[00:00:00] Welcome back to The Management Lab Podcast. I'm Uri Gal from the University of Sydney
[00:00:20] Business School. I'm Sean Hansen from Saunders College of Business at Rochester Institute
[00:00:25] Technology in beautiful Rochester, New York. Our hockey team is tonight actually right
[00:00:33] now so I'm being a very bad member of the organization. Our hockey team is playing
[00:00:38] in the NCAA hockey tournament. So it's called the Frozen Four. In the same way that basketball
[00:00:46] well basketball is going on right now too. So but we're at the in basketball we're
[00:00:51] in the sweet 16 stage but in hockey there's only 16 in the whole tournament. The NCAA
[00:00:56] tournament is 16 teams so we're playing Boston University right now which is the number
[00:01:04] two team in the country so I don't want to go check the score well one on our call
[00:01:07] or I might get upset. Does only 16 teams in the whole country? Oh no in the tournament
[00:01:14] so unlike in basketball there's 64 teams that gets selected to the NCAA basketball tournament,
[00:01:20] men's tournament and women's tournament but in hockey they only do 16. Right okay there
[00:01:25] are fewer here are hockey teams but they're playing as we speak so and isn't the same as
[00:01:30] in basketball that the very best player gets selected for the NH NHL. In basketball you get
[00:01:38] a lot of players well not a lot but yeah plenty of strong players go to the NBA but yeah
[00:01:44] you will have players from this tournament surely go into the NHL. So today we're going to be
[00:01:51] talking about workplace boredom boredom in the workplace and it's kind of I'll tell you what
[00:01:56] it's not something I had ever looked into the research on and having looked through some
[00:02:02] of this research there's way more nuance to it than I would have expected. Yeah so I picked
[00:02:08] the topic. Why did I do it? I don't know that there was a- You were bored. No no no no but
[00:02:18] I didn't realize the level of nuance in the literature when I had thought about the topic.
[00:02:24] I just thought there was something about it that might be fresh or interesting just because
[00:02:30] I haven't heard any any real discussions about boredom in the workplace. In fact most of the
[00:02:36] conversations I've heard in academia and outside of academia as well is around kind of the opposite
[00:02:41] of boredom. It's about stress and being overloaded with work and all the negative implications
[00:02:46] of this sort of phenomenon but you don't really hear about boredom that much right?
[00:02:52] Yeah which is surprising because again looking at some of the research it seems like boredom
[00:02:57] is on the rise workplace boredom is on the rise which I'm sure we'll delve into some of the
[00:03:02] potential drivers for that but given how much discussion overload and you know excess work or
[00:03:10] you know stress in the workplace gets it's kind of surprising right that people are saying well
[00:03:17] my work life is actually quite boring. Yeah and you keep hearing people talking about
[00:03:22] you know I can't deal with all the different sources of pressuring my life work and life
[00:03:27] and money and competing demands and family so it's like the opposite of boredom but like you say
[00:03:34] yeah it seems like more people are more bored at work which is kind of intuitive I suppose.
[00:03:41] People are spending a bunch of time checking TMZ is TMZ still a thing?
[00:03:44] What is TMZ? Oh it was like a haboid type website that would like celebrities lives kind of
[00:03:53] website but my point is that you know given people talking so much about their time stress and
[00:04:01] work stress little would we know that people are spending a lot of time doing other things
[00:04:06] in their work lives. And yeah one of the things that I thought was interesting in the literature
[00:04:11] and well they'll delve more deeply into it in a minute is the different ways in which boredom has
[00:04:16] been defined because I think when you think about the concept initially it sounds kind of obvious what
[00:04:23] it is but when you look at the different definitions it turns out that there's actually quite a bit of
[00:04:26] sophistication and you can tackle this from different angles and it turns out that there's different
[00:04:32] types of boredom. So why don't we start? Give us one, give us one definition. Yeah okay so I guess
[00:04:38] just to kind of get a set of baseline for the conversation perhaps a basic definition of boredom
[00:04:46] is a state of relatively low arousal and dissatisfaction which is attributed to an inadequately
[00:04:53] stimulating situation. So it's not having enough stuff to do, it's not getting sufficient stimulation,
[00:05:00] things are moving too slowly there's not enough tasks for us to do and I think that's kind of the
[00:05:08] most intuitive understanding that many people have of what boredom is right it's just not
[00:05:12] stuff we don't have enough to do like give me something guys. I'm not engaged. Yeah it's not engaged.
