Employee Burnout

Employee burnout: causes, signs and strategies
Employee burnout is an incredibly important issue. After all, your company may be letting its employees burn out without them even realizing it! Whether it’s multitasking, sending emails after work, or marathon virtual meetings, burnout can come in many different shapes and sizes, but they all have the same impact.

Demotivated employees, lack of productivity and poor company performance. In this article, we’ll explore the signs and causes of employee burnout and provide strategies for preventing it from becoming a problem in your company.

What is employee burnout?
Employee burnout is a particular form of workplace stress, even recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO), in which employees experience general dissatisfaction with their work and several states of exhaustion, including:

• Mental exhaustion
• Physical exhaustion
• Emotional exhaustion

The end result is a worker who no longer feels up to the task of their daily job, who is generally disinterested in their job or profession, leading to mental distance and overall lower productivity.

At an organizational level, this can lead to higher turnover and turnover rates, lower employee engagement scores, and a negative impact on workplace culture, which can generally impact company performance.

How common is employee burnout?
A survey conducted by Micro Biz Mag found that out of 1,000 workers in the UK, 22% had experienced some form of work-related burnout. Extrapolated, this could mean that around 12 million British citizens are affected by workplace burnout.

In terms of scale, a study by the UK government’s Health and Safety Executive found that around 17.9 million working days were lost as a result of stress, depression or anxiety in the workplace in 2019/2020 alone.

So it’s not just about the number of people suffering from burnout, which is already quite high and widespread. But about the direct impact on productivity in the workplace.

Some experts suggest that the 24% of UK workers suffering from burnout could even rise at certain times of the year (e.g. January 2021), given search trends.

What are the most common causes of employee burnout?
Employee burnout doesn’t just happen out of nowhere, it has to be induced. Typically, this is due in part to the way a company operates and how its people processes respond to employees’ needs.

When things go wrong, burnout can take over. Here are some of the most common causes of employee burnout:

• Too much work – Too much to do, too little time. When employees are faced with too much work, this can be one of the most common causes of burnout. Because when tasks pile up without any relief, it can be incredibly overwhelming and cause people to switch off completely.
• Too little work – On the other hand, a lack of work can also lead to burnout. This doesn’t mean too little work, at least not necessarily, but rather a lack of complexity in the tasks. Burnout can occur when employees no longer feel as connected to their work, which can occur when they do the same tasks over and over again.
• Compensation – When employees feel like their compensation doesn’t match their work or the amount of work required of them, things can get complicated very quickly. You can influence this with the right compensation packages and bonus structures.
• Environment and Management – Both workplace culture and management style can have a significant impact on burnout. If employees don’t feel like they enjoy coming into the office or even opening their laptop to start work each morning, then feelings of burnout can quickly arise. The same applies if their superiors pressure or micromanage them.

What are the typical signs of employee burnout?
The signs and outcomes of employee burnout are typically linked. Here’s how to determine if your employees are burnt out using your company’s key performance indicators:

• Sickness – Employee sickness absence can increase and cost your business working days (which, as previous data shows, is a total of 17.8 million working days in the UK).
• Errors – When employees suffer from burnout, their daily work may be more prone to errors because they are less passionate or diligent about what they do.
• Motivation – Less motivated, less innovative and less productive. If you feel like your company has experienced a brain drain and no one has left, then you may be dealing with burnout.
• Turnover – Higher turnover and attrition rates, as well as faster exit times, can lead not only to less talent, but also to higher overall recruiting costs.
• Customers – If your customer service has become worse, it may be due to burnout. Your employees may no longer approach or respond positively to customers.

Employee burnout therefore has a significant impact on the bottom line. This is why it is so important for modern companies to define burnout and find ways to prevent it.

Preventing burnout in five steps
Massages, training courses and health seminars – all of this is good, but it doesn’t really get to the heart of the problem. If you want to prevent employee burnout, you have to address it directly at the source.

Here are five steps to help you create a framework for burnout prevention in your organization…

1.Stop multitasking
Think of multitasking as a relic from a bygone era. After all, studies have shown that switching between tasks doesn’t make people more productive – it makes us less productive and more prone to stress!

In this sense, switching between tasks is not good for us. So your company needs to find unique ways to keep employees from switching between different tasks unnecessarily.

A simple example would be to encourage employees to mute their various means of communication. This way they can pay attention to messages instead of being distracted from their work by a ring or bell.

Fewer interruptions and fewer switching operations mean more productivity, concentration and happier employees! Overall, this is a key element in how we view strategic work as a competitive advantage for your business.

2.Management should lead by example
It’s not enough to suggest eliminating multitasking, it must be an initiative embraced by the leaders in your company. This is especially true when managing teams that work remotely (and are at risk of being “always on” day and night).

Let managers practice this themselves first, promote it to employees, and ensure they lead by example so that your employees feel empowered to do the same.

It could even take the form of a company-wide initiative. For example, “meeting-free Monday” could become the standard in your company. This way you can skip meetings for a day so everyone can focus.

3.Define, change and optimize company values
Your company’s core values are one of the clearest expressions of what your company cares about and what it expects from your employees. So if you have no values at all, this should be your first step.

If you have them, you should revise them. But don’t just update for the sake of updating, consider how you live these values and how they impact employee experiences.

To prevent burnout, everyone in your company needs to know that their health comes first. Expressing this as part of your company values while making it happen (see our next step) is essential.

4.Make work-life balance a reality
Over the last ten years, the topic of work-life balance has become an incredibly important topic. Not just for workers, but also for companies that have to help promote this balance. To prevent burnout, you must play an active role yourself.

How does it look? For your company this could look like this:

• Strict no-email policy on weekends.
• Clear sign-off teams for members to complete the work well.
• Self-care days to allow employees to focus on themselves.
• The expectation that the answers will come with the right quality and not in the right time.

5.Stay in touch!
This is especially true for HR managers and executives, and it’s about how you keep the pulse of your organization. Preventing burnout begins with identifying when and how burnout occurs.

So, to develop a proper prevention program, you need to stay updated with your employees. Schedule meetings and reviews, collect feedback, send surveys, and gauge how employees are doing.

If you find that employees are happy, great! However, when they are stressed or overworked, you need to quickly come up with initiatives to help employees maintain the spark before they burn out.

How do you overcome employee burnout?
That’s easy. You can overcome employee burnout in your company by recognizing it, understanding it, and thinking about how you can contribute to it (and conversely, how you can prevent it). This means you need to engage in strategic initiatives to reduce not only burnout in general, but also the risk of burnout.

Do you know how your employees are feeling right now?
The first step can be to conduct an employee engagement survey to find out how your employees are feeling, their current level of engagement, and whether burnout is a potential risk to your company. Specifically, you can ask your employees about the following points:

• Your current workload.
• How they assess the culture of your company.
• How they assess the relationship with their superior.
• Whether they have a good work-life balance.