A 2021 study showed that 186 government workers in Turkey who suffered from boreout also dealt with depression, and high rates of stress and anxiety. She found that chronic boredom “ increased the likelihood of employees’ turnover and early retirement intentions, poor self-rated health and stress symptoms”. In 2014, she worked on a study, looking at more than 11,000 workers at 87 Finnish organisations. Stock-Homburg and her colleagues have identified three main aspects of the boreout phenomenon: “being terribly bored, having a crisis of growth and having a crisis of meaning”.Īlthough it’s normal for everyone to get bored at work occasionally, being chronically bored for days on end may indicate that you need to address the issue, says Harju, because failing to do so can have consequences. Or taxi drivers that have to wait sometimes for hours in quiet times in the countryside.” Tech workers in Silicon Valley have also told her they feel the same way, she says. “I started observing people in quiet hours in retail stores, and people are just standing there bored. Ruth Stock-Homburg, a professor of management and human resources management at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, says she’s witnessed the phenomenon across multiple industries. But Harju says the fundamental experience of boreout is meaninglessness – “the experience that the work doesn’t really have any purpose, that there’s no point”. That sums it up,” says Lotta Harju, an assistant professor of organisational behaviour at EM Lyon Business School, France, who has studied boreout for years.Ī number of factors can cause chronic boredom, including working in a demoralising physical environment like a cubicle farm, or feeling under-challenged over a prolonged period. And experts suggest that as we emerge into an evolving new world of work that prioritises worker wellbeing, boreout could merit just as much attention as other workplace problems. There are also actions both workers and companies can take to alleviate it. Knowing what boreout is, and being able to identify it in ourselves, is critical for tackling it. It’s also bad for companies, because a workforce with boreout can lead to high staff turnover. Our job seems pointless, our tasks devoid of value.īoreout doesn’t get as much attention as its workaholic cousin, but experts say that this phenomenon – which occurs across industries – can result in some of the same health problems for workers. While burnout is linked to long hours, poor work-life balance and our glamourisation of overwork, boreout happens when we are bored by our work to the point that we feel it is totally meaningless. But fewer of us have heard of ‘boreout’ – a related phenomenon that’s arguably just as pernicious. We all know what burnout is and why it’s bad.
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