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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 disease. “We estimate that 15 per cent of office staff are on the way to boreout,” said Peter Werder, the co-author of a management book outlining the perils of the condition. “They are seriously underchallenged.”
Many workers are so ill at ease in the office that they spend a large part of the day simulating work. That generates more negative stress than excessive working. The result is serious but hidden depression in the office.
“It is easier nowadays to confess to alcoholism than to tell your boss you are not being used properly,” said the co-author, Philippe Rothlin. While burnout and stress are socially acceptable problems, boreout is seen as little more than slacking.
The study – which has become a business book bestseller – has a much smaller but more carefully chosen sample: 100 managers, bankers, PR and advertising agency executives, all working in supposedly highly charged environments. The resulting profile of a boreout victim is remarkably similar to characters such as Tim in the Ricky Gervais BBC comedy series The Office, and Homer Simpson. Boreout, it appears, is such a profound taboo that it can only be shown in a comic context.
Boreout works like this: a boss refuses to delegate work, frustrated underlings ask for more to do but are trusted only with mind-numbing tasks. After a while they stop asking and enjoy the free time at their desk, stretching out the low-intensity tasks with a series of strategems.
But mimicking work day after day erodes self-esteem. Result: the boss hurtles towards burnout while at least some of his staff edge towards boreout. The symptoms are almost identical.
Source and more information:
www.timesonline.co.uk | |
