Beware of Suffering from Boreout

Getting bored with your present job? Feeling you get nothing other than being tired after work? Beware, you may be suffering from boreout, chronic boredom.

DIDIE SW

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Boreout or chronic boredom is a sibling and paradox of burnout, acute exhaustion. The two indicate the same symptoms but they have different, even opposite, causes. While burnout is triggered by an excessive burden and target of work, as written in DW, 1 April 2020, boreout is induced by boredom and the lack of work challenges.

Both boreout and burnout constitute a psychological issue in the place of work. Their symptoms also bear resemblance like being apathetic, less enthusiastic, anxious, easily angered, sensitive and emotionally explosive. They also tend to withdraw themselves from social interaction, from friends as well as their loved ones. In extreme conditions, boreout is apt to set off stress and depression.

The psychological syndrome generally leads to physical complaints such as insomnia, tinnitus, frequent dizziness or headache, stomachache inclination and the weakening system of body resistance that makes one vulnerable to infectious diseases.

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The term boreout was first introduced by corporate consultants Peter R Werder and Philippe Rothlin in 2007. Boreout is caused by too modest challenges of work, low interest in the job being performed and boredom in the place of work. The three elements triggering boreout are related and have mutual influence.

“Employees who are permanently deprived of challenges of work will feel bored with their jobs. If the boredom that arises is permanent, the interest in what they perform will also vanish,” according to Werder and Rothlin in the book Diagnose Boreout (2007).

The same tone was stated by Ruth Stock-Homburg, a professor of human resources management at Darmstadt Technical University Germany, as quoted by the BBC, on 5 July 2021. Besides being bored, the main characteristic of boreout is facing a crisis of growth and a crisis of meaning in doing work.

An organizational behavior expert from EM Lyon Business School, France, Lotta Harju added that apart from the lack of challenges of work for a long time, boreout could also result from a working environment that lowered the morale of workers. Those affected by boreout generally perform their work without any aim or they only work to complete their tasks for the sake of earning salaries in the beginning or at the end of the month.

Kompas

Employees at an office in the Kuningan area, South Jakarta, during lunch break, on Tuesday (4/8/2020).

In many cases, boreout is indeed easily found in workers whose jobs are characterized by lack of challenges, repetitiveness and the absence of new responsibilities. Boredom also easily arises from jobs with overqualified workers or workers whose career is underdeveloped.

However, boreout in reality can also occur as a result of a corporate environment or organization that just reduces working interest and motivation. Anyway, employees are humans who always have the need to be appreciated by the corporate management.

Establishing diagnosis

In fact, it is natural to feel bored with the work done once in a while. But if the boredom lasts for a long time or becomes chronic, caution is needed. A study of 11,000 workers in 87 companies in Finland in 2014 showed that boreout increased the risks of changing employees, early retirement and mental health.

Another study of 186 government employees in Turkey in 2021 also indicated that workers feeling chronic boredom experienced stress, a high degree of anxiety and depression. Worse still, the impact of depression was not only apparent in the workplace, but also at home, as shown by the emergence of various physical ailments.

In many cases, a lot of people claim to have burnout, but after being analyzed by psychologists, what happens is boreout.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, chronic boredom has given rise to a new awareness of the meaning of life and work. The awareness has arisen along with acute exhaustion due to the hybrid working system, online and offline. Yet what has received more attention is burnout, whereas boreout gets less consideration.

While burnout has been clearly defined in International Classification of Diseases (ICD) 11 published by the World Health Organization (WHO), boreout has yet no diagnostic standard. But if deeply analyzed, burnout and boreout are easy to distinguish.

In many cases, a lot of people claim to have burnout, but after being analyzed by psychologists, what happens is boreout. As the symptoms are alike, many employees with boreout consciously claim they are affected by burnout. They find it hard to identify boreout because they have been used to experiencing boredom for a long time.

DIDIE SW

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Workers with boreout usually go to work always but they lack working enthusiasm. Consequently, they can be wasting their time at their office desks or in front of computer monitors, doing cyber-loafing or using their computers for things irrelevant to their jobs, from online shopping, accessing social media, to playing games.

They also spend much working time chatting and gossiping with workmates and planning activities outside their tasks. “All the actions are not done out of laziness, but rather serve as a coping mechanism (to overcome boredom),” said Harju.

Overcoming boredom

Nevertheless, employees with chronic boredom actually realize that what they do during working hours is indeed uninteresting. They are tired of pretending to have burnout, trying to show that they are working with a heavy burden. The paradoxical action is purposely done to hide their suffering due to boredom.

“Doing nothing while at work for a long time is a horror. Every day they have to do the trick of being apparently engaged in their work. If this is done for a long time, it will be very tense,” note Wetder and Rothlin.

HERYUNANTO

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Seeking a solution to the problem is not easy, though. Employees with boreout are generally reluctant to report their case to their executives or the human resources development division. Moreover, many corporate organizational cultures in fact are not accommodative toward the needs of employees.

If they report their boredom, workers fear it will just burden them with additional tasks that make them even more duty-bound. They may even be asked to resign or be dismissed for being considered unproductive or a corporate burden.

Therefore, employees realizing their chronic boredom but having an impediment to report to corporate executives can take a break for a while. They should not hesitate to take their leave, sparing their time to be on their own so as to ease their stress and anxieties. Besides, they can learn new skills, get different perspectives and even consider starting businesses.

But in serious boreout cases, a radical action is needed to overcome it. The boredom faced should be communicated to a team, colleagues, seniors or managers to discuss the feelings, professional ambitions and find a solution. The lack of communication makes executives unaware of what their working partners actually experience.

There are many ways to make workers feel the time they spend in the workplace is valuable and appreciated.

Every worker is also entitled to propose a workload review and career development to corporate executives. If necessary, assistance can be offered to working partners to help their work or propose new projects.

If the chance to make progress in the company is limited, workers should evaluate the achievements already made in the company and consider a concrete career change. Things that encourage workers’ commitments in the workplace like independence, teamwork and flexibility can serve as capital to reach a position or find new jobs according to their competence and personality.

Boreout can also come from the working condition. Several kinds of jobs are actually boring and difficult to create new challenges. For such a character of work, improving the working environment can help reduce boredom such as building pleasant relationships between workers, the management’s appreciation of employees or giving a new meaning to the jobs being performed.

KOMPAS/RADITYA HELABUMI

A number of office workers cross Jalan Sudirman to their workplace in the Sudirman area, Jakarta, on Monday (21/2/2022).

“There are many ways to make workers feel the time they spend in the workplace is valuable and appreciated,” said Harju.

The pandemic has produced a new awareness of a firmer norm of work. A job should be performed wholeheartedly and with deep interest in the field of work, or work should be done with passion.

Companies should have a high initiative to help their employees surmount boreout. In any case, employees constitute the asset and investment of companies.

“We need a change of thought about the welfare of employees,” said Harju. Only through employees’ physical and spiritual wellbeing can companies realize their visions and missions as well as their business continuity. For this reason, employees and companies should be capable of making progress together and mutually benefiting.

This article was translated by Aris Prawira