[00:05:19] I'm not engaged. And in the literature researchers point out various causes as well as effects
[00:05:27] of this sort of boredom. So one of the some of the main causes- Wait, but before we delve into
[00:05:33] the causes what are the other definitions like we said there's so many different you know some
[00:05:37] I can add something to this you know there's others that talk about it specifically as a transient phase
[00:05:42] so in the article we read by male and jacks this is in group and organizational management they
[00:05:49] cite someone else which was Fisher 1993 but that person defined it as an unpleasant transient
[00:05:56] of affective state in which the individual feels a pervasive lack of interest in
[00:06:01] and difficulty concentrating on the current activity. So in that case it's specifically being
[00:06:07] defined as transient it's passing right it's not something persistent but then in other definitions
[00:06:13] it is persistent or chronic. It's a you know it's specifically framed as something that
[00:06:18] pervades a given work environment or a given person's experience. So the paper that you just
[00:06:25] mentioned actually goes through they put together a pretty structured matrix of different types
[00:06:32] of boredom so there's two dimensions to this two by two framework that they have one of them-
[00:06:38] It's a two by two so it's not too complicated. I learned early in my consulting career that
[00:06:43] I remember someone telling me every good consultant should be able to generate a two by two matrix
[00:06:48] just about anything yeah right and put it on a slide yes and charge a thousand bucks for it
[00:06:56] exactly yeah so they distinguish on hour
[00:07:02] yeah they distinguish between episodic episodic and chronic
[00:07:07] autumn on the one hand episodic as something that like you said before is transient it comes
[00:07:13] and goes it depends on the time and chronic it's something something just lingers which tends to be
[00:07:20] more associated with people who are prone to boredom right so there's a difference between
[00:07:25] situations that may give rise to boredom because of their nature and the lack of stimulation that
[00:07:29] they provide to people but when you're talking about chronic types of boredom it may have more to
[00:07:35] do with the individual and it's a him or herself rather than the situation that they're operating
[00:07:40] with them yeah and then on the other hand they distinguish between situational and global boredom
[00:07:46] so situational is something that has to do with the one aspect or domain of their life or at work
[00:07:51] right maybe it's a particular task or project that they might be involved in that's for whatever
[00:07:58] reason is uniquely boring to them but there's also global boredom which cuts across multiple domains
[00:08:05] I and not this sort of boredom is not attributed to the situation which a person might be
[00:08:13] operating within it but it might be more to do with individual differences in their
[00:08:18] pronest of boredom or in their need for stimulation so again it sort of aligns a little bit more
[00:08:23] with that chronic state let me just ask before we delve into any of the research when you experience
[00:08:29] boredom in your own work environment just in work where do you think it would fall within that matrix
[00:08:37] that's a good question I'll let you think about it I'll say for me it's absolutely episodic
[00:08:44] and situational there's certain aspects of my job that I hate that are boring and there's others
[00:08:51] that are very engaging so it's all about sort of what's the task I think I can speak for every
[00:08:56] college professor on earth and say that grading is boring it's the worst part of the job
[00:09:04] do you think I do you think I overstated my ability to speak for every college professor on earth
[00:09:12] just a tad hair maybe a bit I but what I'm thinking about I'm wondering whether
[00:09:18] I don't think they're mutually exclusive right I think you can score different you can have
[00:09:24] different scores on these different quadrants so the two by two gives us four different quadrants
[00:09:29] yeah I'm just saying in my own experience I would say work boredom tends to be very situational
[00:09:37] yeah it does definitely a bit of that I would agree that different tasks involve different levels
[00:09:43] of boredom but yeah for me I think I don't know maybe I across the the border a little bit
[00:09:53] from episodic to chronic on occasion because I and I don't know I haven't had a diagnosed but
[00:10:02] I think I may have a particularly strong need for stimulation like intellectual
[00:10:10] informational stimulation and so I'll give you an example one of the things that we have to do
[00:10:16] as professors is to write papers right that's the publisher parish situation there
[00:10:22] that's the mantra I know people who are able at least that's what they tell me to sit down and write
[00:10:28] for eight hours a day and if I have to sit down and write for the most I can do in one go is about
[00:10:37] three to four minutes and then I have I'm not that's true and then I have to break away from it
[00:10:43] and and I don't know strum on my guitar for a minute or write an email or read something
[00:10:49] us or do something else and then I have and I get back for a couple more minutes and I
[00:10:54] and that's the way I work that's the way I write and I just can't do it for any longer
[00:10:58] I'm I'm I'm not capable of it this is really interesting because I do find that in terms of boredom
[00:11:07] working on research is probably the least boring thing to me because it is intellectually
[00:11:12] stimulating and it gets you know you're sort of thinking through things and you're trying to craft
[00:11:16] your argument in a certain way I follow you that you you might need breaks periodically just to
[00:11:23] I don't know what refresh your brain um sorry let me clear my throat
[00:11:30] there's nothing worse than someone speaking into a microphone with that consistent
[00:11:36] sound coming from the back I was looking forward to hearing it actually
[00:11:40] yeah I was doing a reading at church don't start in on me
[00:11:46] but I was doing a reading at church and I had that I couldn't clear my throat
[00:11:52] and it's it's the worst possible place like you're up there at the at the
[00:11:57] rostrum and uh
[00:12:01] I kept trying to turn my head aside to clear my throat and it was it was brutal what way reading can I ask
[00:12:08] uh
[00:12:09] the first and second reading so in the Catholic church there are two readings before the gospel
[00:12:16] so the first reading is generally an Old Testament reading
[00:12:19] uh Old Testament meaning Hebrew Bible including including the prophets and all that and everything
[00:12:25] not not just the Torah um and then the second reading is usually uh is a New Testament reading
[00:12:32] meaning often one of the epistles uh epistles of Paul or others um and so those get
