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Bore out: the new office disease

Are you irritable when you return from work? Drained of emotion? Do you stare blankly at the wall of your living room?

You could be suffering not from burnout but from boreout, which could soon become the fashionable new office ...

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Burnout.Net 2008

The Burnout-Syndrome

Burnout is a psychological term for the experience of long-term exhaustion and diminished interest. Research indicates general practitioners have the highest proportion of burnout cases (according to a recent Dutch study in Psychological Reports, no less than 40% of these experienced high levels of burnout). Burnout is not a recognized disorder in the DSM.

The most well-studied measurement of burnout in the literature is the Maslach Burnout Inventory. Maslach and her colleague Jackson first identified the construct "burnout" in the 1970s, and developed a measure that weighs the effects of emotional exhaustion and reduced sense of personal accomplishment. This indicator has become the standard tool for measuring burnout in research on the syndrome. People who experience all three symptoms have the greatest degrees of burnout, although emotional exhaustion is said to be the hallmark of burnout.

Many theories of burnout include negative outcomes related to burnout, including job function (performance, output, etc.); health related outcomes (increases in stress hormones, coronary heart disease, circulatory issues), and mental health problems (depression, etc.).

Although burnout is work-related, most responsibility for burnout currently rests on the individual worker in the United States, as well as the individual company, as it is in a company's best interest to ensure burnout doesn't occur. Other countries, especially in Europe, have included work stress and burnout in occupational health and safety standards, and hold organizations (at least partly) responsible for preventing and treating burnout.

Tracy in her study aboard cruise ships describes this as "a general wearing out or alienation from the pressures of work" (Tracy, 2000 p.6) "Understanding burnout to be personal and private is problematic when it functions to disregard the ways burnout is largely an organizational issue caused by long hours, little down time, and continual peer, customer, and superior surveillance"(Tracy, 2000, p.24)

There are a variety of ways that both individuals and organizations can deal with burnout. In his book, Newton (1995) argues that many of the remedies related to burnout are motivated not from an employee's perspective, but from the organization's perspective. Despite that, if there are benefits to coping strategies, then it would follow that both organizations and individuals should attempt to adopt some burnout coping strategies. Below are some of the more common strategies with dealing with burnout.

Organizational aspects

Employee assistance programs (EAP)

Stemming from Mayo's Hawthorne Studies, Employee Assistance Programs were designed to assist employees in dealing with the primary causes of stress. Some programs included counseling and psychological services for employees. There are organizations that still utilize EAPs today, but the popularity has diminished substantially because of the advent of stress management training (SMT).

Stress management training

Stress Management Training (SMT) is employed by many organizations today as a way to get employees to either work through stress or to manage their stress levels; to maintain stress levels below that which might lead to higher instances of burnout.

Stress interventions

Research has been conducted that links certain interventions, such as narrative writing or topic-specific training to reductions in physiological and psychological stress.

Individual aspects

Problem-based coping

On an individual basis, employees can cope with the problems related to burnout and stress by focusing on the causes of their stress. This type of coping has successfully been linked to reductions in individual stress.

Appraisal-based coping

Appraisal-based coping strategies deal with individual interpretations of what is and is not a stress inducing activity. There have been mixed findings related to the effectiveness of appraisal-based coping strategies.

Social support

Social support has been seen as one of the largest predictors toward a reduction in burnout and stress for workers. Creating an organizationally-supportive environment as well as ensuring that employees have supportive work environments do mediate the negative aspects of burnout and stress.

Occupational Burnout

Occupational burnout is characterized by exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced professional efficacy within the workplace. More accurately defined, exhaustion refers to the depletion or draining of emotional resources, cynicism refers to the indifference or distant attitude of work, and reduced professional efficacy refers to the lack of satisfaction with past/present expectations. Occupational burnout is typically and particularly found within the human service professions. Such jobs that naturally experience high amounts of occupational burnout include: social workers, nurses, teachers, lawyers, physicians, and police officers. The reason why burnout is so prevalent in the human service professions is due in part to the high stress environment, emotional involvedness, and outcomes that are independent of the effort exerted by the working individual.

The individuals who are most vulnerable to occupational burnout are ones who are strongly motivated, dedicated, and involved in the work in which they partake. As work for these individuals is a source of importance in which they derive meaning in life, it is significant that they find meaning by achieving their goals and expectations. Therefore, the process of burning out is the realization and reflection of the failure to find meaning and growth in life.

Occupational burnout is associated with increased work experience, increased workload, absences and time missed from work, impaired empathy and cynical attitudes toward clientele, and thoughts of quitting.

