Can UN peacekeepers help you manage workplace boredom?

Boredom is far from a boring subject. Great thinkers throughout history have pondered the boundaries of boredom, from Roman philosopher Seneca in the first century (boredom leads to “the sad and languid endurance of one’s leisure”) to Germany’s Friedrich Nietzsche in the 19th century (“Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?”). 

Boredom, and especially boredom at work, is certainly not boring to Madeleine Rauch, Associate Professor in Strategy and International Business at Cambridge Judge Business School. 

“Boredom is everywhere,” says Madeleine. “As adults we’re trained not to say we’re bored at work. But when people open up about their feelings on work, they acknowledge that there are times that work is repetitive and boring, and many adult workers realise that the last time they said they were bored was when they were children.” 

In fact, prior research cited by Madeleine estimates that 87% of workers have experienced boredom at work. But is this necessarily a bad thing?

What is boredom, and how do deeply committed workers respond to it? 

Those realities on the ground often reflected boredom. So, what is boredom? 

It has been described variously in academic studies, including one that said the word refers to “an unpleasant, transient affective state in which the individual feels a pervasive lack of interest in and difficulty concentrating on the current activity”, such that “it takes conscious effort to maintain or return attention to that activity”. The German word for boredom, ‘langeweile’, literally refers to a long while, and the French word for boredom, ‘ennui’, reflects workers’ feelings of dissatisfaction and disengagement.

In her research, Madeleine focuses on a simple definition of boredom as an emotional experience associated with an absence of meaning, and that raised a key question for her: how do workers who are deeply motivated to enact idealised futures – rooted in an aspirational set of values and morals, rather than in the current reality – experience and respond to boredom at work? 

While most studies on workplace boredom have focused on the negative organisational consequence of idleness, including low morale and disengagement, the stakes are different in extreme and hostile contexts because boredom can jeopardise security, compromise a mission’s success, or prompt workers to abandon the mission. 

“Yet, in many instances, workers persevere, indicating that there is much to learn about how boredom influences workers’ enactment of their idealised futures,” Madeleine writes. “My findings reveal boredom as a double-edged sword. While boredom can trigger disengagement, it can also motivate workers to address the lack of meaning in their work.”

Researching boredom at work: studying UN peacekeepers

“What people find surprising when I present my research is that boredom can be something positive and conducive to accomplishing things at work, and that’s because boredom is supposed to be something negative,” says Madeleine. 

To examine how people cope with boredom at work, Madeleine spent 2 weeks in 2019 with United Nations blue helmet peacekeepers in South Sudan, the world’s newest country (it became independent in 2011) and one with continuing conflict and problems ranging from poor infrastructure to dangerous drought. She also had access to the unsolicited personal diaries of 63 such peacekeepers, who recorded their thoughts about peacekeeping duties and many other topics. 

The result was a study published in the prestigious Academy of Management Journal that breaks new ground in introducing the concept of ‘idealised futures’ – or visions of how the world is imagined to be, grounded in strong moral beliefs – and how this relates to boredom. 

With references to Aristotle (“It is not enough to win a war: it is more important to organise the peace”) and Nietzsche (who also said “the boredom of God on the seventh day of creation would be a subject for a great poet”), the study examined the contrasting responses to boredom among the peacekeepers in South Sudan. 

While UN peacekeepers are assigned to many other countries, including Lebanon, Kosovo, Cyprus and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the South Sudan mission is the UN’s largest and most expensive with an annual budget of $1.2 billion out of the total UN peacekeeping budget of $6.45 billion, says the research. 

Peacekeepers typically spend 6 to 12 months in a country, with tasks ranging from ensuring security for civilians to strengthening infrastructure to empowering women. Most have been trained as law enforcement officers, with extensive experience, in their home countries. 

Following peacekeepers around the clock 

To conduct her research, Madeleine collected 4 types of data focused on the blue helmets: 

1. unsolicited personal diaries
2. interviews
3. informal conversations
4. nonparticipant observations documented in field notes, as well as internal documents 

“For 2 weeks, I followed peacekeepers in their daily work and activities, traveling to various parts of the country, including the combat region, and observing daily briefings, staff meetings, and meetings with local politicians, army generals, and members of other local and international humanitarian agencies. 

“Given the nature of UN missions, I was with the delegation around the clock. Sleeping and eating in the same location, often in provisional housing with little to no privacy, promoted bonding and enabled me to remain close to the action.” 

To gain further knowledge about the political aspects of the UN and its mandates, she also attended briefings before and after her South Sudan field work at UN headquarters in New York and Geneva.

