that people experience at work more than in any context—with serious consequences for engagement and productivity for individuals and organizations. We reached out to Shimul Melwani, an associate professor of organizational behavior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to learn more about a recent paper she co-authored about the consequences of boredom in the workplace and what we can do to counteract it. Here are excerpts of our conversation, edited for length and clarity:
What are the consequences of boredom at work?
It’s one thing to do worse on the activity that you’re bored of. That’s pretty intuitive. But our research shows it also tends to have this lagging effect where it affects not only the task that you’re working on, but even has an effect on your attention and productivity deficit for a future performance task.
In the first task in our study, people were unable to remove themselves from the activity even though they wanted to abandon it. They had to just power through and suppress their boredom. When you engage in suppression, it’s really tiring because it’s a form of regulation. When the next task comes around, it’s almost like a kind of boomerang effect. Even for a less-boring task, people start to mind wander because the thing that they’ve been suppressing kind of pops up. When you’re mind wandering, you’re therefore not working hard on the task that you’re doing and that second task tends to suffer.
What did you learn about preventing boredom from affecting future tasks?
Assuming work is going to have its ebbs and flows of boring and less boring tasks, what we need to do is find a way to intervene after that experience of suppression. We tested different types of tasks to have almost an absorption capacity to excite the individuals, including ones that involved empowerment, independence, and creativity.
The thing that ended up having the most impact was if the second task was actually something that had meaning for the individuals—having impact on other people, having a connection to other people, where a person really felt like the work they were doing was deeply impactful. These tasks were really reorienting, they were replenishing. As a result, it broke that path between the suppression of boredom and the desire to mind wander.
If I’m an individual worker, how can I apply these lessons in my own work to manage my boredom?
First, having an awareness of where your meaning comes from is really critical. And then secondly, be able to understand and plan your day so that if you know you’re working on something that is going to bring you down to follow it up as best as possible with the type of task that is going to affect your emotions and attention in a positive way. For example, my meaning comes from working with students. So engaging with students, helping students, working on research or other types of work with students is the thing that gives me the most meaning.
Are there ways managers should intervene?
The first is empowering employees to have some degree of ability to craft their time. The second—and I’d say this about almost all emotions—is being open. You can prevent or avoid suppression by having an environment in which people can actually share things like, ‘Look, I’m really struggling. This is the kind of thing that really pulls me down, and I can’t bring myself to focus.’ The third thing is to constantly remind employees about how the tasks they’re working on has impacts for the organization, colleagues, or clients. Take a step back and let other people know about how their work is important and meaningful to the organization and others.
It’s particularly important with some neurodivergent people, who can experience boredom in ways that are really paralyzing. Someone who has ADHD, for example, gets bored really, really quickly and boredom can have a very paralyzing effect on their behavior. Being able to talk about it so someone can help you craft your job or break it into different tasks is a really critical thing.
These are really easy things to do by just asking people openly. It’s amazing to me how many managers don’t have regular one-on-ones with their team members. In the one-on-ones they do have, they often are very much focused on task work. Like, ‘Where are you on this project and where are you on this project?’ So little is focused on, ‘What is draining you right now? What is exciting you right now? What’s preventing you from achieving your best right now?’
With my own team, I use a framework for designing or rethinking our roles where we talk about what parts of our job are energizing, what parts of our job are draining, and what parts of our job are neutral. ‘Rose, bud, thorn’ is another example of this, to ask team members what makes them excited and what might be bothering them or pulling them down. Normalize talking about it in every team meeting.
Charter Pro subscribers can read a full transcript of our conversation for more on Melwani’s research.