At times it can seem as though being anything but manically busy is an extremely negative thing to be at work, but having a degree of slack in your day is something I’ve touched on many times before, both in terms of giving your brain a rest (and thus doing better work when you’re ‘on’), but also in terms of giving you space to think creatively.

A recent study explores the impact having what the authors refer to as ‘underemployed’ employees.

An epidemic of underemployment

The study begins with an interesting finding.  It reveals that despite the image we all have that we’re super busy and snowed under with work, underemployment is actually very common, with levels typically ranging from 17% to around the 60% mark across Asia, Europe and North America.

What is interesting however is how this underemployment is perceived by employees.  Given our prediction for appearing busy, it’s easy to believe that being underemployed would be viewed negatively, but managers can play a big role in managing this perception, especially when they want to tap into this slack time for things like creativity and innovation.

“When managers notice that their employees feel underemployed, they should support employees’ efforts to proactively change the boundaries or formal descriptions of their work tasks, such as changing the sequencing of the tasks, increasing the number of tasks that they do or enlarging the scope of the tasks,” the authors say. “Because the perception of underemployment may be experienced by many employees, managers should provide support to sustain positive outcomes in these situations.”

Managing creatively

Whilst slack can be crucial to innovation and creativity, the study found that employees were neither when they felt they had too much time on their hands.  Instead, there was a sweetspot whereby they felt sufficiently valued by their employer to be engaged effectively, yet had enough free time to create.

Of course, inadequate employment doesn’t just relate to the amount of work one has to do, but also its type, with things such as over-qualification also resulting in feelings of our skills not being sufficiently utilized.  In a second study, the researchers find that underemployment in this sense has a similar impact on our creativity levels as underemployment in a purely time based sense.

“Our findings of the moderating role of organizational identification suggest that practices that enhance organizational identification can help increase task-crafting efforts for employees perceiving themselves as underemployed,” the authors conclude. “In sum, our results encourage managers to proactively work toward achieving positive responses to underemployment. Another relevant implication is that recruitment managers should not turn away job applicants who are overqualified because such individuals, if managed appropriately, may bring creativity and organizational citizenship behavior to the organization.”