“If an employee suffers from monotony, if he even tries to cover this up or distract from it in front of his employer, then this is money thrown out,” says Renate Rau, Professor of Industrial and Organizational Psychology in Marburg. And it costs money: The overall economic damage in Germany is said to amount to more than 250 billion euros, an estimate that Philippe Rothlin and Peter R. Werder derive from regular Gallup studies, which they quantify in Diagnose Boreout.
For the two Swiss management consultants, boreout is primarily found in office jobs – a phenomenon of the entire service society. In many office jobs, they say, people can control their workload, thanks in part to the digitization of offices. “We assume that at least 15 percent of workers in the service sector are affected by boreout,” Rothlin explains.
Boreout strategies
Some typical strategies for feigning complete exhaustion, which everyone has probably experienced or even personally used, characterize boreout. Rothlin and Werden first mention the “document strategy”: one surfs through the Internet to research private matters. If the boss suddenly appears, you switch to an important document on the screen at lightning speed.
With the “compression strategy”, you complete a task as quickly as possible, but pretend to be busy for days. This leaves time for private things. Or the opposite – the “flat rolling strategy”: A task is spread over several days, although it could actually be completed more quickly.
More often, one also encounters the “pseudo-burnout strategy”, where one moans about the burden of a lot of work that doesn’t really exist, but leads to not adding more tasks. Especially here, boreout resembles burnout. Affected people do the whole day busy, moan about the many work, come early to the office and leave as the last. As funny as these stratgies may sound, however, the effects on those affected by boreout are serious. Frustration, fatigue, listlessness and even depression mean that he or she no longer has confidence in anything and can hardly find a way out of the situation – so they find even more strategies to work as little as possible.
