Forget burnout at work. Are you at risk of “boreout”?

Stress and employee burnout are at record-high levels. According to Gallup, 3 in 4 U.S. employees experience workplace burnout “at least sometimes,” and 1 in 4 experience burnout either “very often” or “always.” But what if burnout isn’t the main issue that leaders should worry about? What if boredom is an even bigger threat to worker productivity and well-being?

There’s a name for feeling chronically “blah” at work: boreout. It occurs when an individual experiences consistent boredom and lack of purpose at work. It is closely related to what psychologist Adam Grant calls “languishing” — a sense of stagnation and emptiness that doesn’t go away and is essentially a feeling of disengagement that can occur when there’s a lack of stimulating activity, repetitive tasks or a mismatch between what we anticipate and what we’re experiencing.

Boreout was first given its name in 2007 in “Diagnose Boreout,” a book by co-authors Peter Werder and Philippe Rothlin. According to research by Rothlin and Werder, boreout is composed of three components: boredom, a lack of challenges and a lack of professional interest.

Boreout can cause stress, depression, insomnia and higher turnover. It is a psychological malaise that has become far too common in an era of endless meetings, pointless emails, bureaucratic BS and what the late anthropologist David Graeber called “BS jobs.” Worse, boreout exposes organizations to cultures of SEP — somebody else’s problem — which reflect an attitude of excuses, finger pointing and complacency.

Boreout, if ignored, can sabotage a team’s performance and well-being.

How leaders can address boreout

The boreout epidemic is a wake-up call that demands leaders to care about their employees’ work purpose. You can’t seize new opportunities, proactively solve customer’s pain points or identify opportunities for improvement with a culture of boreout.

To address burnout, the current paradigm of leaders as preservers of the status quo must evolve to challengers of the status quo. Too often, we build cultures that reward bureaucratic work and compliance-led KPIs more than intelligent work and courage-led KBIs (key behavior indicators). This leadership approach is counterproductive, especially when tech and workforce disruptions are multiplying. Because the best way to outpace the forces of disruption is to build organizations where people can embrace change (such as advancements in AI and the skills revolution) into a tailwind for new learning, growth and meaningful work.

We desperately need a new leadership model fit for the AI age, where people can thrive in values-driven, trust-led cultures offering work combining growth, meaning and skills over a lifetime.

It’s time for leaders to confront boreout in their organizations. The first step of doing so is to address the number one reason for boreout: bureaucracy.

Broken meetings

One of the most ironic paradoxes of leadership is that technology changes fast but humans don’t. As a result, many leaders suffer from a common-sense gap, with bureaucracy outstripping our human brains’ capacity to make sense of everything, exacerbating boreout.

Too many companies have become slow, siloed and stupid. In a survey by researchers Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, nearly two-thirds of respondents said their organizations had become more bureaucratic in recent years. Despite all the hype about technology and AI everywhere, Hamel writes that there is “potential for liberating $3 trillion of extra economic output by excising unproductive bureaucratic work and redeploying those energies to value-creating roles.”

Boreout increases every time we forget to unlearn the old ways, whether attending another zombie meeting where dead ideas live on or following best practices that have become broken practices and rules that become the proxy for how we work.

To be sure, a key example of bureaucracy is the tremendous number of meetings we expect our teams to participate in. In 2016, researchers Rob Cross, Reb Rebele and Adam Grant found that the time workers spent in meetings had increased by 50% since the 1990s. And more recently, Microsoft has found since 2020, workers have tripled the amount of time they spend in meetings. Indeed, “white-collar work is just meetings now,” Derek Thompson writes in The Atlantic.

The bright side is that reducing the number of meetings you hold is a simple way to reduce boreout and make teams more productive.

Say no to boreout

Perhaps the most significant risk to long-term performance, well-being, and resilient growth is boreout. Boreout is here to stay and leaders who ignore it do so at their own peril. With entire professions at risk of automation and displacement from the rapid advancement of AI, putting our curiosity to work is the only way forward.

We all need to define and demonstrate new ways of working that inspire people to choose curiosity (embracing ideas that challenge the status quo) over conformity (rejecting ideas that challenge the status quo). And leaders need to create environments of trust, which is essential to avoiding the insidious threat to our well-being and sanity: boreout.