[00:12:38] those get read first and then the feast or deacon will usually read the gospel
[00:12:44] so which which during which reading did you um get into a coffin fit
[00:12:48] the first one of the hidden one in the second one I like stepped away and
[00:12:54] cleared my throat maybe you're a dente semi
[00:12:58] we both know that's not true we both know that's not true
[00:13:03] uh this is maybe revealing too much but or it teaches me because I think I know more about the
[00:13:08] history of Judaism than he does sometimes you probably do yeah
[00:13:12] but that's a major digression how did we how do we get oh yeah the coughing
[00:13:15] yeah um yeah me having to clear my throat
[00:13:19] but you know to me research is actually one of these things that's actually very stimulating
[00:13:24] intellectually and so I don't usually get bored when i'm working on papers
[00:13:27] I get frustrated but certainly I wouldn't say bored right where if I feel like I'm not making
[00:13:34] an argument properly or I'm struggling to sort of get an angle on something that can be frustrating
[00:13:40] but I wouldn't call it boring so what you're saying makes me think that maybe I'm
[00:13:44] I'm mischaracterizing what I'm experiencing maybe it's not bored and maybe it's just uh
[00:13:50] in some way over stimulation of having to think about things really hard to the point that I have
[00:13:54] to step away and kind of refresh my mind so that might be part of it but I also think that
[00:13:59] I mean I do find at least part of that exercise boring in a sense and in the sense that
[00:14:05] and people who are not who work in other fields might relate to this as well so there's uh
[00:14:11] you know when you write a paper when you do research you kind of have an idea
[00:14:16] once you have the data at your disposal what the argument is going to be in what you want to say in
[00:14:20] the paper and if you don't have data if you're crafting a theoretical argument about whatever the case
[00:14:26] might be you know what it is before you're writing the paper but once you think somewhat
[00:14:34] a lot I think it's kind of like you know how novelists will say once they start writing a book
[00:14:39] eventually the book writes itself like the characters take on a life of their own I think that's true
[00:14:45] developing ideas I haven't found that to be the case but the way that I write because there are
[00:14:50] there are few surprises there but anyway let me finish my argument then you can
[00:14:54] reset sure go ahead sorry so I know what it is roughly for that we're not roughly like
[00:15:01] the vast majority of what ends up being written I know what it's going to be like
[00:15:06] and yet as as everybody who's working academia knows to write a paper and to get it published
[00:15:12] as at least an 18-month you know endeavor if not two or three or four years and that that process
[00:15:21] you know the notion that you can do something pretty quickly and efficiently and easily but then
[00:15:26] for whatever institutional pressures or organizational demands you have to keep plugging away at
[00:15:33] getting it over the line is just so sucking and boring and boring I guess it can be if you're
[00:15:45] depending on what your reviewers have requested it certainly can't be certainly yeah
[00:15:51] so can we talk about some of the causes now or it was that anything was they wanted to cover
[00:15:56] before we got into them no let's let's go into some of the drivers some of the purported causes
[00:16:00] of workplace portemps okay so some of the things that literature talks about
[00:16:07] limited interactions with colleagues and as I saw this I was thinking that truly does
[00:16:15] individual variations in preference for that as well I know some people are just happy to
[00:16:21] sit in their office and not talk to anybody else for the whole day they'll be perfectly
[00:16:24] comfortable doing that but other people just can't get enough of talking to other people
[00:16:30] in at work and yeah those are the people that I would usually kind of send this team private
[00:16:38] I would walk to the other side of the whole way to avoid these people yes I have someone very close
[00:16:45] to me who says the same thing is our true sorry so I don't have quite that same reaction I like
[00:16:52] the social interaction but I do know some some friends and loved ones of mine who talk about how
[00:17:02] the chatter within their workplace is just unbearable like it's impossible to do work because people are
[00:17:10] just kibbutzing yeah so different people have a varying varying levels of this need to be around
[00:17:19] and talk with other people during the day like social interactions so anyway I guess on average limited
[00:17:25] interactions can lead to job boredom sorry you were gonna say what were you gonna say
[00:17:30] so I was just gonna say I do think that's one that's really intriguing or has really intriguing
[00:17:35] implications because we have had this massive move to more remote work right I think this is
[00:17:43] fairly global or at least throughout much of the west that since the pandemic many
[00:17:49] workplaces have not gone back to full-time in office and a lot of people a lot of places have
[00:17:54] gone to regular remote work where people are entirely working from home I mean this is one of the
[00:18:00] things we talked about in one of our previous discussions and so that that significant move to
[00:18:05] remote work has huge implications for workplace boredom if if that limited interaction with colleagues
[00:18:13] is a valid driver yeah I mean there are different solutions to that right people organizations use
[00:18:19] all these different types of enterprise social networking systems like Slack or Facebook work and
[00:18:26] stuff like that in order to compensate for the lack of physical proximity I've never used any of
[00:18:32] these because we don't really have to use them in the kind of work that we do have you had any
[00:18:36] experience with with any of these systems yeah I'm not a big fan because again even even there
[00:18:41] it's not really interaction it's not like social interaction doesn't feel like social interaction
[00:18:45] to me it's like a replacement for email right so rather than have email you just have
[00:18:51] you know a channel for instant messaging and asking questions to one another and that's fine but it's
[00:18:57] you know it lacks a certain richness of of social interaction yeah so limited interactions is one
[00:19:05] cause of boredom limited opportunities for progression was highlighted as another precursor
[00:19:12] of boredom in the workplace yep which yeah I guess kind of makes sense lack of yeah lack of options
[00:19:20] are inadequate resources so you don't have enough resources to do your job effectively essentially
[00:19:28] yeah I wonder why would that be a cause of boredom it sounds to me more like it should be a cause
[00:19:34] of frustration rather than boredom frustration yeah I thought that as well interesting there is some
