(NerdWallet) – TikTok trends don’t lie: Whether they’re quitting quietly or adopting the bare minimum of Mondays to combat Sunday scares, people are opting out of work.
In a sense, reducing work to a smaller part of life is a permanent change that people working from home have experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, says Cristina Banks, an industrial and organizational psychologist and director of the Interdisciplinary Center for healthy workplaces at the University of California, Berkeley Haas School of Business.
By working from home, people had more autonomy. They also had a clearer sense of the value of their time, which they could spend exercising or playing with their children rather than sitting in traffic on the way to the office.
After many workers have had this experience and are now being pushed back to pre-pandemic norms, Banks says it’s difficult for them to relinquish control over when and how much they work.
So some workers are adopting trends like Bare Minimum Monday, which suggests doing only the most important tasks at the beginning of the week, in order to maintain that control.
But people’s choice to devote less time and energy to work may also have a more worrying origin. Surveys repeatedly show that a large portion of workers are on the verge of burnout.
So, in the spirit of World Mental Health Day on October 10, we’ve looked at the challenges and tactics that can help workers cope.
Burnout and poor mental health at work
About 3 in 4 workers reported experiencing work-related stress in the past month, according to the American Psychological Association’s 2023 Work in America survey. More than half said stress led to a range of negative effects, including emotional exhaustion, lack of motivation, desire to quit, decreased productivity and irritability, among others.
The statistics on workplace mental health are so grim that workplace wellbeing has become one of the highest priorities for public health and professional organizations over the past two years.
For example, the surgeon general’s office has made worker well-being one of its top priorities, saying the pandemic has highlighted the connection between people’s health and their jobs.
The federal agency created a list of stressors that harm Americans’ mental health, which reads like a day in the life of a typical American worker: heavy workloads, long commutes, unpredictable schedules, long hours , limited autonomy, multiple jobs and low wages.
The solution should come from employers, the surgeon general and others conclude. But leaders must first overcome their own faulty assumptions.
In the 2023 Workplace Well-being Survey, released in June by Deloitte, a business management consulting firm, executives tend to have an overly optimistic view of worker well-being, which does not match to their own assessment of their situation. While two-thirds of employees surveyed said their mental health has stayed the same or worsened over the past year, the overwhelming majority of leaders believe their employees’ mental health has improved.
With this kind of disconnect, workers may have to take the first step. One of the newest trends emerging from social media, called Bare Minimum Monday, urges people to prioritize their own well-being instead of forcing productivity. This could be just what workers need right now.
What is Monday at the bare minimum?
Bare Minimum Monday is a trend started on TikTok by Marisa Jo Mayes, content creator and co-founder of Spacetime Monotasking, a startup offering virtual coworking spaces and productivity tools.
Mayes coined the term Bare Minimum Monday to describe his slow start to the work week. Instead of feeling paralyzed by an incredibly long to-do list, she focuses only on the most necessary work tasks.
When she’s done with that, she allows herself to put her work aside in favor of self-care, creative pursuits, housework, or anything else that makes her feel good (which can also be more work ).
Before I started doing Bare Minimum Monday, I was making myself physically ill from stress, Mayes says in a video. I couldn’t produce anything because of the level of burnout I had reached.
Why try the bare minimum on Monday
Mayes says practicing Bare Minimum Monday frees you from the pressure of an unrealistic workload, encouraging you to be easier on yourself and helping you avoid burnout.
It turns out that lowering expectations about what you need to accomplish in a day can have the unintended effect of making it easier to do productive work.
As she started Bare Minimum on Monday to feel better, Mayes found that taking a little break made her “more productive than [she] never thought possible. »
It would be difficult for an employer to dispute this result, Banks says. As long as they’re productive, why worry about where they are or how long their workday is?
#Bare #Minimum #Monday #reduce #stress #work
Image Source : wgntv.com