Sheep Shooting for Boredom – Bored Sick: How Workplace Boredom Affects You
Have you ever wondered where that email sheep-shooting game came from? It was probably created by someone who was bored at work. If you ended up playing the game, you might be one of them. Underwork, in the sense of having literally nothing to do while at work, is one of many causes of boredom and may be just as harmful to employee and employer as overwork.
What would happen if your working day only involved internet ‘research’, reading and sending emails, trawling through some self-guided learning, and stacking papers neatly for the umpteenth time? It might be fun at first, but eventually leads to boredom. While there are more factors that cause boredom at work – such as personal predisposition, environment, task and situation – the sheer lack of work is a major contributor. According to a survey by Sirota Consulting LLC in the USA, of more than 800,000 employees at 61 organizations worldwide, those with ‘too little work’ gave an overall job satisfaction rating of 49 out of 100, while those with ‘too much work’ had a rating of 57.
So what? Who are these dissatisfied people, those who spend their day sharpening their pencils rather than their wit? These are the ‘underworked’ or ‘underloaded’, and may be in your own office.
Underload can be qualitative, in which job demands are too simple to adequately use an employee’s skills, or quantitative, in which the employee doesn’t have enough work to fill the work day. Quantitative underload can happen for a period of minutes, hours, or a day, to longer periods of weeks or even months. Typical industries with occasional quantitative underload include service (retail, hospitality) and administration (reception, accounts), where demand fluctuates unpredictably. Think of a supermarket cashier who is waiting for a customer to arrive. In a project-based environment such as engineering and research, boredom through underload can be caused by poor planning/scheduling, too many employees, temporary downturn in demand, and over-qualification for positions.
These underloaded workers may not realise their peril: boredom is not healthy for mind or body. Studies at the University of Northumbria attribute the lack of stimulation at work as a cause for ‘underload syndrome’ aka ‘bored sick’, resulting in more sick days due to depression, fatigue and headaches. On a physiological level, when the body does not experience rushes of stress, there are no endorphins in the system to provide energy, which then drops the metabolic rate, leading to immunodeficiency.
As for boredom’s effect on the mind, the worker can feel worthless, bitter and dull and may also face resentment from overworked colleagues.
Jamie Travis, an occupational therapist with private practice, nth Degree, sees underload syndrome as a convenient label for a range of non-specific physical and psychological symptoms arising from work conditions Travis describes the psychological impact of boredom at work causing job dissatisfaction. ‘The worker may ask themselves “Why the hell do I exist here?”, when the job lacks clarity and purpose.’ The overall malaise from monotony thus increases the incidence of recurrent absenteeism and the development of musculoskeletal pain in the future.
These health effects of underload can affect any level of job, as described by Hugh*, an engineer with a doctorate in Telecommunications – physical layer technologies.Hired by an engineering firm to do testing, which was constantly delayed, the firm kept him busy with secretarial work – scanning, printing, binding and word processing, or as Hugh describes: ‘Basically all the work that no one else wanted to do and the company didn’t want to employ anyone to do it. It made me feel depressed and suicidal. Instead of solving project problems…I gossiped, whinged, and surfed the internet for a new job.’ Hugh has since escaped his underloaded environment and uses his brain to develop cutting edge technology at a university in Victoria.
Hugh’s ex-employer may have experienced the common consequences of boredom at work, such as absenteeism, worker dissatisfaction, accidents, reduced performance on vigilance tasks, horseplay, and sabotage, as identified by Professor Cynthia D Fisher, industrial psychologist and Head of the Department of Management at Bond University. Fisher and her colleagues studied enlisted men in the US Marine Corps. Outside of the programmed hours of Marine activity but largely confined to base, some soldiers did not report any boredom at all. Many, however, were bored and dealt with the experience of having ‘nothing to do’ in one of two ways. Some were destructively bored, drinking and brawling, while others were constructively bored, choosing to go to the gym, read, or enrol in a correspondence course.
Whether employees are marines or mail clerks, the employer must take action to prevent underload, and thus avoid the presence of underload syndrome, which may lead to absenteeism and workplace claims for psychological injury.
Ellen Jackson and Rachel Clements described in InPsych magazine that the average cost of a psychological injury claim is $27,798 per claim compared with $18,913 for a physical injury claim and the average time off work is 21 weeks compared with 8 weeks for a physical injury claim (WorkCover NSW Statistical Bulletin 2003/04).
If only to save money, what can the employer do about qualitative underload? Fisher recommends that they ensure that workers have background tasks to fulfil, such as improving processes, preparing for meetings or helping another employee. Travis recommends that the company should conduct a psychologically based risk assessment, which is mindful of the health and productivity hazard of underload. A staff survey should measure against key indicators of job satisfaction, such as role uncertainty, lack of workload control and lack of support in the workplace.
What can an employee do about quantitative underload? It depends on whether the underload is short term (hours or a few days) or longer (weeks to months). The following tips explain how to cope with underload, to avoid underload syndrome.
Short term underload
- clean up your desk and your hard drive and sort your documents into folders
- finish any outstanding correspondence
- build up social capital with colleagues or clients
- go the extra mile for a client or help a coworker who is overloaded
- or you could always go to the “Bored at work website” http://www.boredatwork.com/
Long term underload:
- use the time to do some learning:
- see if your company has on online university and take a course
- share your skills with others by coaching/mentoring a less experienced employee
- help someone with their job and see if you like it, and take away some of their stress
- tell your boss that you can offer the company more, and ask for additional responsibilities.
You may even need to change careers; if the work is enough to occupy most of the day, and yet you are still bored due to qualitative underload, then you may suit a job that is more congruent with your skills, or where the pace of organisational life is faster.
So if you find that you’re a sheep sharpshooter, you’re not alone. The key is to make the most of the downtime, or move on.
About the Author
I am a freelance writer and editor from Australia specialising in article and review format. I generate story ideas, conduct research and interviews then complete the piece in line with house style and expected deadlines. The underlying philosophy to any writing I do is ‘information through engagement’.
eating a pencil hurts
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