[00:19:40] of this research though that plays around with that in terms of allowing more resources if we get
[00:19:46] to those topics though it didn't seem like the endowment with more resources actually led to
[00:19:53] improvements in boredom so I'm not sure that one is entirely persuasive I think those sources
[00:19:58] just to give some citations that was from the Susan Nevis applied psychology articles that right
[00:20:05] yeah that 2020 and I think those are the social interactions one is compelling to me some of the others
[00:20:14] you know again I'm as with you I'm not entirely persuaded there were a couple others that occurred
[00:20:20] throughout this body of research that I think are worth noting one is overqualification right which
[00:20:26] sort of relates to that limited opportunities for progression like you could see getting bored
[00:20:31] if you're sort of stuck in a rot right if you were in the same job and there's no sort of path forward
[00:20:36] you can see the routine of it getting boring so that idea of being overqualified for a job is
[00:20:43] the source of boredom because you know presumably you feel like you could do it without really
[00:20:49] engaging your mind fully in the activity you buy that one so the they talked about perceived
[00:20:57] overqualification which I think is a qualification we need to add there because it's whether or not
[00:21:03] a person think thinks they're oversteroed and it struck me that one way to potentially combat this
[00:21:11] is to put people down you know you're not overqual you're not good you're stupid you should be doing
[00:21:17] this put them in their place I'm guessing that's not going to be your management recommendation at the
[00:21:23] end of our part no in fact I'm gonna edit this out but I thought it was funny yeah yeah I think it's a
[00:21:29] valid observation for sure well it's it's an technological extension of their initial argument right
[00:21:34] yeah yeah the other the other thing that has traditionally been positive as a driver for boredom
[00:21:42] is rutinization right mind maybe mundane's not the right work because it could still be
[00:21:48] sick right word rather because it could could still be significant but work that consists of repeating
[00:21:54] the same actions again and again so very routine work is traditionally positive as a source of
[00:22:00] boredom yeah that always makes me think of Charlie Chuppen's movies it's called modern times
[00:22:08] modern times yeah yeah the chose people working on the assembly line where he's in the in the gear work
[00:22:15] famous scene where he gets caught in the gears does I don't know why but I remember a scene where
[00:22:20] he eats a shoe or am I mixing up different different movies so that definitely happens I'm not sure
[00:22:27] if that's in the same movie that's a good question we'll have to look into it but no in modern times
[00:22:32] he definitely is working in a in like a gear shop and he gets caught up in the gears and you got
[00:22:40] you got the right movie yeah but the idea is that you know every individual on the assembly line
[00:22:46] would be responsible for a very minute kind of repetitive and highly writtenized tasks that
[00:22:55] will combine together with a hundred other tasks to produce the the final shoe or I don't know
[00:23:02] what a clock or whatever it is that they make it in that factory yeah this gets back I think we
[00:23:09] talked about Taylorism in a previous in a previous discussion but what was Taylor's first name
[00:23:15] Patrick Patrick Taylor gave birth in the early 20th century to this whole school of
[00:23:21] management called scientific management and his whole premise was let's take the work and break it
[00:23:27] down into its component parts and try to rootonize those to get the most efficient possible
[00:23:34] operation right for an organization but one of the critiques that emerged in the wake of Taylorism
[00:23:39] is you're making people's lives incredibly boring you know you're taking all the richness out of
[00:23:44] people's work lives by trying to make things so routine and so atomized that it would have long
[00:23:53] term detrimental effects so the literature also talks about the effects or the consequences of
[00:24:02] boredom and I was surprised just to see the the whole range of negative consequences that he can have
[00:24:12] because it's not something that I thought about to that extent before I looked at it so some of the
[00:24:18] things that that the papers that we read mentioned so the soza and never one specifically had a whole
[00:24:24] range of them so that's one of the reasons one of the main reasons people leave their job because
[00:24:30] they find boring yeah just dissatisfaction yeah so it's just oh it's not dissatisfaction it's
[00:24:36] distinct from dissatisfaction I think it's just boredom no I mean I mean it leads to such dissatisfaction
[00:24:42] that they leave their jobs that it causes significant increase in turnover so it's a stronger predictor
[00:24:50] of people leaving their jobs than salary then then strife and politics and power dynamics in the
[00:25:00] workplace that people might find disruptive or toxic and even cultural fit right that you don't
[00:25:06] feel like you belong in this organization for whatever cultural reason so boredom was a strong
[00:25:11] of predictors of people leaving their jobs and any of these other factors yeah that was that was
[00:25:19] quite startling to me one of the other stats and I for the last week can't figure out which paper
[00:25:23] we saw it in but there was this that it was not the the author's own finding it was an illusion to
[00:25:31] another study but it said that 64% of millennials I think it was in particular said they would rather
[00:25:38] have of get paid $40,000 a year in a job that they felt was interesting then $100,000 a year in a job
[00:25:46] they felt was boring so this is from the mail and jacks paper there's a statement concurrently acceptance
[00:25:53] of boring jobs is dropping in a recent Brookings Institution study 64% of millennials said they would
[00:26:00] rather make $40,000 a year US on a job they love than $100,000 a year at a boring job and I guess
[00:26:10] if you frame it as I love this job that you know positions it a little differently but still
[00:26:16] this is a pretty big pay differential yeah and fully two thirds or nearly two thirds of
[00:26:24] millennial said yeah I'll take the the low wage job if I enjoy it that is a pretty startling
[00:26:31] finding but I mean the disparity is so white between these two salaries yeah I was surprised by it
[00:26:40] but then when you look at some of the other effects that are cited in the literature things like
[00:26:44] higher rates of heart disease like there were real health impacts and some of these you know that
[00:26:49] that it actually is taking you just off people's lives working in a boring job yeah so it has been
[00:26:56] shown to lead to more anxiety and stress and like you said even higher likelihood to die younger
