Nine out of ten employees report feeling stressed at work. But nearly half of that stress comes not from having too much to do -- it comes from having nothing worth doing. HR Morning calls it boreout. A more accurate term would be abandonment.
What They Found
HR Morning reports that boreout is costing organizations as much as burnout, and the two conditions are converging in ways that most management teams do not recognize. Their analysis draws on data showing that 90% of employees feel stressed on the job, 44% are considering leaving within six months due to that stress, and a third of HR professionals themselves are considering leaving the sector due to fatigue and disengagement.
The article identifies nine strategies for addressing boreout, ranging from job enrichment to stretch assignments to better communication about role expectations. The core argument is that boreout is not laziness -- it is what happens when capable people are trapped in roles that do not use their capabilities. An employee who was hired for their creativity and then assigned to data entry for eighteen months is not disengaged because of a character flaw. They are disengaged because the organization wasted them.
The financial specifics are sobering. Disengagement costs an average of $3,999 per hourly worker, $4,257 per salaried non-manager, $10,824 per manager, and $20,683 per executive annually. That is not a rounding error. That is a structural tax on every organization that confuses presence with performance.
What They Missed
HR Morning's nine solutions are competent management advice. They are also, without exception, things the manager does to the employee: enrich their job, assign them stretch projects, communicate expectations better. Every solution positions the employee as a passive recipient of management improvement. Not one asks the employee what they want to build, what challenge they are hungry for, what skill they would develop if given the space. The solutions are top-down because the diagnosis is top-down: boreout is a condition management must fix, not a relationship management must repair.
The Antidote
Research on the Hero's Journey framework identifies boreout as a direct consequence of denied Sovereignty. When a worker has no agency over the problems they solve, the methods they use, or the trajectory of their own development, boredom is not a risk -- it is a certainty. No amount of "stretch assignments" cures this if the assignments are still selected by a manager who decides what stretching looks like.
The framework pairs Sovereignty with the Context Bridge. A worker with Sovereignty chooses their challenges. The Context Bridge ensures those challenges connect to something real -- both for the organization and for the worker's own life. When both operate, boreout is structurally impossible. You cannot be bored when you chose the problem, you can see the impact, and you know how solving it serves your own growth. That is not engagement theater. That is how humans work.
What This Looks Like Monday
Ask each person on your team to name one problem in the organization they would solve if they had permission. Then give them permission. Not a committee. Not a proposal process. Permission. Watch what happens to boreout when people are allowed to care about something they chose.