A new study shows that bosses waste a lot of their employees time.
Even when employers don't mean to, many of them ask employees to do unnecessary work.
The findings are part of a study on "organizational friction" by a Stanford University professor Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao, according to the Wall Street Journal.
There are three main ways bosses are wasting your time:
1. They assign time-consuming tasks: In one of the study's examples, a boss got into the habit of announcing new initiatives a few times a year, without knowing how much training and time-consuming paperwork each one entailed. The new initiative in this example led employees to abandon previous projects altogether because there wasn't enough time to get everything done.
2. Making offhand comments: One story the researchers heard involved a CEO noting that there were no blueberry muffins at a breakfast meeting. The offhand comment led to employees always buying blueberry muffins for future breakfast meetings without the CEO even realizing he was responsible for the decision. Make sure casual remarks aren't being misinterpreted as direct orders.
3. Refusing to delegate: One time-wasting practice known as "cookie licking" refers to managers not letting others take over certain tasks, WSJ reported. The study gave an example of a CEO who personally interviewed every job candidate at her company. The CEO continued this practice even after the company grew to be more than 500 people, which created a scheduling backlog and some interview candidates ended up accepting jobs at other companies.
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