[00:27:02] because of cardiovascular diseases so it's not just like we said at the out so it's not it's not
[00:27:09] just about being overloaded and stressed out because you have too many things to do or too
[00:27:15] many competing demands or what have you but but not having enough to do is almost as dangerous
[00:27:21] or I don't know if actually I haven't seen a comparison of these two things but it has its own
[00:27:26] very significant set of very negative consequences yeah well and in particular one of the studies we
[00:27:34] looked at which is Pindeck et al from computers in human behavior the article is called cyberloafing
[00:27:41] in as a coping mechanism dealing with workplace boredom and they draw a very clear link between
[00:27:48] experiences of boredom or what's the phrase to use not workload under workload work under load
[00:27:57] so not having enough work to do essentially work under load leads to boredom and then boredom is what
[00:28:05] leads to cyberloafing and also to counterproductive or what's the exact phrase there counterproductive
[00:28:14] work behavior which is not always so cyberloafing is basically this experience of like people
[00:28:21] going online during their work day when they're supposed to be working doing personal things or again
[00:28:26] looking at TMZ or whatnot but basically doing non-work stuff online is what's phrased as cyberloafing
[00:28:32] now in that particular paper they posit it they argue that it's not necessarily a counterproductive
[00:28:39] work behavior counterproductive work behaviors doing things that are deliberately sort of
[00:28:44] against the interests of your employer or against your the focus of your work and they say well it's not
[00:28:52] they're positive at least that it's not that it's just a natural response to boredom people are bored
[00:28:57] so they go online and look at things yeah there was another study the same paper we referred to
[00:29:04] before by Solzhan Nevis to actually conducted an empirical study as well as part of that paper to
[00:29:09] examine the impact of both boredom and overload at work on two independent variables to outcome
[00:29:16] variables one is emotional exhaustion and the other one is disengagement what they found was
[00:29:22] well they had a couple of interesting findings one of them was that boredom does lead to emotional
[00:29:27] exhaustion by an increase in effective rumination which has a couple of different dimensions
[00:29:34] to it but the most significant one was affective within a affective rumination which basically
[00:29:40] involves people thinking having negative thoughts about their work yeah gotta hate this job
[00:29:46] gotta hate this job so it's it's emotional in nature and and what they found was that boredom
[00:29:53] leads to affective rumination to having negative thoughts about your work which in turn leads to both
[00:30:00] being emotionally exhausted exhausted and to being disengaged in the workplace yeah
[00:30:07] and overload had a similar effect right overload leads to I don't know if it's ironic because
[00:30:12] it's kind of the opposite of being bored but it has the same same effect on on having negative
[00:30:18] thoughts about your work and as a consequence of being to be an exhausted emotionally and to
[00:30:24] being disengaged as well it is a little ironic I mean it could be one of those things where it's
[00:30:30] kind of counterintuitive that these things it seem almost like opposites by the way boredom also
[00:30:35] seems like it's frequently being positive as an opposite of something else like flow chick send me
[00:30:40] highs yeah famous concept of flow and so it does suggest that maybe there's sort of a sweet spot
[00:30:47] right that you gotta you gotta make sure that the work is engaging people's I cognitive effort but
[00:30:55] but not so much that they feel like they're underwater I will say one of the things that I found
[00:31:01] most fascinating in all this work is this idea that boredom has increased in recent years
[00:31:08] so multiple sources suggesting that the rates of workplace boredom have gone up
[00:31:15] at the exact same time that the traditional causes for boredom have gone down right so
[00:31:21] rootin is eight work has become less routine most a lot of manual labor type or very routine
[00:31:28] labor type activities again in western democracies have have gone away or have been outsourced in many
[00:31:35] cases so a lot or have been automated and so a lot of these things that would seem to suggest they
[00:31:42] would be the sources of boredom have been reduced and yet boredom has gone up so that's pretty
[00:31:51] interesting to me now a couple all explanations for why that might be the case have been positive
[00:31:59] but just the that juxtaposition I thought was pretty surprising did you have any reaction to
[00:32:05] that that makes me feel like we need more data on this finding because it's very crude in the sense
[00:32:12] that it makes no distinction between for instance different generations and so you know we talked
[00:32:18] before about different types of boredom and how they may emanate from the situation of the work
[00:32:23] that might be under stimulating but it might also have to do with people's need or expectation
[00:32:28] for stimulation in the workplace so it strikes me that yeah people of our generation and older
[00:32:37] probably have fairly restrained expectations about what kind of meaning and stimulation they
[00:32:44] ought to get from work but younger people probably have a much different type of expectation about
[00:32:50] what they should be getting from work and how much meaning they want to derive from it and when
[00:32:54] they don't get their reaction might be quite different in terms of how the experience boredom
[00:33:00] yeah I think actually I think that's a huge part of the explanation for for what I just
[00:33:05] called paradoxical right so I think that's exactly right number one throughout these studies if
[00:33:11] the usage age as a control variable in several of them and the clear result is the older you are
[00:33:18] the less bored you are the younger you are the more inclined to boredom you are right
[00:33:24] and I do think there are some generational effects there and some of them might be of around
[00:33:28] expectation some of it might be around attention span right like there's I think there is plenty
[00:33:34] of research that suggests that attention spans have gotten shorter across society but particularly
[00:33:40] amongst younger cohorts so those are two different dynamics but I think they both can help explain
[00:33:47] that paradox right so if and that point you made about expectations I see it all the time so I
[00:33:52] I talked to a lot of students who are doing job searches or RIT as a co-op school so to get your
[00:33:59] degree you actually have to complete a cooperative educational experience which most of the world
[00:34:03] would call in internship so you have to go and do substantive work within your discipline at least
[00:34:11] for one term most of our students do multiple terms they're very enterprising bunch but I
