Be mindful: the boss might be looking!

By Dr. Siting Wang

Whether overcoming the “Monday Blues” or running to the pub early to join a “Thank God It’s Friday” drink with friends, most of us share many common expectations about the working week: fun and shopping on Saturday, bracing for work on Sunday and going through the motion from Monday onward. Dubbed “entrainment” this cyclical behaviour occurs when we synchronise our efforts with the patterns and rhythm of social and institutional norms. But can following the crowd be enough to stay motivated, make a difference and – more importantly – impress the boss?

With the objective of investigating whether motivation and performance decrease as the week goes by, a team of researchers collected data twice a day across a typical five-day workweek from 151 full-time employees of a medical device company in China. Generating daily scores for each person, they confirmed that both motivation and performance tend to decrease over time. Convinced they will be able to complete all their tasks when checking-in at the office on Monday, many employees gradually gravitate towards performing simpler, easier work until Friday arrives. As the week progresses, employees lose focus and slowly become less efficient.

While the results were generally true for most employees, findings showed that trait-based mindfulness – the personal capacity to remain focus on the present moment— helped some employees sidestep the effects of entraiment and stay on track. As mindfulness increases, employees are more apt at filtering out unconscious temptations to slow down while acting with purpose. However, this type of mindfulness only seems to get activated for demanding jobs that require constant focus and effort across the workweek. Featuring a lower workload, slower pace and simpler tasks, easier jobs don’t require mindfulness for employees to avoid the pitfalls of entrainment: just going through the motion is enough to keep the boss happy.

The study suggests that organizations keen to maximize productivity should address the effect of entrainment by mixing up their activities to disrupt weekly patterns and keep workers engaged it across the workweek. Employers may also want to use trait-based mindfulness as a criteria to screen potential employees or offer mindfulness training to those assigned to demanding jobs. Meanwhile, employees eager to impress employers should seek to develop their mindfulness skills, if only to make sure that your company does not seek to fight entrainment by moving Happy Hour to Monday and dreaded staff meetings to 18:00 on Friday!

Reference:

Dust, S., Liu, H., Wang, S., & Reina, C. (2022). The effect of mindfulness and job demands on motivation and performance trajectories across the workweek: An entrainment theory perspective. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(2), 221-239.