These six tips will help you combat boredom in your workplace, too.
1. Teach people how to treat you
As an executive or manager, if you micromanage and focus only on your specific tasks, your team will reflect and replicate that type of work environment, which can easily bore people. Keep people from falling into their own silos. Hold regular meetings to keep you and your team up-to-date on current activities and broader quarterly or annual goals.
2. Manage what you measure and measure what you manage
Jumping into a project is great, but if you continue on without working toward a specific and measurable goal, you may get stuck on a long, boring path. By identifying a clear goal with milestones along the way, you can track progress as you go. Nothing is more frustrating than working hard on a project that has no clear success metric.
With each step toward your goal, give yourself a little praise to help you recharge and refocus to reach the end goal. The weekly sense of accomplishment can do wonders to chase away boredom.
3. Give latitude
If employees feel they have to follow a certain path, their ability to explore other ideas can be squashed. With more freedom, employees can often grow the current task or project into something better than initially planned. Latitude to try something new and build upon an idea often results in an amazing outcome. This is a best practice at top technology firms that depend on innovation as a key competitive differentiator.
4. Don’t forget the power of fun
Gamification is a big idea that many larger organizations are using to better motivate their workforce, and encourage creative outlets to solve tough, common issues. You can leverage some of the ideas around gamification by setting up contests between departments, or hosting special events such as “fit-bit” measured team fitness or walking events. Fun is a force multiplier to great customer service — just ask a Zappos customer.
5. Give respect to get respect
You need to demonstrates your trust in your valuable employees.
6. Create purpose
As with respect, when employees feel a sense of purpose within a company or community, more work gets done, more ideas are developed, and less boredom results. To create purpose, you first need to determine the higher purpose for your business. For a local candy store, the higher purpose may be supporting the community or cementing memories for generations of families. After you figure out your business’ purpose, you need to make sure your team understands and supports that purpose.
When you open yourself up by sharing your ideas and plans on a consistent basis, your colleagues will do the same. Hearing what others are working on is motivating and inspiring and can spark ideas for those who are stuck at a standstill.
When given the power to reward customers, employees are on the lookout for the moment they can bring more happiness to a customer, which brings excitement to both employees and customers.
Keep in mind that implementing purpose isn’t a one-time thing — it’s an ongoing goal needing continual attention. People working together toward a higher purpose they all believe in can be very powerful, and far from boring.
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