[00:34:16] you know when I ask them about their their experiences one of the biggest critiques I have or I get
[00:34:22] back from them is I was just boring right like I didn't feel like I had interesting things to do
[00:34:28] like their expectations are very high in in an internship in particular you know the reality of
[00:34:35] internships are sometimes they get spun up by a firm to you know try and assess talent early but
[00:34:42] you know sometimes the jobs are not well crafted such that the intern has to sort of figure out what
[00:34:48] they're going to do and if and the biggest critique by the way on the other side from the employers is
[00:34:53] this person needed too much handholding like they needed to constantly be told in fine detail
[00:34:59] what to do and that doesn't work for us right we can't need somebody who needs handholding they got
[00:35:04] to be able to sort of figure it out on the fly and that doesn't seem to work for a number of people
[00:35:10] in the current student population like they want they want their expectations are very high of what
[00:35:15] the job experience will give them and they go in and they realize that you know sometimes it is
[00:35:21] what we used to call in the consulting business grunt work I think the point about the
[00:35:26] intergenerational differences is really interesting and really important as well I think
[00:35:31] you're right the rise of social media has I would argue radically change people's capacity for
[00:35:37] cognitive effort and you know I was talking about myself before and how I can't focus for more than
[00:35:44] 34 minutes at the time not because of social media for my case that came before it but I think
[00:35:51] for younger people many of them who spend many hours on social media and watch 12 minute clips
[00:35:57] of whatever it is that's kind of their attention span and I think most workplaces are not set up
[00:36:03] to keep people like they're stimulated over the course of a work day I do think that part of what we're
[00:36:12] seeing there in the rise of boredom is the effect of social media and just sort of being
[00:36:17] inundated with information technology that can sort of entertain us in various ways all the time
[00:36:24] and again I'm sort of I don't have the statistics at my fingertips here but I know the numbers on
[00:36:30] attention span have dropped again across population across the population where people's attention span
[00:36:36] have dramatically dramatically reduced or declined rather in over the last 15 to 20 years so what
[00:36:47] can we say to manage as an organizations what can they do to address this I think the first
[00:36:55] thing that occurred to me was this idea of work under load and given that we know that boredom has
[00:37:01] these very very significant negative side effects like significant increase in turnover at the
[00:37:07] organization I think it's definitely something people have to pay attention to so I think organizational
[00:37:12] managers should should take efforts to assess the degrees of boredom that are happening within their
[00:37:18] workforce right to try to gauge people's engagement with the workload and if you identify
[00:37:26] a under load work under load where people feel like they don't have enough to do well that's
[00:37:31] just an efficiency opportunity right like you could be getting more I don't want to say it in sort
[00:37:37] of a way that sounds like the manager should just be trying to get the most out of you know
[00:37:43] bleed every penny of value out of their employees but if you have people that don't have enough then
[00:37:50] then as a manager you need to be focusing on that and thinking about what more could I be asking
[00:37:56] from this folks I don't know if you recall but when Elon Musk first took over Twitter
[00:38:02] within like two months he laid off something like 80% of the workforce
[00:38:08] and the productivity of the firm didn't dip
[00:38:12] that to me when I heard that stat was like oh my god this company was just employing people to do
[00:38:16] nothing like good lord like structure your work environment in a way that you're
[00:38:23] having people get engaged in substantive ways and give their best efforts to the firm
[00:38:30] so you saying it's an opportunity for a job redesign across people who find
[00:38:38] themselves being underestimulated yeah yeah I think that's one I think another one gets
[00:38:44] effected something we've talked about quite a bit which is this idea of meaning
[00:38:48] so a number of the studies we looked at frame boredom with respect to meaning that often boredom
[00:38:55] is sort of a sense of lack of meaning within the workplace so I think trying to communicate to people
[00:39:03] how the work that they do contributes to the broader efforts of the organization and thinking
[00:39:08] about how to reinforce that concept consistently so that people feel like they're part of something bigger
[00:39:14] than themselves in the in the time they put in at work I think is pretty important
[00:39:20] uh I do think this also relates to this idea that you have nixed previously as one of our topics um
[00:39:26] and maybe it has passed but in the wake of the pandemic there was this whole concept of quiet quitting
[00:39:32] do you remember that quiet quitting which was basically people staying on their job but deliberately
[00:39:37] underperforming like just not putting any effort in um I think
[00:39:42] that phenomenon might speak to something similar where people just feel like well
[00:39:47] it doesn't really matter what I do so trying to think of ways to reinforce that sense of meaning
[00:39:52] I think could be a huge element to addressing boredom how do you feel about so another way
[00:39:58] to tackle this might be by introducing gamification principles into people's work and people's
[00:40:05] day-to-day job yeah I'm a believer in gamification are you because I was gonna
[00:40:11] say that some people might think about gamification is being kind of inappropriate in a way because
[00:40:16] it's making the whole thing more childish than it needs to be and it's not as serious as
[00:40:23] you know a workplace needs to be but your take is that they can actually work
[00:40:28] uh I do I mean I guess it depends on the nature of the design of the gamification elements but
[00:40:32] yeah I think it can I think even creating little competitions not not high-risk competitions where
[00:40:39] people where it undermines collaboration but maybe team-based competitions within the workplace
[00:40:45] is one of those elements of gamification uh I'm a believer in it yeah so I think that that might be
[00:40:52] that might be another route that that organizations might take and of course there's different ways
[00:40:56] in which you can design and build in gamification principles into people's work and other
[00:41:02] thing that I thought was interesting and one of the papers talked about it let me quickly check
