Behavioral interview questions related to managing work.How do you handle situations where you did not have enough work to do

Although most of the time we will have more than enough work to do, there are situations in an organization where there is not much work to do. This can be due to a transition phase of the organization or the organization might be in a restriction period for change implementation or for new projects because of the annual high transaction period or budget constraints. In an interview, there can be questions related to this and the intention of asking this question is to understand the attitude of the candidate.

Here we review some sample questions related to this.

Sample questions related to managing your work

• Have you been in a situation where you did not have enough work to do

• How do you keep you busy if you don't have much to do at work

• How do you kill time when there is not much work to do

Situation

• I was working in a financial services organization which enforces restriction period wherein no project specific changes are deployed during the busy transaction period from November to January

• Restriction period basically translates to less busy time with respect to work. And there are days where we cannot do anything with the systems which we work on.

Approach

• Although I didn't have enough work during the restriction period, there were opportunities to improve my knowledge as well as to share it. I was utilizing this opportunity to learn new technology relevant to work as well as sharing my knowledge with others in my team.

• I also took this as an opportunity to research on improving the existing systems, optimizing the process/systems to get some re-engineering saves.

• I also took initiatives to do the proof of concept study for some of the new improvements that I found.

Results

• Although there was not much work, I was able to utilize the work hours effectively to the advantage of the organization in all possible manner.

How effective is the above answer

The candidate was able to demonstrate that he will be committed to the betterment of the organization and he thinks innovatively and comes up with better ideas instead of sitting idle or spending work hours in a non-fruitful manner.

Summary

Spending your work time wisely and effectively is something that every organization expects and questions related to this is common in an interview. It's also good to have a story handy to address these questions.