Inadequate management leaves workers bored, stressed, and unproductive In the UK, 40 per cent of workers report feeling bored at work. In Australia, a study found that the average worker spends 6 hours per week bored and unproductive.
At the same time similar proportions of workers report suffering from stress, anxiety, and overwork. All of these combine to reduce productivity and to create a high-strung and toxic work environment.
surveyed cited a lack of work as the reason for their boredom. Instead, they overwhelmingly indicated that tedious work, poorly executed meetings, and a lack of task diversity caused the problem.
What may not be obvious to employers is that all these problems are often part of the same bigger issue. Boredom, stress, anxiety, and a sense of being overwhelmed are not mutually exclusive, and are often the result of the same set of symptoms. Those symptoms all trace back to the ultimate problem: poor management.
Meeting fatigue Workers commonly report being bored due to an excessive number of mandatory and unnecessary meetings. Studies on workplace stress also cite workers being kept away from their responsibilities by unnecessarily long meetings that often don’t merit the attendance of many of the people present. This perfectly illustrates the problem. Workers in these meetings have little to contribute, little to gain by being there, and are left feeling bored with nothing to think about except all the work that they can’t do during this
What causes boredom, stress, and anxiety at work? We know that workers mostly aren’t bored and unproductive just because they have nothing to do. In fact, only 27 per cent of workers
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