Occupational Burnout Prevention

In order to quell occupational burnout, it is important to reduce or remove the negative aspects of the three main components that make up occupational burnout. However, it is difficult to treat all three components as the three burnout symptoms react differently to the same preventive or treatment activities. Exhaustion is more easily treated than cynicism and professional efficacy, which tend to be more resistant to treatment. Research shows that intervention actually may worsen the professional efficacy of one who originally had low professional efficacy.

Burnout prevention programs in the past have focused upon cognitive-behavior, cognitive restructuring, didactic stress management, and relaxation. These types of prevention programs rely upon reducing the exhaustion component of occupational burnout. However, recent research indicates that, at the individual level, cognitive-behavioral strategies have the best potential for success. It is more complicated at the organizational level where reducing or removing job stressors have been shown to decrease burnout. Burnout experts believe that in order to reduce occupational burnout, a strategy of combining both organizational and individual level activities may be the most beneficial approach to reduce the three main symptoms. Improving upon job-person fit by focusing attention on the relationship between the person and the job situation appears to be a promising way to deal with burnout.

Employee Rehabilitation

Employee rehabilitation is defined as a tertiary preventive intervention which means the strategies used in rehabilitation are meant to alleviate, as well as, prevent burnout symptoms. Such rehabilitation of the working population includes multidisciplinary activities with the intent of maintaining and improving employees’ working ability and ensuring a supply of skilled and capable labor in society.

Insulation from burnout

Several studies suggest that social-cognitive processes such as commitment to work, self-efficacy, learned resourcefulness, and hope may insulate individuals from experiencing occupational burnout.

Work-life balance

Work-life balance is a broad concept including proper prioritizing between career and ambition on one hand, compared with pleasure, leisure, family and spiritual development on the other.

As the separation between work and home life has diminished, this concept has become more relevant than ever before. Related but broader terms include "lifestyle balance" and "life balance".

The expression was first used in the late 1970s to describe the balance between an individual's work and personal life. In the United States, this phrase was first used in 1986. Over the past twenty-five years, there has been a substantial increase in work which is felt to be due, in part, by information technology and by an intense, competitive work environment. Long-term loyalty and a "sense of corporate community" have been eroded by a performance culture that expects more and more from their employees yet offers little security in return.

Many experts predicted that technology would eliminate most household chores and provide people with much more time to enjoy leisure activities; but many ignore this option, encouraged by prevailing consumerist culture and a political agenda that has "elevated the work ethic to unprecedented heights and thereby reinforced the low value and worth attached to parenting".

According to a survey conducted by the National Life Insurance Co., four out of ten employees state that their jobs are "very" or "extremely" stressful. Those in high stress jobs are three times more likely than others to suffer from stress-related medical conditions and are twice as likely to quit. The study states that women, in particular, report stress related to the conflict between work and family.

The number of stress-related disability claims by American employees has doubled according to the Employee Assistance Professionals Association in Arlington, Virginia. Seventy-five to ninety percent of physician visits are related to stress and, according to the American Institute of Stress, the cost to industry has been estimated at $200 billion-$300 billion a year.

Steven L. Sauter, chief of the Applied Psychology and Ergonomics Branch of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in Cincinnati, Ohio, states that recent studies show that "the workplace has become the single greatest source of stress". Michael Feuerstein, professor of clinical psychology at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences at Bethesda Naval Hospital states, "We're seeing a greater increase in work-related neuroskeletal disorders from a combination of stress and ergonomic stressors".

It is clear that problems caused by stress have become a major concern to both employers and employees. Symptoms of stress are manifested both physiologically and psychologically. Persistent stress can result in cardiovascular disease, sexual health problems, a weaker immune system and frequent headaches, stiff muscles, or backache. It can also result in poor coping skills, irritability, jumpiness, insecurity, exhaustion, and difficulty concentrating. Stress may also perpetuate or lead to binge eating, smoking, and alcohol consumption.

Burnout Stages

Psychologists Herbert Freudenberger and Gail North have theorized that the burnout process can be divided the into 12 phases, which are not necessarily followed sequentially:

A compulsion to prove oneself

Working harder

Neglecting one's own needs

Displacement of conflicts (the person does not realize the root cause of the distress)

Revision of values (friends or hobbies are completely dismissed)

Denial of emerging problems (cynicism and aggression become apparent)

Withdrawal (reducing social contacts to a minimum, becoming walled off; alcohol or other substance abuse may occur)

Behavioral changes become obvious to others

Inner emptiness

Depression

Burnout syndrome

Boreout

Boreout is a management theory that posits that lack of work, boredom, and consequent lack of satisfaction are a common malaise affecting individuals working in modern organizations, especially in office-based white collar jobs. This theory was first expounded in Diagnosis Boreout, a book by Peter Werder and Philippe Rothlin, two Swiss business consultants.

