Have you ever heard of 'bed rotting’If your answer is 'no' and you act as a manager in a company – regardless of size or sector – I advise you to pay attention to this term, especially if you have younger employees on your team. Making the translation from English, the term 'bed rotting' means 'rotting in bed', and is related to spending a long time rolling around in bed after waking up.
The term gained strength among younger people on social media, from atrendon TikTok. The audience adopting this practice, in addition to helping spread its concept, is precisely Generation Z, born from 1996 to 2010, who are frequently criticized by many organizations for their behaviors and conduct, often deemed inappropriate for the corporate environment.
Despite the 'bed rottingbeing classified as a self-care practice, there is still no scientific evidence that it actually works and much less that it is good for people's health. On the contrary, spending too much time in bed doing nothing and "rotting," as the term suggests, tends to bring harm to people in general, in their personal and professional lives.
The truth is that, from the moment we enter the labor market, we are subject to excessive demands that can sometimes cause us stress and fatigue. However, when we find ourselves at this impasse, the best approach is to seek support from leadership to report the problem and align on what can be done to alleviate the overload, which can happen without the leader noticing.
However, it is worth emphasizing that for this to happen, the manager also needs to be well prepared to handle the situation, both to support the employee and not to judge them, in order not to further harm their well-being and eventually their mental health. It is essential for the leader to be flexible enough to understand what is happening before making the appropriate decisions.
In addition to a rest or a reduction in activities, depending on the case, leadership can also consider ways to help the team organize itself better. Often, people don't necessarily have many tasks, but they don't know how to manage their time and end up procrastinating, taking too long to complete them, or starting one activity and stopping to begin another, and so on in a vicious cycle.
I consider it essential that the manager ensures that employees understand that quality time to rest and even do nothing is very important, but it must be limited and shared with other responsibilities – whether in personal life or especially in the work environment, where other individuals depend on you. Balance is a way for it to work.
In this regard, it is necessary to know how to give importance to the discipline of monitoring the team's goals and objectives, but also to take advantage, as a leader, of the eye-to-eye moment to try to perceive what is not being said in words, but what the body is saying.
The dangers of bed rotting for professional life
