Boredom can affect even the most studious of workers, and worrying new statistics from CV-Library, the UK’s leading independent job board, reveal that boredom afflicts nearly half of UK workers (44.9 percent), with 54 percent admitting that they have looked for a new job as a result of a dull work life. Comment from Lee Biggins, founder and managing director of CV-Library.
The survey, which asked 1,200 professionals about boredom at work, found that one in five (19.5 percent) UK workers admitted to feeling bored on a weekly basis, with a further 23.7 percent claiming that they feel this way about their work every day. Furthermore, only 19.3 percent of workers stated that they never felt bored in their work life. When asked why they felt this way, respondents cited the following as the top reasons:
I do the same thing every day – 26.6 percent
I dislike my job – 21.8 percent
My daily tasks are tedious – 16.6 percent
There’s little for me to do – 14.3 percent
I work alone – 8.3 percent
Lee Biggins, founder and managing director of CV-Library, comments: “It is very disappointing to see boredom getting the best of the UK’s workers. With so much of our adult lives spent in work, ensuring that you get passion and enjoyment from your career is of paramount importance. Prolonged boredom in a job can lead, very quickly, to burnout, low productivity and inevitably a high turnover of staff for businesses, so it’s extremely important that each and every employee in a company feels engaged in their day-to-day work.”
When asked how they maintain productivity at work during these periods of boredom, 28.8 percent of UK workers citied that they would prioritise their workload in a bid to re-engage with the work at hand. Following this, 15 percent would set deadlines for themselves, with a further 12.8 percent opting to listen to music in an attempt to ward off the onset of boredom.
Biggins continues: “While it is good that UK workers have coping mechanisms in place to ensure that their productivity levels don’t decline, there is clearly a worrying trend of boredom in the workplace. It is up to employers to identify disengaged workers and find ways of reinjecting purpose and interest into their job role, or risk a high turnover of staff as a result. In some cases, it may be that workers are simply not in the correct job, and they should take these feelings of boredom as a sign that they need to start searching for a new job that they are passionate about.”
