Have you ever heard of ' bed rotting' ? If your answer is 'no' and you work 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. Translating from English, the term ' bed rotting ' means 'decaying in bed', and it's related to spending a long time lingering in bed after waking up.
The term gained traction among younger people on social media, starting with a trend . The audience adopting this practice, in addition to helping spread its concept, is precisely Generation Z, born between 1996 and 2010, who are frequently criticized by many organizations for their behaviors and conduct, often deemed inappropriate for the corporate environment.
Although ' bed rotting ' is being classified as a self-care practice, there is still no scientific evidence that it actually works, 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, only tends to bring harm to people in general, in their personal and professional lives.
The truth is that, from the moment we enter the job market, we are subject to excessive demands that can sometimes cause us stress and fatigue. However, when we find ourselves in this predicament, the ideal 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 realizing it.
However, it is worth noting that for this to happen, the manager also needs to be very well prepared to deal with 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 that the leader has enough tact to understand what is happening in order to then make the respective decisions.
In addition to rest or a reduction in activities, depending on the case, leadership can also think of ways to help the team organize itself better. Often, people don't necessarily have that many tasks, but they don't know how to divide their time and end up taking their time, delaying tasks, starting one activity and stopping to begin another, and so on in a vicious cycle.
I consider it essential that managers make their employees realize that quality time to rest and even do nothing is very important, but that it must be limited and shared with other responsibilities – both in personal life and especially in the work environment, where other individuals depend on you. Balance is key to making it work.
In this aspect, it's necessary to prioritize the discipline of monitoring the team's goals and objectives, but also to take advantage, as a leader, of face-to-face interaction to try to perceive what is not being said in words, but what the body is conveying.
The dangers of bed rotting for professional life.