[00:41:06] which one that was that was the paper by male and jacks they had a couple recommendations at the end
[00:41:14] yeah so but but they looked at the use of information technology as a contributor to boredom
[00:41:19] as a contributor to the boredom which I thought was really interesting now granted that paper was
[00:41:24] written in 2015 so some nine years ago and I guess the state of of IT was quite different than
[00:41:31] than it is now nine years ago in the scheme of a research community is not that long
[00:41:38] no but in the scheme of IT and what technology you and how people were using it so I'm not sure
[00:41:43] what kind of IT they were looking at exactly but I don't know that they say in the paper
[00:41:47] but you're right so they were talking about this as as positively related to boredom
[00:41:52] but it strikes me that it might be used in other ways as well so as to mitigate boredom not to
[00:41:56] contribute to it yeah that's an interesting well the recommendations that came out of that particular
[00:42:02] paper I thought some were a little light but I do think some of them could be enhanced with some
[00:42:11] use of IT so for example one was less distractions create less distractions in the workplace
[00:42:16] well that might be a little hard to execute like what does that mean don't have crazy pictures
[00:42:22] on the wall don't have televisions running or I don't know exactly how that plays out
[00:42:28] but one of the others was enabling people to give to others so enabling people to
[00:42:33] help others in the workplace can give that sense of meaning and certainly IT could do that so
[00:42:39] some of the collaboration platforms like you mentioned earlier things like Slack and others
[00:42:43] might create mechanisms for enabling people to contribute to two you know colleagues
[00:42:51] or offer ideas and suggestions and support and things like that which could enhance that sense of
[00:42:56] meaning the other one that came out of that particular study was streamlined meetings and that's
[00:43:02] another one I'm a big believer so agile software development is something that I have studied for
[00:43:07] years and the procedures around agile development I think are quite interesting this has become
[00:43:15] the predominant mode of software development and some of the techniques there I think could have
[00:43:22] a huge effect on reducing boredom so these are things like the daily stand-up right so lots of
[00:43:28] organizations do this now not just IT or even organizations but this is every morning we have a
[00:43:33] stand-up meeting and it's specifically called a stand-up because we don't want people sitting around
[00:43:37] in bullshitting about the you know the football game that was on last night or you know whatever
[00:43:44] cut to the chase and sort of talk about what are you working on are you hitting any snags
[00:43:50] what do you need help with and then you move to the next person so it keeps it quick fresh you know
[00:43:54] people touch base know what everyone else is working on and then move on I wish more places
[00:44:00] of up to this practice because it's death by meetings right there's so many meetings we have
[00:44:06] to attend and I'm sure many people can relate to this they just they go on and on and different
[00:44:11] people just find various types of meetings as a venue for them to unload on everybody else yeah
[00:44:18] yeah I think we have all we've all been in meetings where you got to the end of two hours and you
[00:44:22] thought did we really need to meet did we what do we actually achieved right yeah yeah totally yeah
[00:44:30] I agree wholeheartedly there one of the other things by the way in agile development is the
[00:44:35] concept of a sprint right so the idea that I guess sprints technically are specific to
[00:44:41] or were specific to scrum the scrum methodology but it's the idea of let's organize our work in small
[00:44:47] iterations two to four weeks right so what can we get done in the next let's say a given firm uses
[00:44:53] two weeks prints let's focus on what we can do in the next two weeks work on that for two weeks
[00:44:59] review see how we did and then focus on the next two weeks I think that type of iteration based
[00:45:06] work structuring could have could be a great solution to workplace boredom I totally agree
[00:45:13] yeah when you don't see the end of what you're working on until you know two years you know the
[00:45:18] project's going to be done in two years it can sap your motivation whereas if you say
[00:45:24] I can see this target two weeks from now it keeps that energy level up and can create a more stable
[00:45:32] work rhythm where you don't have these periods of low activity in the other periods of oh my god
[00:45:38] I've got to put in you know 20 hours a day to hit this deadline so creating a more iterative
[00:45:45] structure in your work I think could really level out that pace yeah the notion the notion of
[00:45:52] sprints is really useful I think beyond software development because it allows a couple of
[00:45:57] different things one is that allows for a good level of intensity during those sprints to the point
[00:46:03] that you feel like you're doing something but I think that the the scram methodology is very explicit
[00:46:09] about not overworking people and keeping pace sustainable right it's sustainable levels
[00:46:15] but you do have a certain level of intensity because you know you have to deliver something within
[00:46:19] within the next two weeks and the the added thing is that he actually get feedback on your work
[00:46:26] because you have to present it whatever it is that you did you developing that two week window
[00:46:30] you have to present it to the customer and you have you have feedback so you know how you've done
[00:46:36] and I completely agree I would I would argue in most cases in most organizations
[00:46:43] you just work and there's no there's no ending site right there's no obvious I'm lined it you have
[00:46:50] to cross after which you know I'm going to get feedback and I'm I have to maintain this level
[00:46:55] of intensity up to that point because then something's going to happen it's just kind of routine
[00:47:00] ongoing never ending box moving sort of work which you can you can obviously see why many people would
[00:47:08] find it kind of un stimulating and boring yeah getting back to an old another old silent movie
[00:47:14] that's like metropolis yeah if you ever saw Fritz Lang's metropolis but basically he re-images the
[00:47:20] industrial workplace as MoLock you know the Babylonian god just devouring people um but yeah
[00:47:29] that movie is from like 1929 or something when was that movie made no so it would have been before
[00:47:34] 27 because it is a silent film and 27 is when wings one best picture I think okay but I wasn't
[00:47:41] wasn't far off no anyway I'll check it I'll check it but yeah it's 20s yeah but anyway I do
[00:47:51] think the challenge there's of course not all work can be structured into iterative cycles