An absence of meaningful tasks, rather than stress, is the crucial problem for many workers according to Werder and Rothlin. Boreout consists of three elements: boredom, lack of challenge and disinterest. The authors disagree with the common perceptions that a demotivated employee is lazy; instead, they claim that the employee has lost interest in work tasks. Those suffering from boreout are ‘dissatisfied with their professional situation’.They are frustrated by being unable to either contribute to the development of the company or use their skills, knowledge and abilities, or get recognised for their efforts.

The authors posit that this phenomenon has been neglected by researchers and employers because of the social stigma associated with boreout and its effects. Indeed, stress has become an indicator of status in the workplace. There are several reasons boreout might occur. The authors note that boreout is unlikely to occur in many non-office jobs where the employee must focus on finishing a specific task (e.g., a surgeon) or helping people in need (e.g., a childcare worker or nanny). In terms of group processes, it may well be that the boss or certain forceful or ambitious individuals with the team take all the interesting work leaving only a little of the most boring tasks for the others. Alternatively, the structure of the organization may simply promote this inefficiency. Of course, few employees want to be fired, and are unlikely to call attention to the dispensable nature of their role. As such, even if an employee has very little work to do, they ensure that there is always a spreadsheet up on their computer and they cover their desk with file folders and carry briefcases home, to give the impression that they are bringing reports home to work on.

Werder and Rothlin cite research into time wasting at work carried out by AOL and salary.com in 2005.The survey of 10,000 employees showed that the average worker frittered away 2.09 hours per eight hour day outside their break time on non-work related tasks. The principal reason for this was a lack of assigned tasks according to 33% of the subjects.

The authors note that the main response of many companies to these problems is to increase their monitoring and surveillance. Internet use may be monitored and a number of websites (e.g., video game websites or social networking sites) may be blocked. However, the authors argue that these monitoring and surveillance methods are not effective, and nor do they create a good working environment. First of all, tech-savvy employees can get around some of the monitoring and surveillance methods. If employers block Facebook or Hotmail, employees with personal Blackberry devices or high-end cell phones can simply use their mobile devices to send personal e-mails. As well, if employers begin to monitor phone calls (according to which numbers are called or time on the phone), employees can simply use their cell phones, either at their desk, or by slipping out of the office and going into the hallway.

Coping strategies

The symptoms of boreout lead employees to adopt coping strategies or ‘boreout strategies’, these indicate the appearance of stress and activity, while cleverly avoiding any more boring work. ‘The boreout sufferer’s aim is to look busy, to not be given any new work by the boss and, certainly, not to lose the job.’

Boreout strategies include:

Stretch your work strategy: This involves drawing out tasks so they take much longer than necessary. For example, if an employee's sole assignment during a work week is a report that takes three work days, the employee will "stretch" this three days of work over the entire work week. Stretching strategies vary from employee to employee. Some employees may do the entire report in the first three days, and then spend the remaining days surfing the Internet, planning their holiday, browsing online shopping websites, sending personal e-mails, and so on (all the while ensuring that their workstation is filled with the evidence of "hard work", by having work documents ready to be switched-to on the screen). Alternatively, some employees may "stretch" the work over the entire work week by breaking up the process with a number of pauses to send personal e-mails, go outside for a cigarette, get a coffee, chat with friends in other parts of the company, or even go to the washroom for a 10 minute nap.

Pseudo-commitment strategy: The pretence of commitment to the job by attending work and sitting at the desk, sometimes after work hours. As well, demotivated employees may stay at their desks to eat their lunch to give the impression that they are working through the lunch hour; in fact, they may be sending personal e-mails or reading an entertainment magazine. An employee who spends the afternoon on personal phone calls may learn how to mask this by sounding serious and professional during their responses, to give the impression that it is a work-related call. For example, if a bureaucrat is chatting with a friend to set up a dinner date, when the friend suggests a time, the bureaucrat can respond that "we can probably fit that meeting time in.

Consequences of boreout for employees include dissatisfaction, fatigue as well as ennui and low self-esteem, while for the business itself there are the problems of an unnecessary financial burden, high levels of sick leave and low company loyalty. The paradox of boreout is that despite hating the situation, employees feel unable to ask for more challenging tasks, to raise the situation with superiors or even look for a new job. The authors do however propose a solution: firstly one must analyse one’s personal job situation, then look for a solution within the company and finally if that does not help, look for a new job.