5 Steps to Managing Boreout Syndrome in Your Workplace

You’ve heard of burnout, but what about boreout?

Boreout, as the name suggests, is when employees experience chronic boredom in their workplace from a lack of stimulating activity because they feel a lack of purpose as they complete tasks.

This phenomena is increasingly relevant in a world where technology is the norm and asking employees to use their mind to complete tasks manually is a thing of the past, leading to unstimulating workplaces and roles that suffer a lack of engagement and eventually mass departures.

This article explores five steps to tackle boreout, including recognizing signs, aligning roles with interests, learning and growth, digital adoption, and purposeful work culture.

Step 1: Recognize the Signs of Boreout

First, you need to recognize the signs that your staff are experiencing boreout. But how is this different from burnout?

Burnout is apathy caused by excessive stress. Boreout, on the other hand, is a result of boredom. 

Once you understand this distinction, look out for the common symptoms of boreout: 

• Constant fatigue: The employee often looks tired, takes long pauses, struggles to focus, and avoids extra tasks or conversations.

• Lack of motivation: Tasks are delayed, energy is low, and the employee rarely shows interest in team goals.

• Clock-watching: They frequently check the time, seem distracted, and appear eager to leave before the workday ends.

• Pretending to be busy: A staff member opens random tabs, shuffles papers, or moves around without finishing real tasks.

  
  

Boreout sounds like the name of a light-hearted behaviour. But the impacts of it are serious for mental health. It can lead to low self-worth, anxiety, and depression. It’s worth being vigilant of symptoms of boreout to prevent mental health problems in your employees. 

Managers should promote open communication so they are open to employees telling them boreout symptoms to deal with it early, before it gets worse and more difficult to deal with. 

Step 2: Align Roles with Strengths and Interests

A great way to combat boreout and prevent it from happening in the first place is to align roles with strengths and interests. 

In practice, this means ensuring that people are given roles and responsibilities that fit with what they enjoy doing. This point is especially important when there are several different tasks for the same role. 

An HR assistant can work backstage and do more computer-based work if they prefer to work alone, and another HR assistant may be great with people, so they can assist with more interactive roles. 

Skill mapping is a way to help staff understand where their strengths lie if they are unsure of this. 

Another effective and often popular idea is for staff to build their own role. This approach gives employees the autonomy to shape roles that include tasks they enjoy doing and that fit their skillset. 

Step 3: Encourage Continuous Learning and Growth

Boreout thrives on a lack of stimulation and growth. So offer your staff stimulation and growth by training them in whatever skills they want to learn. 

Online courses are great for remote or hybrid workers as they are flexible with home-working. Mentorship can help staff learn from peers or roles above them and encourage internal promotions, and certification programs help build internal experts with qualifications.

Some of the most popular learning platforms include LinkedIn Learning and Coursera. Some of these courses are free, so they offer training at low or zero cost.

Step 4: Leverage Digital Adoption to Reignite Engagement

Digital adoption, the act of embedding skills to use new technologies in your organization, can fulfill a significant role in beating boreout. Anything that involves learning and the empowerment that comes from being able to complete new tasks promotes stimulation and prevents chronic boredom. 

Poor digital onboarding for new hires or underutilized platforms can contribute to boreout because people get frustrated when they can’t use technologies they are supposed to use for daily tasks.

The WalkMe digital adoption platform (DAP) is currently the most popular way to adopt digital technologies. It allows staff to learn as they work, using new technologies with real-time in-app experiences instead of separate training. It also supports faster onboarding, clearer workflows, and less task frustration. 

Step 5: Foster a Purposeful Work Culture

Your final step should always be about culture, and if you completed the other steps correctly, this one should be a little simpler. 

Wherever possible, promote the importance of offering employees visibility into how their work feeds into larger organizational goals. Basically, the small part helps the large parts work and helps the entire organization to move toward goals. 

It’s also good to focus on team leaders as beacons of enthusiasm and clarity and mission values. Train them to use different techniques to promote values in diverse and fun ways to employees. 

Conclusion

It can seem like boreout is a difficult to spot, define, and treat phenomenon, but this is untrue. 

With a little training, practice and skill, you can see and solve boreout and avoid its worst outcome: Mass employee departures. 

First, recognize the signs of boreout, like fatigue and clock-watching. Next, personalize roles for staff, offer a diverse range of learning opportunities, embrace digital adoption, and build a culture of purpose.

As a final step, audit your current workflows and employee satisfaction. If workflows are slow and inefficient, and satisfaction is low, you need to be vigilant that boreout doesn’t take hold.