People with boring jobs tend to design dull jobs for their colleagues
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Re: People with boring jobs tend to design dull jobs for their colleagues
#2What is this idea that every job you do has to be brilliant and engaging? There's an endless amount of dull, tedious, and repetitive work required to make many things possible. That's why it's called work.
Re: People with boring jobs tend to design dull jobs for their colleagues
#3What is this idea that every job you do has to be brilliant and engaging? There's an endless amount of dull, tedious, and repetitive work required to make many things possible. That's why it's called work.
"It is important that managers and others learn the value of creating higher quality work, especially if we want to be competitive in a world in which employees need to be innovative, agile, and high performing," Professor Parker said.
Re: People with boring jobs tend to design dull jobs for their colleagues
#4Alternative Title: Most jobs, even newly created jobs, aren't exciting.
Re: People with boring jobs tend to design dull jobs for their colleagues
#5My knee-jerk reaction is that this is sort-of a tautology:
If there was interesting work available at their job, the people with boring jobs would not have boring jobs. Nobody is going to do the boring work first and leave the interesting stuff sitting around just waiting for a new hire! Where there is a surplus of interesting work, people with interesting jobs will design interesting jobs for their colleagues.
Dunno. Just musing.
Re: People with boring jobs tend to design dull jobs for their colleagues
#6What is this idea that every job you do has to be brilliant and engaging? There's an endless amount of dull, tedious, and repetitive work required to make many things possible. That's why it's called work.
"It is important that managers and others learn the value of creating higher quality work, especially if we want to be competitive in a world in which employees need to be innovative, agile, and high performing," Professor Parker said.
More often than not, it's cleaning up someone else's mess.
Re: People with boring jobs tend to design dull jobs for their colleagues
#7What is this idea that every job you do has to be brilliant and engaging? There's an endless amount of dull, tedious, and repetitive work required to make many things possible. That's why it's called work.
"It is important that managers and others learn the value of creating higher quality work, especially if we want to be competitive in a world in which employees need to be innovative, agile, and high performing," Professor Parker said.
That begs the question - it assumes that the work in the world needs innovative, agile, and high-performing employees, when maybe the world needs a bunch of people that will dig in and do the stuff that needs to be done.
Re: People with boring jobs tend to design dull jobs for their colleagues
#8What is this idea that every job you do has to be brilliant and engaging? There's an endless amount of dull, tedious, and repetitive work required to make many things possible. That's why it's called work.
That viewpoint just sounds like martyr complex to me. Yes, boring stuff exists and must get done, but that doesn't mean we can't strive to reduce it, and hopefully make it a small part of our lives and even our jobs.
Re: People with boring jobs tend to design dull jobs for their colleagues
#9My knee-jerk reaction is that this is sort-of a tautology: If there was interesting work available at their job, the people with boring jobs would not have boring jobs. Nobody is going to do the boring work first and leave the interesting stuff sitting around just waiting for a new hire! Where there is a surplus of interesting work, people with interesting jobs will design interesting jobs for their colleagues. Dunno…
I think I'd need more concrete examples to understand this study. What kind of dull work? What dull work was created and what could have changed to make it better?
If the available work is to dig a hole or file papers into a cabinet, how can you possibly make that better?
Re: People with boring jobs tend to design dull jobs for their colleagues
#10My knee-jerk reaction is that this is sort-of a tautology: If there was interesting work available at their job, the people with boring jobs would not have boring jobs. Nobody is going to do the boring work first and leave the interesting stuff sitting around just waiting for a new hire! Where there is a surplus of interesting work, people with interesting jobs will design interesting jobs for their colleagues. Dunno…
It's only a tautology if "creating work" is all about delegating part of my own work, and there's limited amounts of interesting, engaging work to go around.
However, if I am in a managerial position, my own work can be quite different from my reports'. What this article is saying is that, if my work as a manager is boring and not very engaging, I'll give my engineers boring, unengaging work too, irrespectively of how interesting their work could be.