Bored at work and hooked to screens!
“I don’t leave the house in case some work comes in or my boss calls me, but I spend all day mindlessly on my phone.”
Being bored at work, or boreout, is the opposite of a burnout (which often results from being overworked). Boreout is chronic boredom at work — people feel underworked, unchallenged, unmotivated and frustrated. On the surface, it seems strange for companies to hire an employee – pay them good (or great) salaries and then underutilize their skills. Yet, it happens all the time, across industries. Some of you reading this article might envy a worker in this situation – but you might want to read further before you make up your mind.
For instance, in the tech industry that has seen exponential growth since 2020, talent hoarding, and over hiring is extremely common. That means bringing in highly compensated team members without having a specific plan for how to utilize or grow them. Here’s a small, unscientific poll conducted on Blind, an anonymous forum for mostly tech workers.
So what?
Being bored at work means a free paycheck which just frees you up to do other things, right?
Not always. Consequences of boreout for employees include dissatisfaction, fatigue as well as low self-esteem. Feeling like your work has no meaning makes them vulnerable to seeking meaning and excitement using their digital devices on TikTok, Instagram, Reddit etc. This fuels the cycle of boredom because tasks keep getting stretched out, and employees become used to the illusion of being productive by engaging in distracting activities than getting anything accomplished.
Withdrawing into these digital spaces perpetuates workplace loneliness. For globally distributed teams where co-workers are far flung, it’s already difficult to make real connections. However, when digital devices can take free reign over your sense of agency its just exponentially harder to be curious about a person IRL. One quick measure where this shows up is in employee engagement. The most recent Gallup data shows that in 2023, employees in the U.S. continued to feel more detached from their employers, with less clear expectations, lower levels of satisfaction with their organization, and less connection to its mission or purpose, than they did four years ago.
The way forward:
Now, as Alyson Meister and Aksinia Stavskaya write in their HBR article on “The Benefits of Being Bored at Work”, boredom can be an opportunity to reflect on your interests, values, and goals. It can truly be a gift. Yet, the energy required to be contemplative is sucked up by the inertia of poor digital habits.
For human and capital management (i.e. HR) teams, this is a difficult challenge which can’t be resolved by just creating team-building events over Zoom (just like it doesn’t work for burnout). It requires a deliberate effort to establish a digital culture that doesn’t simply reward being ‘green on Teams or Slack’. By investing in digital wellness for employees, they can hope to allow employees to retain their sense of agency – which may motivate them to look beyond the scope of their current underutilized work, and perhaps contribute in broader ways.
About Scroll By Choice
We are a digital wellness company focused on helping people reclaim control over their screentime. Our research based, quantifiable and personalized solutions boost innate human traits that become dulled from persuasively designed technology.
We deliver solutions for organizations that care about workplace wellness, educational institutions that want to improve student outcomes as well as for individuals interested in reclaiming control over their digital habits.
References:
In New Workplace, U.S. Employee Engagement Stagnates (gallup.com)