Why Managers Are Obsessed With ‘No Purpose’ Tasks Just To Keep Their Team Busy

Many managers fill their employees with tasks that don’t make sense, just to keep them working. Why are bosses so afraid of lack of service?

When employees are paid by the hour, most managers expect them to be busy for the entire work shift. This could mean completing tasks under your responsibility or finding ways to make sure they are busy with some work-related project.

And when the flow of work slows, the message from management is often clear: Find a way to keep working. So when employees seem to be idling, some managers come in with some useless work to keep them busy.

“Worthless work is that task that has no purpose,” according to Randy Clark, a leadership and development instructor in Indiana, USA. “It doesn’t lead to any goal and it doesn’t improve the person, the company, or the culture.”

Examples of useless work might include preparing a report without purpose, color-coding a spreadsheet, or checking a presentation that has already been proofread. A 2016 study of 600 knowledge workers—those who primarily use their knowledge, information, and intelligence to develop their jobs—showed that they spent only 39% of their workday performing their actual tasks. The rest was devoted to meetings, emails, and purposeless tasks like preparing reports for managers.

In the office, managers will be able to assign useless tasks after visually checking what employees are doing. But the adoption of remote work during the pandemic has changed that, as many managers are no longer able to easily monitor their employees.

Studies indicate that many remote workers are significantly more productive, but they are also working much longer. Does this mean that managers are handing out more work to no purpose? And would it really be so bad if employees took a break when they had nothing to do?

keep control

Part of the pointless task issue is that some managers link work overload to productivity. The idea is not just that a busy worker is dedicated and hardworking, but that his industrial-scale production makes him of greater moral worth than his less-busy colleagues.

This establishes a dynamic in which two employees performing identical tasks can be evaluated on their workload rather than their results. Who seems more dedicated: the busy worker who misses lunch to finish errands or the efficient worker who finishes early and uses his spare time to shop online?

From the employer’s point of view, the busy worker is often a more comforting sight. “People think they’re paying you right when they see you busy working,” says Susan Vroman, a management lecturer at Bentley University in Massachusetts.

This view is reinforced in companies where the work culture dictates that managers operate in an authoritarian, more traditional style, discouraging employee autonomy. In these companies, managers may also feel pressure from their own superiors to prove that their team works hard and is productive.

“Managers say, ‘I need my employees to keep generating work so I know they’re earning their wages, because someone is watching me to make sure I’m managing well,'” says Vroman.

And remote work has exacerbated that pressure in some cases. When employees started working remotely, many managers worried that they could not visually monitor their employees.

“When Covid-19 hit, bosses realized they couldn’t see their employees working — so they weren’t working,” adds Vroman. “They didn’t think their employees were being productive, even if they were still generating results.”

At the same time, managers reported a widespread loss of trust in their employees. A July 2020 survey published by the Harvard Business Review found that 41% of managers questioned their employees’ motivation, while nearly a third of them doubted their employees had the right knowledge or skills essential for remote working to succeed.

When superiors doubt employees’ work ethic, one solution is to micromanage their time with an endless to-do list to keep them tethered to their desks — even if some of those tasks are pointless.

“Managers may not even know if the employee has finished their main job, but they send more useless tasks to make sure they don’t finish [as atribuições do dia]”, says Barbara Larson, professor of management at Northeastern University’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business in Massachusetts.

According to her, “these are literally delegated tasks to ensure that employees stay working, so that the manager has the feeling that they are still in control.”

‘We definitely need to look busy’

It’s not just managers who link industrial-scale production with good performance. A study has shown that knowledge workers spend an average of 41% of their time at work on purposeless tasks that they themselves have created and could be delegated to others to appear more busy and important at work.

“We definitely need to look busy because we know people are watching us,” says Vroman.

Online, the pressure to look busy remains, even if that means adding more tasks to the workday, like sending messages to verify we’re logged in. And while many workers are able to complete their tasks faster in remote work environments, many still feel the pressure to add unnecessary work.

“We feel bad [não trabalhando] because we know we’re being paid to work all day,” says Vroman. In fact, a 2021 study showed that the guilt of taking breaks is so much that 60% of North American remote workers don’t take any breaks throughout the workday. job.

The temptation to assign useless work to yourself can be even greater among employees who fear receiving pointless tasks from their bosses if they don’t. Vroman says people will start doing things to look busy “and get the bosses to back off.”

Some managers report that work breaks in remote environments have left teams uneasy. “When some of our employees were working from home, I noticed that they felt a little guilty in times of low service,” says Niall John Lynchehaun, managing director of Irish construction materials company Midland Stone.

He then began handing out tasks without purpose so that his employees would still feel useful in these quieter times. “It’s just the easiest way to handle the situation.”

But assigning a lot of useless work to reduce guilt can cause one negative feeling to be replaced by another. A 2018 study found that 42% of workers spent half their time on purposeless tasks, while 71% said useless work “made them feel like their lives were being wasted.”

The ripple effect of purposeless tasks

In the long run, the frequent assignment of tasks primarily designed to keep workers busy can damage the relationship between managers and employees.

For Barbara Larson, “It can be very demotivating for the remote worker. It’s a sign of a lack of trust and care. The real tragedy of useless work is the opportunity that is lost. There are so many things that are beneficial to the employee and the company that could be made at that time.”

These opportunities could include assigning the employee meaningful tasks or opportunities for growth that normally take a back seat, such as training. It could also mean a break for employees.

Several studies have proven the benefits of regular breaks throughout the workday. Among these benefits are reduced stress and increased concentration, creativity and productivity — which is positive for employees and for companies.

But especially with remote workers working longer and longer hours, endless piles of purposeless tasks have the opposite effect. “The main risk is that employees experience burnout and impacts on their mental health,” says Vroman. “The Great Renunciation [a tendência que levou um grande número de trabalhadores norte-americanos a deixar seus empregos durante a pandemia] it is, in part, the result of exhausted people not being efficiently managed during their remote work for lack of sufficient flexibility.”

How to break the cycle

Of course, not all managers advocate useless work.

Larson, for example, believes in “outcome-based” rather than time-based tasks. If her employees finish their work early or have time for a break, she says, “Frankly, that flexibility is part of the reward for your performance.”

This approach requires granting autonomy to teams, which Larson describes as “extremely motivating.” “Typically what happens is that it creates a virtuous circle, with people wanting to do a good job.”

Randy Clark suggests that managers need to think more deeply about the type of tasks they are handing out to employees. During his training of managers and leaders, he advises them to keep employees busy during working hours, but avoid pointless tasks. To do this, they should plan for slow periods and “seek to assign tasks that add value.”

Finally, managers who feel trapped in a cycle of purposeless task assignments should step back and think more broadly about what their bosses want from them—not fight to keep people busy. “They probably want you to generate good results and hopefully keep people who are happy to work with you,” suggests Vroman.

Remote working may not have eliminated the idea that hourly workers need to be kept busy, but changing managers’ attitudes does offer some hope. If the flexible schedules that are now required replace work hours with results, they could eliminate purposeless tasks, leaving workers happier and healthier.​