[00:47:55] but the degree to which it can could uh I think if you can identify areas where work could be structured
[00:48:02] into iterations like that I think it could have a real substantive impact on reducing boredom yeah
[00:48:09] to me that's definitely a principle that more managers need to think about when they think in
[00:48:15] about how to design their departments their processes their structures their incentive systems
[00:48:20] I think there's there's potential for the sort of scrum like sprints way beyond so for development
[00:48:28] yeah the last one and I don't know if this is really recommendation but it gets back to that
[00:48:33] I can I just say Sean can I just can I just say the movie was released in 1927 so I was two years off
[00:48:39] but but your reaction was so dismissive like I was off by like three decades I can see I can see
[00:48:46] no I make no contest the the other piece and and I think this was this was the idea from the cyber
[00:48:55] loathing article is that maybe you create some space for some of this that you recognize that
[00:49:02] that people like you strumming your guitar people need to have pauses and to refresh which of course
[00:49:09] was traditionally the the role of the the coffee machine or the water cooler right when people talk
[00:49:14] about interacting with friends at a water cooler that was kind of the point is you know you're working
[00:49:18] away in your day you need to take a break periodically and just talk to other people so maybe
[00:49:23] thinking about little ways in which people can have those little refresh moments or opportunities
[00:49:30] for refreshing their their intellectual state their cognitive state I think would be interesting
[00:49:35] or valuable yeah that that goes back to what you said before about Taylorism and scientific
[00:49:41] management which essentially treats everybody as cogs in the machine that we have to extract
[00:49:46] as much value out of but I think once you start recognizing that people have different needs
[00:49:51] some of them are not directly in immediate related to the outcome of the work
[00:49:56] then you have to think about workplaces in slightly different ways and allow for these different
[00:50:00] variations in people's need for interactions or to break away from work or to do stuff that allows
[00:50:06] them to kind of you know refresh for a few minutes and come back with new forces into whatever it
[00:50:12] is that they were doing before so yeah I think that that's pretty important as well last note I would
[00:50:17] have is know your workforce right like if you have a lot of younger adults in your workforce
[00:50:23] the need for attention to these things goes up that you really have to think about how are we
[00:50:29] engaging them are we are we engaging their full mind and effort where's we get a lot of older people
[00:50:37] maybe it doesn't need quite as much energy and attention yeah now that's a good point
[00:50:43] okay well I think we've covered a lot the discussion I think so you want to find out what went
[00:50:49] down today yeah let's let's find out what went down today
[00:50:53] okay
[00:51:10] oh do you want to go first because I think no I want you to go first because it sounds like you had an
[00:51:14] interesting one okay um I hope it's as interesting as I think it is and let's see if you get it
[00:51:21] because it does have a special connection to you and your history okay so I'll start with
[00:51:29] giving away only a couple of general details and and then see how we go so what happened
[00:51:38] on the 29th of March which is today for me in the year 1990 that had to do with actually I'm
[00:51:53] not going to say what it had to do with just the sheer date does that mean anything to you
[00:51:58] so March of 90 so that was right around nothing jumps out at me but it was right around the
[00:52:04] the the fall of the western block so was it the um the fall of the Berlin wall that wasn't
[00:52:11] that was 90 right no I think it was 1989 but I'm I'm it has 89 was when okay go ahead
[00:52:19] but it has a special connection to you so it happened within the special connection to me okay
[00:52:26] so now I have to think about what aspect of me you're thinking about um
[00:52:30] um it happened in the Midwest in the Midwest of the United States okay so
[00:52:39] in the state of Ohio yeah I know you're zeroing in for me I know it was not any of the sports teams
[00:52:46] winning anything significant or I would have known that um state of Ohio 1990 March I don't know
[00:52:53] you got me in the city of Cleveland you're zeroing in on me Mike White cease to be the mayor
[00:53:02] of the city of Cleveland no so it has to deal with oh wait wait the groundbreaking on the
[00:53:10] Jacobsfield the the what is now called progressive field so close but no rock Hall of Fame
[00:53:19] no another building you have to give it to me okay so on the 29th of March 1990
[00:53:26] power city center in Cleveland formally opened tower city which is right under the terminal tower
[00:53:33] I tell you what last time I was in there there weren't too many shops still open so
[00:53:38] I think it was a I think it had a short stretch uh I probably should have come up with that
[00:53:43] you're right that's pretty good yeah 94 was when progressive field opened I shouldn't know that
[00:53:49] all right you stumped me good job I got one for you now this is US based
[00:53:57] but a significant event now again I'm a day behind you but a significant um accident I think
[00:54:04] I can give you that occurred on this date in 1979 and it had fairly substantial subsequent ramifications
[00:54:14] for US policy in at least one domain can you can you work out what it was an accident
[00:54:24] an accident the letter of change in US policy
[00:54:28] oh was it a three mile accident yes three mile island in uh in Pennsylvania yeah so the the
[00:54:39] partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor in retrospect it was actually I think the impact was
[00:54:46] the the real impact was quite small I think there's been skin evidence of substantive long-term health
[00:54:52] impacts from this but it led to almost the freezing of opening of new nuclear uh plants in the US
[00:55:02] which I think we probably regret now because that technology has advanced quite a bit and it
[00:55:06] would be a great source of clean energy if we had continued to invest in it but that's uh
[00:55:13] that's a separate question yeah you've taken this to a very serious direction I was gonna say
[00:55:17] we need to start keeping score because I think I'm leading you might be we can go back and check
[00:55:23] yeah I'm not sure but um as long as I'm winning I want to keep score once that stops happening
[00:55:27] I'm wish it's so now you get a bit of check because I'm not sure you are but if you are then
[00:55:32] you get keep score that's fine all right I gotta go teach a class so I think I'm gonna wrap up for
[00:55:39] the night but there's a good discussion I wasn't bored at all
[00:55:43] haha sounds good Sean will talk again soon
[00:55:47] I'll see you soon