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HBR Guide to Motivating People (HBR Guide Series)
book

HBR Guide to Motivating People (HBR Guide Series)

by Harvard Business Review
May 2019
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
272 pages
4h 10m
English
Harvard Business Review Press
Content preview from HBR Guide to Motivating People (HBR Guide Series)

CHAPTER 24

Don’t Let Grunt Work Drag Down Performance

by Whitney Johnson

In So I Married an Axe Murderer, a wacky 1990s parody, a police officer named Tony confides to his captain, “I’m having doubts about being a cop. You know, it’s not like how it is on TV. All I do all day is fill out forms and paperwork.”

Tony thought his job would be more thrilling than it has turned out to be. Tony is not alone. Every job contains some unglamorous grunt work.

I am a great proponent of the joys of work. But not every part of every job is a joy. While we all want to find a level of meaning and purpose in our work, often some fraction of our time has to be spent doing tasks that have no intrinsic meaning and serve no deeper purpose than helping to keep the ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781633696778