Employee Burnout is an extreme form of work related stress which leads to feelings of physical or emotional exhaustion; ultimately resulting in reduced productivity.
Is burnout inevitable or can it be prevented? Factors such as rigid policies, micromanagement, or chaotic job conditions are all causing your employees to burn out – so here’s 7 simple ways that you can help protect yourself and your employees from experiencing burnout, in order to have a happy healthy office, with maximum productivity!
Improve Work-Life Balance
This is a concept which involves the prioritization between someone’s career and their lifestyle. For 87% of men and women, their work life balance affects their mental health negatively; therefore, by promoting a healthy work life balance it could be the answer to eliminating burn out. This can be done through providing flexible hours for your employees and encouraging them to utilize their lunch breaks by socializing or going out for a walk. By talking to your employees and having conversations about their work-life balance, it allows them to communicate their boundaries. These are all factors that’re important so your employees can truly unplug to help utilize their time to achieve a healthy work-life balance.
Implement Regular Breaks
By implementing regular breaks into the work day it enables employees to recharge and have a few minutes away from their screens. By taking just a quick break from work, it can increase focus and restore motivation; therefore, making it a helpful way for employees to recover from stress which improves their performance rates. During a short 5 – 10 minute break, employees can reassess and keep an overview of their tasks for the day ahead. Even a 30 second microbreak could:
- – Improve concentration
- – Reduce stress
- – Keep you feeling engaged
- – Make your work feel more enjoyable
Improve Time Management Skills
By improving time management skills and teaching employees how to prioritize tasks, you can help to ease the stress or overwhelming feelings associated with work that cause burnout. Time management is the skill of planning all of your tasks based around how much time you have to complete them. By doing this it enables you to prioritize items in your daily schedule, allowing you to finish them on time and ensure you’re doing what you’re supposed to at the correct time. Time management can be done it a plethora of ways such as using a checklist or a timer to track your progress throughout the day. By breaking tasks down your employees can achieve their goals faster and track their progress easily, this prevents procrastination and improves focus to help avoid employees feeling overloaded with work and heading towards burnout.
Encourage Fitness and Healthy Lifestyles
You can help encourage your employees to live a healthier lifestyle and improve their fitness through cycle to work schemes or team yoga sessions after work. Exercising regularly has endless benefits for the workplace, it boosts energy levels, inspires confidence and helps employees set and achieve goals both inside and out of work. Not to mention the fact that fit employees are less likely to get sick meaning they’ll be able to attend work more regularly and be more consistent. On top of all these benefits, workplace wellness programs help to educate employees on how they can feel better on the job, improving their mental and physical wellbeing. By encouraging your employees to stay active their minds will be healthier and will be less susceptible to symptoms related to burnout such as stress.
Review Employee Workload
Reviewing workloads regularly can help to ensure that your employees aren’t being overworked will help eliminate the risk of burnout. This can be done by asking a few questions:
- -How critical is each task in both the long and short term?
- -How critical is each task?
- -Should the task remain with the current person or could it be reassigned to someone else who also has the ability to perform it to a high quality?
By having regular catch-ups or team meetings to discuss workload using these questions or similar, you’re creating a good way to keep track of employee progress and productivity.
Encourage Friendships Between Employees
Activities such as staff days out or team building exercises can help encourage friendships between employees. A healthy relationship between colleagues helps to avoid toxic workplace and reduce stress. This also allows employees to have trusted colleagues that they feel they can turn to if they feel overwhelmed or are in need of any help, these conversations often lead to finding solutions to a variety of challenging work situations. Further to this, employees who have friendships within their workplace are often more loyal and trustworthy to the organization. As a result, the company can then obtain a better brand reputation while being able to display an empathetic work culture. Workers with supportive friendships at work are also shown to make less mistakes in their work; therefore, for a healthy workplace friendships can be a win-win for both companies and employees too while eliminating the risk of employees reaching burnout.
Use these helpful tips when reviewing the progression on how you’re employees are working and see where you can make changes. You could also consider creating a survey and seeing where the main causes of burnout are sourced from.
To find out how you can improve your employee experience further, get in touch with a member of the team today on 01244 739 350 or email us at [email protected]!
