How to Help Your Team Manage Grunt Work

In So I Married an Axe Murderer, a wacky 1990’s parody, a police officer named Tony confides to his captain, “I’m having doubts about being a cop. You know, it’s not like how it is on TV. All I do all day is fill out forms and paperwork.”

Tony thought his job would be more thrilling than it has turned out to be. Tony is not alone. Every job contains some unglamorous grunt work.

I am a great proponent of the joys of work. But not every part of every job is a joy. While we all want to find a level of meaning and purpose in our work, often, some fraction of our time has to be spent doing tasks that have no intrinsic meaning and serve no deeper purpose than helping to keep the workplace trains running.

This can be especially tough for early-career professionals to accept, especially those in entry-level positions. College life is often flexible, challenging, and engaging, and after four years of that it can be hard to sit still in an office for hours at time, doing administrative tasks, without thinking, I earned a college degree for this? But it’s not just recent graduates who struggle with grunt work. Anyone of any age can think their role should only entail tasks that are exciting or fulfilling and that the drudge work is beneath them and should be someone else’s problem.

Whatever its source, entitlement is a career killer, a noose with which employees of any generation can — and do — hang themselves. If someone you manage is complaining to you about the amount of grunt work they have, you need to figure out a way to help them get over their frustration and see that everyone on the team has grunt work they have to do, and also learn to manage their time so that they don’t short-change higher-value activities. (For the purposes of this article, I’m assuming that as a manager, you’ve assigned these tasks fairly, and the employee in question isn’t actually burdened with too many non-promotable tasks.)

Here are a few techniques I suggest to help them shrink the amount of time they spend on grunt work, while still getting it done:

Impose constraints: If an employee is filling her days with low-level tasks that could be completed in much less time, impose a time constraint. Morning email needs to be answered by 10am. Calls need to be returned within one hour. The previous week’s data needs to be compiled and reported by Monday at 4pm.

Time management is a skill that many need help to learn, and as a manager, you may need to be the teacher. Expect some pushback — an employee is likely to say that they can’t complete X task in half the time. But push them to at least try. They may surprise themselves. And an often overlooked upside is that a ho-hum task can become a more engaging challenge when a time constraint is imposed.

Dangle the carrot: What is the more interesting work that the employee would like to be doing? What is your vision of what the employee could be doing for the firm? Have the conversation. Help the employee visualize the new opportunities that could complement their ordinary tasks. Perhaps pair the employee with a more mature worker who can mentor them in time management and also inspire with a glimpse of the different types of work the firm engages in. Adding more-appealing work to their portfolio will compel them to shrink the amount of time they spend on lower-value work.

Shake the stick: A dangled carrot is positive motivation, but consequences can be effective as well. Employees who spend hours on tasks that really are not that important are not spending their time on the right things. Establish goals for an employee’s most value-added work, and consequences if they don’t meet those goals.

Shrinking the amount of time your employee is spending on the dull tasks should help mitigate their frustration at having to do them at all. If it doesn’t, you may need to have a larger conversation about their career goals and whether they can meet them in their current role, or even at your firm.

Remind them that positivity itself is promotable. When you hire or promote someone, it’s because of the tasks you think they can do for your organization. But you also want to hire people who have a good attitude — who will pitch in and do what needs to be done. Sometimes taking care of the grunt work is just about showing that you can be a team player with a great attitude. If a manager can trust you with the boring stuff, then you can definitely be trusted with the exciting stuff. Remind your employee that sometimes, it’s not about what you’re doing but how you go about doing it.

Model the behavior. So much work is invisible. We know what we’re spending time on, but does anyone else? When an employee complains about the scut work they have to do, it’s probably because they don’t see how much scut work everyone — including their boss — has to do. Make the work on your team more transparent. Talk to the employee about how everyone — even you — has to spend a certain percentage of their time on these kinds of tasks. Make sure your team sees you occasionally taking on these tasks.

I love the story told about Sam Pitroda, then the head of C-DOT, India’s telecommunications enterprise. C-DOT had two floors of a five-star hotel as their workspace. A repairman had been called to fix a broken doorknob on the boardroom. Repair completed, he packed up his tools and prepared to leave — both the boardroom and the mess he’d made while making the repair. Pitroda asked for a broom, invited the man to sit and proceeded to clean up the mess while he watched. A great lesson which should be taught in more workplaces — the task is not beneath the CEO; it isn’t beneath anyone else either.

Perhaps you recognize that you’re not the manager of an employee in this scenario; you are the employee. These techniques will work for you as well. Outline your own objectives and practice the discipline to achieve them. Establish time limits for accomplishing unpleasant tasks, a schedule for completing less-than-thrilling projects and reward yourself for achieving these goals. Have a negative consequence in mind if you don’t make the effort and impose the consequence if you should. Also recognize that this is an opportunity to shine. Inexperience has the advantage of fresh eyes. If some of your work is too time-consuming, try to innovate a more efficient process that hasn’t yet occurred to your boss or coworkers. When it comes to battling entitlement, good self-management is the most powerful weapon of all.