In Lausanne, does boredom at work signal a psychosocial risk?
In medtech companies, higher education institutions, international sports organisations and scale-ups across the Lake Geneva region, highly skilled jobs do not rule out monotony or enforced waiting. The management question is specific: when someone reports boredom, should we give them more tasks or examine what prevents them from engaging in useful work?
What the literature establishes
Cynthia Fisher (1993, Human Relations) offers a conceptual review of boredom at work, rather than an estimate of its prevalence or health effects. She explains why analysis cannot be confined to repetitive tasks: job characteristics, the social situation and individual differences need to be considered together. Being busy and finding an activity stimulating are therefore not equivalent descriptions.
Distinguishing workload from obstacles to work
Paul Spector and Steve Jex (1998, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology) develop and evaluate, among other instruments, separate measures of quantitative workload and organisational constraints. Their study does not directly address boredom, but it provides a useful distinction: having plenty to do is not the same as having the conditions needed to do it. An unavailable approval, missing information or an inaccessible tool can therefore be examined as obstacles, without immediately attributing disengagement to the individual.
The premature conclusion
These studies do not justify concluding that boredom can be corrected by increasing the volume of work. Adding tasks may leave monotony or waiting periods untouched while creating overload elsewhere. A more careful approach distinguishes work that lacks stimulation, work that is blocked and an actual shortage of tasks before selecting an intervention. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot diagnose
These two articles are not sufficient to establish a causal link between boredom and illness, or to validate a diagnosis of “bore-out”. Reporting boredom does not establish a lack of commitment either, and a quiet period is not necessarily problematic. In SHR’s “Psychosocial Risks” programme, the aim is therefore to learn how to document working situations without turning a signal into an individual label.
A practical check in Lausanne
In Lausanne, a team can test a shared log over two weeks, recording episodes when a planned task remains blocked by a missing approval, information or tool, separately from periods of low activity. For each episode, it records the cause and the time until work resumes, without ranking individuals; it then selects a recurring obstacle and changes the process for resolving it. Over a second period of the same length, it compares the median time to resumption and checks with the team whether enforced waiting has decreased. This measure tests a specific organisational obstacle, not individual mental health or every possible cause of boredom. To go further: explore the Psychosocial Risks training in Lausanne in the canton of Vaud, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Psychosocial Risks in Lausanne
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