Boredom at work: enrich the task or clarify its purpose?
When an employee is bored, adding responsibilities may seem an obvious response. Yet the managerial question is more precise: should the demands of the task change, or should its purpose become clearer?
What the literature establishes
Erin C. Westgate and Timothy D. Wilson (2018, Psychological Review) propose and test a model in which boredom can arise from a failure of attentional engagement or a lack of meaning. An activity can therefore become boring when its demands are too low, but also when they exceed the available attentional resources. Boredom alone is consequently insufficient to diagnose underload.
A signal that encourages seeking something else
Shane W. Bench and Heather C. Lench (2013, Behavioral Sciences) propose a functional account of boredom: this emotion may encourage people to leave an activity that no longer satisfies them and pursue other goals. This is a theoretical proposition, not a demonstration of its effects in organisations. Nevertheless, it invites managers to examine the activity before attributing boredom to an individual lack of motivation.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that work simply needs to become more stimulating. Yet additional complexity may solve nothing when attention is already overwhelmed, while an accessible task can still seem meaningless to the person performing it. Within the SHR — Swiss Human Resources “Emotional Intelligence” programme, the issue can be framed as follows: acknowledge the emotional signal without immediately turning it into a diagnosis. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What these studies cannot prescribe
These articles do not validate a universal protocol for reorganising work on the basis of reported boredom. Moving from studied or proposed mechanisms to a managerial intervention requires local testing. In federal administration, public health, telecommunications and precision manufacturing, some repetition serves traceability or safety requirements: eliminating it is not an objective in itself.
A practical check in Berne
In Berne, a team could select a recurring, non-critical task and, for one week, collect three separate ratings after its completion: experienced boredom, difficulty sustaining attention and perceived usefulness, each on a scale from 0 to 10. The following week, it could test a single adjustment — for example, explaining how the output is used without changing the workload — and repeat the measurements while also tracking the proportion of outputs requiring correction. Comparing averages before and after would establish whether the expected change appears without a decline in quality; it would not, by itself, prove causation. This is a proposal for local testing, not a protocol validated by the cited articles. To go further: explore the Emotional Intelligence training in Bern in the canton of Bern, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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