Procrastination at Work: What Causes Workplace Procrastination and How to Avoid It?

Table of Contents

Introduction

Workplace procrastination is the unnecessarily delaying the completion of work-related tasks. This is a common occurrence that can cause serious problems for those who procrastinate as well as their employers.

A comprehensive and useful overview of workplace procrastination is provided in this article. Particularly, it begins by providing pertinent examples, specifics, and statistics regarding this issue. Then, it explains why people procrastinate at work and what can be done to stop it, whether you’re an employee who wants to stop procrastinating yourself or an employer who wants to get rid of procrastination among employees.

Procrastination at Work: What Causes Workplace Procrastination and How to Avoid It?

Types of workplace procrastination

There are two main categories that can be distinguished from one another:

Online working environment dawdling. This is also known as “cyberslacking” or “cyberloafing,” and it involves using digital devices to do things outside of work, like checking social media on a phone.

Procrastination in the workplace offline. This is also known as “soldiering,” and it involves spending time at work doing things that have nothing to do with work, like taking long breaks, gossiping, or daydreaming.

However, engaging in beneficial workplace activities as a productive way to postpone engaging in activities that are more important is another form of workplace procrastination.

Additionally, workplace procrastination is sometimes regarded as behavior that must not be motivated by a desire to harm others (such as the employer, the workplace, a client, colleagues, or the employee themselves). However, people may also postpone tasks unnecessarily for related reasons, such as resentment toward their boss, and this may be considered workplace procrastination by their employer from a practical perspective.

Similarly, in order for a delay to be considered procrastination, there must technically be no practical benefit for the procrastinator; consequently, if an employee strategically postpones a crucial task in anticipation of an upcoming negotiation with management, this technically is not procrastination. By and by, this also might be basically considered as work environment tarrying by a business.

Therefore, workplace procrastination can be categorized in a variety of ways, but in its broadest and most practical sense, it refers to any unnecessary postponement of work-related tasks. This could mean, for instance, that you spend more time on social media than you do on reports, that you take too many breaks throughout the day, or that you put off making a crucial phone call by working on trivial tasks instead.

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Procrastination in the workplace

It is common and affects people at all levels of seniority—from junior employees to senior executives—in a variety of occupations, including administration, sales, retail, service, design, writing, law, research, teaching, and management. This is obvious, since tarrying is normal by and large, with around 20% of grown-ups delaying constantly.

However, a number of factors, such as whether a job is white-collar or blue-collar, can affect the prevalence and severity of workplace procrastination. In terms of the jobs that procrastinators apply for and are hired for, selection is a factor that accounts for some of this variation. Distractions, a lack of clear communication from supervisors, a lack of support from coworkers, and unstructured or self-organized projects are just a few of the workplace factors that can encourage procrastination. This truly intends that in a poor-enough workplace, even an exceptionally reliable individual could hesitate, though in a sufficient climate, even a persistent slowpoke could get things done on time.

Additionally, the influence of the work environment is influenced by employee-related factors. For instance, while some people thrive in environments with a lot of autonomy, others require more direction. In a similar vein, introverts may require more independent work while extroverts may thrive in a group setting. People’s procrastination at work can also be exacerbated by a variety of personal factors, such as a lack of sleep.

Dangers of workplace procrastination

Procrastination in the workplace can have a number of negative effects. This has negative effects on employees’ mental health, career prospects, and job performance. This has negative effects on productivity, job satisfaction, and employee retention for businesses.

In particular, employees who procrastinate are more likely to have lower overall financial success (including due to problematic financial behaviors), to earn a lower salary, to have shorter periods of employment, and to be unemployed or underemployed (instead of working full time). It’s also linked to other problems like stress and emotional exhaustion, which hurt people’s mental and physical health as well as their emotional well-being.

For managers, work environment tarrying among representatives prompts more awful execution and lower efficiency. For instance, when employees procrastinate throughout the course of their workday, not only do they make less progress than they otherwise would, but they also frequently have to rush to complete tasks in order to meet deadlines, which can also result in lower-quality work.

Additionally, tarrying can slow down joint effort among colleagues who rely upon every others’ work. When the procrastinator is in a leadership position, especially if their actions have a negative impact on their subordinates, these issues can get worse.

Employees’ job satisfaction can also suffer as a result of all of these issues, such as being dissatisfied with the pace of their work environment. This can make them more likely to want to switch jobs, which hurts employee retention and can further lower their productivity and performance.

Why people procrastinate at work

Why do people put things off at work? People put things off at work because they don’t have enough self-control or motivation. These issues incorporate individual variables, similar to dread and undertaking abhorrence, and situational factors, similar to interruptions and absence of help.

