Congratulations! You finally got your dream job and you can´t wait to share your knowledge with the company. In exchange you will get a view into all steps of the work and a bunch of experience for your future. Okay, this should be the perfect way. Unfortunately, mostly the companies give their employees blunt tasks without seeing what their talents are and with that the employees are unchallenged. If this situation turns into boredom and if after months even the psych of the employee takes damage than you talk about the bore-out syndrome (Opposite from burn-out snydrom). This sounds ridiculous but don’t underestimate that. This can really damage the psyche and if the state is long-termin, the damage can be really heavy.
The symptoms
Simply and quickly explained the bore-out syndrome is the opposite of the burn-out syndrome. There are three main points: Being unchallenged, boredom and a lack of interest. But this doesn’t mean that employees with that syndrome are lazy. At first you would enjoy also the extra spare time at your job because there are no challenging tasks. But the day will come when you are sitting there and are just grumpy because you are literally just sitting there and waiting till the clock tells you to go home. You would like to engage yourself more but your chef says no. You pretend to be busy but instead you are doing private things at work. This is done by the most people who feel unchallenged and bored.
The most people with bore-out are people with an office job because there you can arrange it very easy to look busy. Especially this imitating of stress is the worst thing because you need also a lot of energy to arrange the whole thing and so it may be that the energy you are losing through this is higher than the energy what it will cost to do your work. A study in Germany has shown that 60 percent of young people feel unchallenged in their jobs. It showed also that the young people would be totally happy about doing more with more responsibility because they know that they had a good training. Because bore-out can affect the same damages than burn-out, medicals see this syndrome as an illness.
Tips
As mentioned above some of the victims just imitate their work. But this is a never ending story because you pretend like you are busy and out of that reason your boss doesn’t give you any jobs and this affects the boredom and so on. If you want to change this situation permanently you have to talk to your chef. You can tell him that you are feeling not challenged enough and that you are very leadable. It may also be that your boss didn’t realize that you can work more or you can also manage tasks with more responsibility. Especially people in internships are often getting underestimated.
If you are able to tell your chef that you would like to do more difficult tasks with more responsibility and that your boss can trust you, than your chance of having more responsible projects will increase. But you also should think about that you won’t lead a whole project team in the beginning of your job either. Only if you have the feeling that you are always unchallenged with your work, you should do something against it. But in the end, the decision is always in the hands of the boss. If the boss continues with this habit and you still are thinking that you can do a better and a harder work than it is may the time coma that you have to face to quit the job. Cause you know too much stress is the same damaging as too less stress.
Self-test
The bore-out syndrome is not as famous as the burn-out syndrome and so often the victims don’t know that they have it. If you see yourself doing private things at work, it may be that you have it also.