How UN blue helmets handle boredom 

Some blue helmets adjusted and adapted their ideals to cope with the boredom that is part of a peacekeeping job in which 8 hours of uneventful patrolling is often the norm. Other peacekeepers, in contrast, refused to adapt to such boredom out of moral principles, asserting that a lack of activity while on peacekeeping duty reflects that the UN’s lofty goals and their own peacekeeping aspirations were not being realised. 

“Peacekeepers respond to existential boredom in 2 ways. Some embrace boredom and follow a pathway of situational adjustment of their moral values, redefining the meaning of the idealised future,” says the research. “Others renounce boredom and follow a pathway of adherence by clinging to their moral values, maintaining the meaning of the idealised future, and anchoring the temporal orientation in the idealised future.” 

Madeleine’s study shifts the academic focus away from new tasks and innovative processes in dealing with boredom, while “providing evidence that boredom can prompt workers to reframe the meaning of work to align their mundane work tasks with an idealised future… I thus challenge the predominant portrayal of boredom as simply a lack of meaning or having too much time on one’s hands.” 

Diaries provide a safe space for coping with difficult contexts 

Madeleine says that since a teenager she has been intrigued by the issue of how countries transition from a state of war to a stable country. Through UN contacts from previous research, she obtained the diaries of peacekeepers in South Sudan and other missions, and after reading them she travelled to the country to speak directly to the blue helmets. In her study, all identifying information was anonymised and names were changed. 

“People often keep diaries with the aim of coping, because it’s very difficult to describe the situation of war even to your family,” she says. “Diaries are a safe space.” 

One such diary had an excerpt that read: “A UN peacekeeper lives on a future promise. It’s our reason of being”, and Madeleine says that this initial discovery led her to probe what most drove the blue helmets. “This diary entry helped me discover that peacekeepers were highly motivated, guided, and inspired by an idealised future despite realities on the ground that limited their capacity to enact this desired change,” she says. 

Types of boredom: situational and existential 

The research clearly distinguishes situational boredom in which a certain period of work may be uninteresting or not challenging, and existential boredom which comes from a deeper sense of meaninglessness and lack of purpose in work.

“In extreme contexts, confronting existential boredom allows workers to recalibrate the meaning and morality attached to their idealised future, redefine their sense of purpose, and restore meaning in their work,” says the research. 

For example, one peacekeeper described being content to “watch locals dance around a fire”, because such commonplace activity was a sign that peacekeeping was working. “Watching them dancing is a good thing. It’s a happy thing. It’s boring for us, but it’s a good thing,” this peacekeeper wrote. 

Said another peacekeeper who had adjusted their thinking to accommodate boredom: “We don’t need to have the moral high ground here. There is no point in having the moral high ground here. It’s absurd and pointless…We must adjust to whatever the f*** is going on here!” 

In contract, a disillusioned peacekeeper wrote: “Nothing fits here. We come to change what the heck is going wrong here, but – well, what we are actually doing is completely something different that doesn’t fit at all.” 

And as phrased by another uncompromising blue helmet diarist: “If we accept being bored to be OK, we give up on our desire to push and make progress. We watch daily how people in South Sudan] destroy themselves even further… Is this morally and ethically OK?” 

The research by Madeleine draws on other studies by Cambridge Judge faculty. These include a study by Madeleine and Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari, Professor of Strategy and Innovation, that shows that aid workers, medical professionals, and soldiers experience emotional ambivalence (such as guilt, shame and pride) but often do not express these emotions, and a study by Mark de Rond, Professor of Organisational Ethnography, who found that medical professionals at Camp Bastion during the war in Afghanistan “struggled to deal with the long spells of inactivity when waiting for new patients to come in”. 

From conflict zones to everyday life: a difficult adjustment 

Madeleine’s other field research has included being embedded with physicians from Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) in Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan, and with US Air Force drone operators dropping weapons on targets in Afghanistan from a computer-screen vantage point 7,000 miles away in Nevada. 

She says it’s always easier to go to such unusual situations than to return home to a normal, everyday lifestyle. 

“When you return home, you realise that you’ve seen things you weren’t prepared for – like travelling on dirt roads and seeing corpses lying around, and seeing that the troops are often young boys fighting with guns in flip-flops and T-shirts in World War I-type eye-to-eye combat. 

“You have these memories and experiences, and then you return to a happy world where everything works – you have such commonplace situations as arguing who will take out the garbage or your mother saying that you forgot to call your aunt on her birthday. It’s worlds clashing, and it’s a very difficult adjustment.”