Organisations must actively discourage grunt work

Organisations must actively discourage grunt work.

Don’t celebrate someone who stayed up all night/worked through the weekend on something that could’ve been automated or even avoided

Acknowledge their efforts, yes, but do not celebrate it. Look for ways to remove it from the system.

Celebrating grunt work gives employees a false sense of “hard work” and achievement. It might seem harmless at the beginning but it starts to breed a very bad culture. Once employees start associating to repetitive, monotonous and useless activities, they will not find ways to eliminate them from the system.

Grunt work is the enemy of an efficient system. Everyone must constantly be looking for ways to eliminate this from the system and celebrating it makes it difficult. Build that culture, instead. Reward elimination of toil, not the practice of it.

If your employees are pulling all nighters and sacrificing their weekends to get work done, it screams of inefficiency. Not something to be proud of and must be fixed immediately.