If you really want to get the most out of your staff, you need to be willing to challenge them.
Challenging work brings lots of benefits to workplace morale, improvements to culture as well as increased employee output.
Below are some reasons as to why challenge is so important in the workplace.
Your Staff Will Accomplish More
One reason why challenging work is important is because it pushes your staff to work harder. This demands more impressive results out of your staff that couldn’t have been achieved if they weren’t challenged.
Challenges Motivate Us to Work Harder
Challenge motivates people to try harder. We enjoy challenges and want to prove we can rise to them.
Because your staff will feel motivated and will be working harder, having challenging work will make their jobs feel that much more important.
The more valuable your staff feels, the harder they will work to continue to feel important. They will work harder to solve more challenging problems, and will feel better about their work once they complete an objective.
Lack of Challenge Will Bring Laziness
Work has a funny habit of expanding to fit any allotment of time given to it. Thus, if your staff is not challenged, work will take longer to complete and will be lower in quality.
Unchallenging work causes us to take work less seriously. If our work doesn’t challenge us at all, we’ll adapt the mentality: “I’ll do it later because it isn’t important now”.
Challenge Makes You Care More
Unchallenging work will not occupy your conscious mind for long. Because of this, you’ll procrastinate or do less than stellar work.
Challenging work, however, requires staff to remain deeply focused on their work. As a result, your staff will try harder to complete the tasks delegated to them because the work demands greater mental attention.
Challenge Makes Work More Interesting
Challenging work is far more interesting than easy work. Easy work can be completed quickly and with little brain power. It is nothing out of the ordinary and does not stretch your staff’s performance at all. Furthermore, completing easy work proves little about your staff’s abilities.
Challenging work, however, presents harder to accomplish tasks that your staff will want to try and tackle. They will be interested to test their abilities and prove that they can overcome the challenges presented to them.
This makes work more interesting, as it is more demanding and tests the outer limits of your staff’s abilities.
Are there any other reasons why challenge is important? How much challenge is too much?