Boredom is not only a joy killer. It’s a job killer. But when we think about why people leave jobs, we often focus on stress, not boredom. Here’s why we need an ‘interest’ stimulus.
After a billion shots worldwide have been administered, many of us are starting to re-emerge into the world. And while the pandemic rampages through many parts of the globe, another more silent epidemic lurks – boredom.
Languishing is what some call it. It’s not burnout (though some are suffering from it), and it’s not depression. It’s a sort of joyless, aimless muddling through days. When we’re bored, we have a sense of emptiness and everything being the same and uninteresting. Sound familiar?
Psychologically speaking, boredom is the opposite of interest. While it doesn’t quite capture people’s attention like stress, boredom is not only a joy killer; it is also a job killer.
Businesses, especially public sector organizations, conduct stress audits, but have you ever heard of one doing a boredom audit? It might sound strange, but it would make much more business sense. Bored employees are not only underperforming (they’d have to be if they’re bored), but they are also a higher flight risk – they are unhappy, and they have the time to look for a new job.
As we emerge from this prolonged period of enforced boredom away from our normal lives, there is both great opportunity and danger for the future of work. The opportunity is that we all recognize our work lives are a source of great stimulation for us — it can be both challenging and rewarding. It can also give us a sense of purpose as we make a contribution to the world. The danger is that we see our work as a means to an end and never bring our best selves to work, seeking other avenues outside our work for stimulation.
Though stress and boredom are both sources of unhappiness in our lives, they are not equal. Everyday boredom is much more corrosive than everyday stress. This is not to say that being over-stressed (especially for prolonged periods) doesn’t have serious consequences such as burnout – it’s just that moderate stress doesn’t. However, even mild boredom has negative work consequences.
At Friday Pulse, we believe in making the science, not just referencing it, and we see these differences in our data about happiness at work. Using a data set of 24,000 respondents in research that we conducted with our friends at Robert Half, we can examine the impact of boredom and stress on employee wellbeing.
Here’s what we found:
Odds are, if you’re bored, you’re unhappy. On the other hand, while stress is often seen as the opposite of happiness, it’s not a foregone conclusion. The graph below shows that when people find their jobs uninteresting, they are rarely happy (only 9%), whereas even when “very stressed”, 38% of people still report they’re happy at work.
This pattern also holds for other key indicators:
So, with all of this evidence, why do people talk about stress more than boredom?
We all have a bias towards negative emotions and stress is largely seen as an unpleasant, negative emotion. It usually comes with fires that need to be put out, and there’s an immediacy to it.
But comparing stress and interest is a bit like comparing apples and oranges — they’re not strongly correlated with each other. However, both are key parts of happiness. If we were to put it in a formula, then it would roughly be:
Happiness at work = (3 x Interest) – (1 x Stress)
It’s unrealistic to have a successful and happy job without stress. There must be some stress to drive forward innovation and creativity. However, you also can’t have a successful business if employees are bored with their jobs. If boredom sets in, then it’s significantly worse for both employees’ happiness and key business outcomes in the long run.
There has been little escape from boredom in the time of COVID, but it is beatable. The famous Hungarian American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi first coined the idea of “flow” in the 1970s. Flow is that wonderful feeling of being so absorbed in something that we lose track of time. Research has since shown that it happens when the challenges we face are well matched to our skill levels.
Flow is almost like a peak experience when it comes to “interest”. Tennis players get into the zone. Musicians get lost in the music. Statisticians get immersed in excel spreadsheets.
The diagram below identifies the “flow zone” and the tension between boredom and stress.
Our research highlights that the costs of being bored at work far outweigh the costs of being over-challenged. Having a low amount of stress is undoubtedly optimal, but it’s much better to push ourselves (and our teams) than to go too easy.
Boredom is a signal to explore novelty, to do something different. Unfortunately, that’s sometimes difficult to do within the rigid structure of work. So, how do we make work more interesting in the middle of a pandemic? Here are some suggestions:
Talk about interest
If you’re conducting one-to-one meetings with your team, consider asking
them what they find most interesting about their jobs. We often don’t
talk about interest at work, yet interest is related to our long-term
development — it’s about our passion and sense of purpose.
Find new things to do
Job variety is important. People have been doing a lot of the same
things since the beginning of COVID. While there may be a desire to
return to how things were pre-COVID, be bold and try new things. This could be adopting a
hybrid work schedule or even mixing with people you don’t typically
engage with. The variety will bring new interest to the job.
Challenge and Empower
Two of The Five Ways to Happiness at Work – Challenge and Empower – are key
components of interest. Employees that are empowered to work with their
strengths will find work more interesting. Likewise, work that is
challenging (but not impossibly so) makes things better.
Ultimately, post-pandemic growth is going to be driven by interest — especially as we’ve all had some time to evaluate what matters to us. We’ve all had to deal with the trauma of COVID, and the way to move forward is to find interesting things in our work.
If you’re struggling to figure out if your people are interested and engaged in the work they do, Friday Pulse can help. By measuring and monitoring weekly happiness scores, we help you get a pulse on what is going on in your company, so you know who needs more of a challenge. Let us know how we can help today.
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