In particular, when people need to complete work, they primarily rely on self-control to motivate themselves to do so. In addition, their motivation sometimes helps them exercise self-control and finish their work on time.

However, there are instances in which a person is afflicted with a variety of conditions, such as exhaustion and anxiety, that oppose or impede their capacity for self-control and motivation. They procrastinate until they reach a point where the balance between these factors shifts in their favor or until it is too late when these issues are stronger than their self-control and motivation.

This explains why, even when they have the necessary motivation and truly want to finish their work, some people procrastinate at work on a consistent basis. This also explains why many people always put off finishing their work until right before deadlines, when they finally feel the increased motivation to finish it, often in the form of stressful pressure.

Consequently, the following are typical causes of procrastination at work:

Unique objectives, for instance with regards to characterizing what should be finished and when.

Feeling overwhelmed, for instance when a project appears to be too big to manage.

Perfectionism, for instance, occurs when individuals desire to produce flawless work.

Fear of failing, such as when people worry that they will be seen as unworthy of success.

Anxiety, such as when individuals are concerned about being judged by others.

Task aversion, for instance, when individuals find a particular task to be tedious or unpleasant.

Lack of motivation, such as when individuals believe they are not being rewarded for effort or progress.

Physical or mental exhaustion, such as when people have worked too hard for too long and are worn out.

resentment, such as when employees believe their employer is unfairly treating them.

Bad fit, such as when employees believe they cannot be themselves at work.

Lack of support, for instance, when people don’t have a designated person they can call when they have problems.

A challenging work environment, such as when employees are required to work in a noisy and distracting office.

Behaviors such as self-handicapping, in which individuals procrastinate so that they can blame their failure on procrastination rather than on their abilities, and self-sabotaging, in which individuals procrastinate as a result of a tendency to sabotage one’s progress, are additional common causes of workplace procrastination. In addition, impulsivity and distractibility are two personality traits that are linked to procrastination tendencies.

Procrastination can also be caused by underlying physical and mental health issues like sleep deprivation, ADHD, and depression. For instance, when it comes to sleep, shift workers who sleep poorly or don’t get enough sleep tend to procrastinate more, especially if their chronotype—the time of day they prefer to be awake or asleep—is not aligned with their work hours.

How to reduce employee procrastination in the workplace

You can reduce employee procrastination in the workplace in a number of ways:

A strategy guided by management.

This entails the organization’s managers modifying the work environment and employing appropriate strategies to reduce employees’ procrastination without involving employees in the process in any way that would make them aware or active. For instance, this can include defining substantial objectives and middle of the road cutoff times for representatives, without making sense of that the objective of doing so is to decrease tarrying.

A strategy guided by employees.

This requires employees to overcome their procrastination without much direction or assistance from management. This could be as simple as bringing up the issue of procrastination and providing employees with a link to a helpful guide on the subject, but otherwise allowing them to solve the issue on their own.

A collective approach

This requires encouraging employees to actively and mindfully reduce their procrastination and combining guidance and assistance from management. For instance, this can include making sense of the worth of transitional cutoff times with regards to keeping away from lingering, and afterward reassuring representatives to set such cutoff times for themselves, with the assistance of their directors if necessary.

There is no inherent advantage to any of these methods. Appropriately, you ought to choose which one to utilize in view of variables, for example, the manner in which representatives hesitate and the justification for why they do as such. This is something additionally essential to consider in the following stage, where you choose which explicit enemy of hesitation mediations to execute and how.

Check out the list in the previous section for specific anti-procrastination interventions you can use and think about how you can either use them yourself or help employees do so. Setting intermediate milestones and deadlines, rewarding employees for progress, and altering the work environment to make it easier for employees to concentrate are all examples of this. By comprehending the factors that lead employees to procrastinate in the first place, you can try to adapt the strategies to the particular requirements and preferences of your workforce and ensure that they are as effective as possible.

At the individual and organizational levels, specific interventions for reducing workplace procrastination can be implemented. Increased accountability, for instance, can sometimes assist in reducing procrastination. A manager might decide, on an individual level, to make a member of their team who is prone to procrastination and needs more accountability in order to be more productive a priority. To reduce general levels of procrastination, an executive might implement a system for monitoring productivity across the various teams at the company on an organizational level.

Conclusion

Overall, employing appropriate anti-procrastination strategies, which can be implemented by management, employees, or both, can reduce employee procrastination. You should tailor your methods to the preferences and needs of your employees and support them as much as possible rather than annoy them. In addition, it is essential to comprehend that an employee is not procrastinating simply because they are delaying a task or engaging in a non-work-related activity. In fact, such actions frequently have the potential to be beneficial to both the employee and their employer.