How to keep people engaged when the tasks are boring and repetitive
Once upon a time, in a tech org not far away, there was a leader…
An engineering manager knew what was coming.
The next few months would be quite different for her team.
Up until now the work was challenging and exciting.
But next: still demanding, but boring.
She feared people on her team would get demotivated.
There would be no new architecture to be crafted.
There would be no new technology to be applied.
There would be no tough problems to be solved.
Only boring. Repetitive. Tasks.
“How can I keep people engaged” she asked herself.
Hey 🙂 Hari here.
/* I went to bed before 10 PM last night. Feeling anger and disappointment. My favorite team Spurs lost to Brighton 3:2 after leading with 2 goals at half-time.
I woke up at 3 AM restless and couldn’t get to sleep again, so I thought I’d channel my thoughts into today’s tale. */
Today’s tale is focused on how to keep people engaged when the tasks are boring and repetitive. This topic appeared in 5 different people management workshops we did with tech companies last month.
Why do people get demotivated?
- Autonomy – your desire to control and direct your work
- Mastery – your desire to get better skilled at your craft
- Purpose – your desire to work on something meaningful and important
When boring repetitive work appears, people typically disengage on all fronts:
- People comply. They do the work. But there’s no free will. No autonomy.
- People feel the work won’t improve their skill. At all. No mastery there.
- People sometimes understand the meaning of the work, but often feel it as unimportant.
So, if you’re in the engineering manager’s situation, you’ve got a tough issue to tackle.
But no worries. Here are some ideas to keep people’s excitement.
Job crafting: tweaking the 4 T’s of autonomy
The autonomy motivational factor consists of your freedom to choose and control on 4 T’s: task, time, team, technique.
When you can’t control your team’s backlog, you can start rotating people over the boring tasks. But this usually works very short-term.
Another approach would be job crafting.
Job crafting is designing, or changing, aspects of your work to better align with your personal needs and desires.
The easiest I’ve seen applied is tweaking the technique aspect of your work – how you do your tasks.
I recently shared an example of how I helped my 8yo son transform a boring task regarding his school’s code of conduct into a 90 min fun game. It was job crafting on a single task.
But this is what you can do with your people.
Find out what’s their individual drive.
And help them redesign their work.
There is no mastery without repetition
I miss the days when people got bored.
For me, boredom leads to some of the most creative ideas.
But in today’s world and times, there’s no room for boredom.
Which makes the life of most managers hell.
The reality is:
you have to do the same thing over and over again if you want to achieve mastery with your craft.
/* Of course, doing the same thing on its own is not enough. I shared a personal story of a 20-day trip across Europe to prove that. And you can read further in Vasi’s newsletter on how experience is measured */
I have led ~15 teams in my career as a manager.
I have coached ~350 teams in tech as a team coach.
I have done 630 training sessions with tech people.
Do you think it was never boring?
But I wanted to master the art of creating strong dev teams.
This is my craft. This is something that drives me.
But this is not about me (although my ego-centric nature would argue )
Let’s go back to your people.
The trick here is to help them connect the repetitive tasks to what they want to master. And make the tasks a playground for them to experiment.
/* A quick leadership lesson I learned 17 years ago: if you know the person doesn’t want to master the skill the repetitive tasks require – it might be better to let him out of the project to keep him within the organization. I lost a senior engineer because I was too stubborn to realize this on time. */
2 types of stories for more purpose
When people don’t find purpose – use stories.
There are 2 types of stories in my leadership toolbox:
- stories, which show the path people are on
- stories, which visualize the impact of people’s work
When thinking of boring and repetitive tasks in my career, a project immediately pops up in my mind. It was a modernization project with COBOL involved. As a 20-something year-old team leader, it was not the most exciting time to work on a technology that celebrated its 50th birthday.
Part of the work was to correct millions of lines of code from COBOL, which were previously run on Mainframe and now had to run on Unix. And wherever there was a specific text comparison, we ran into an issue (EBCDIC vs ASCII encoding).
Was the task boring? Hell yeah.
Was it demanding? Oh, yeah. This was the first project in my career where I had to wake up at 4 AM to fix a production defect.
Was it interesting? Now here’s the funny part. If you had asked me this question during the project – I would say no. I wanted to quit it. But I later understood what I had learned.
This is similar to when I first started my career. For 3 months, I had to work as a 2nd level support in a software development project with HP. Then, for 4 months I was an automation test engineer. I disliked those roles. I disliked the tasks. I wanted to be a software engineer.
But when I became a team leader – I had an unfair advantage.
I understood the job of all my people pretty well.
Because I had done it.
That’s why I have a core belief: you can assess a situation when you’re out of the situation.
So, my tip here is:
- think of boring & repetitive tasks in the past that you think were valuable to your career
- tell your people the boring stuff
- tell your people how the boring stuff was valuable to you
On the second type of stories: check out the graphic on motivation & visible impact. Or read more on stories within the context of keeping people motivated during uncertain times.
How to keep people engaged
when the tasks are boring and repetitive
(summary)
- Use job crafting to change aspects of your people’s work to better align with their personal needs and desires.
- Set the stage for mastery and connect the boring and repetitive tasks with what they want to master.
- Tell 2 types of stories. Stories, which show the path people are on and what’s next. And stories, which visualize the impact of their work.
… and the team lived happily ever after.
P.S. Our podcast recording studio is moving
If you don’t know, Vasi and I (2 of the 3 people in our gang), are hosting one of the best soft skills podcasts in Bulgaria: Radio Tochka 2.
The podcast is almost entirely in Bulgarian, but recently, we started adding short English videos in the Soft Skills Pills playlist.
I might have woken up because of Vasi’s crazy idea to invite listeners to our last recording in our current studio. This will happen in 1 hour. We’ll see if it will be 0 person coming or 100
And if you don’t know why Vasi has such interesting ideas recently – read her last newsletter.
P.S. (in the P.S. ) If you haven’t subscribed to A Dose of Soft Skills, our gang’s other newsletter, do so now by managing your preferences and clicking the ✅
P.P.S. Say ‘hi’ on LinkedIn or reply back
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