Boredom can eat away at your staff’s productivity and has the potential to seriously cripple the company’s growth, bringing the otherwise well oiled machine to a complete halt. As is always the case when it comes to dealing with human psychology, there’s either a good way to go about it or a bad way.

You’re not helping much when you reprimand your workers, holding them entirely responsible for their decreased productivity. This is the bad way of dealing with the problem, one which can result in an increased turnover and have nasty repercussions on your bottom line.

The good way of dealing with the high turnover rate is to take at least some blame for the boredom. Letting your workers know that they’re not the problem will subtly deal away with their paranoia of getting laid off. You can finally go about dealing with their negative productivity head on once the workers have been assured of their job security.

Small businesses have an advantage over larger corporate companies in this area because their relatively smaller work team has a greater opportunity to interact.

Here are 4 steps you should take to destroy boredom at work

1) Distribution of monotonous tasks

By performing the same mundane, repetitive task 8 hours a day, your employee will quickly lose focus and become jaded. This task should be shared with the rest of the workforce so your employee doesn’t feel unimportant and look for engaging job opportunities elsewhere.

A weekly job rotation is one of the best ways to add variety to your employee’s boring work life. This way you also add new skills to their arsenal.  Variety is the spice of life!

2) Give them more challenging work

Out with the old, in with the new! Once the boring part of the job has been properly addressed, it is time to offload the more engaging and challenging aspect of your company to the worker. Ask your employee if they’re comfortable with their new set of responsibilities. Their solutions should serve meaningfully to the company’s bottlenecks and actively contribute to your profits. Make them feel important.

Either way it’s best to leave the repetitive jobs to AI (artificial intelligence) rather than have a poor employee slave away at redundant tasks that don’t amount to much in the grand scheme of things.

3)  Encourage breaks every now and then

Taking some time off from work – whether it is 5 minutes or a full blown week has the ability to rejuvenate your employees. According to a 2014 poll by Gallup, the average American spends 47 hours a week toiling to meet those important deadlines. In an environment like this, how can they be expected to appreciate the finer things in life? This makes regular breaks more important now than ever before.
4)  Encourage your staff to socialize

While we’re not asking them to fraternize to the point that they turn the workplace into a frat party, we do encourage the staff to get to know each other better. According to a study conducted at MIT, workers that socialized more often with each other – doesn’t necessarily have to be at the office – showed higher productivity levels.

One way to boost social interactions is to reserve a ‘living’ room in your workplace where staff can interact with each other and build strong networks. This will inevitably have a positive result on your bottom line.