What is workplace burnout? Why is it important to understand how to spot the signs early, and how can you prevent your employees from dreading coming to work? Burnout is a topic that almost every employer wants to avoid. Burnout has become more of an issue since returning to more of an in-person work style.
Some people instantly think of burnout as laziness or incompetence, whereas it’s the opposite. Today, we’re diving into understanding workplace burnout and how to prevent it.
What is burnout?
Burnout has been classified as a syndrome, with signs and symptoms varying from person to person.
Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress. – Helpguide.org
Burnout vs stress
Due to the severity of burnout, it’s important to know the difference between burnout and stress. While these two have similar symptoms, their effects are entirely different. Stress can be described as mental tension and mental or physical reaction to a situation. This can come and go, and while it can be induced from the workplace, it doesn’t have a lasting effect like burnout. Burnout takes time to build up and can have mental and physical effects lasting for weeks to heal from. Ensuring you spot the signs early within your employees and yourself is key to remaining productive and healthy.
How to spot the signs
When looking at the signs of burnout, spotting them early on is key. With burnout, the longer it goes on, the longer it will take for your employees to recover. Below are some of the signs that can occur when an employee is experiencing burnout.
- Dreading going to work
- Struggling to find the positive in every day
- Excessive workload, employees can feel overwhelmed and don’t know where to start
- Not being challenged, work feels boring and mundane
- Poor office relationships, lack of support and comradery
- Little praise or recognition from managers or boss
- Exhaustion and tiredness
As a manager or boss, these signs can be quite hard to tell from an outside perspective. Just like you would a performance review, it’s important to check in on your employees and see how they’re really doing. Assuming they’re fine and happy within their role can lead them to burnout.
How to prevent it
As much as burnout is negative, the great positive is it is preventable. There’s plenty that you can focus on within your organisation to ensure no employees suffer silently from burnout.
Encourage breaks and encourage employees to take a break outside
Getting the most out of your lunch breaks and encouraging your employees to take their full lunch breaks does so much more than helping to avoid burnout. Taking effective breaks throughout the day helps to improve productivity and can leave employees feeling refreshed when they return to their desks.
If you truly want to encourage employees to take their breaks, lead by example. Take your lunch outside, walk around the block, and be an example for your organisation.
Avoid overloading employees with tasks and projects
Commonly with burnout, employees feel like they can’t say no to an additional project. This can lead to them feeling extremely overwhelmed regarding where and what to start first. When delegating tasks or responsibilities, check in with employees. When you speak openly and honestly with your employees about what they need help with and what tasks they could delegate, it will make them feel acknowledged and seen.
Promote regular time out
When you’re trying to manage mental health in the workplace, it’s important that you, as a manager, take time out and also encourage your employees to do so. This doesn’t necessarily mean your entire office has to transition to the four-day work week. However, offering an early finish every second Friday or allowing employees to take a half day once every month can help them avoid burnout over time.
Accommodate work-life balance
Due to the effects of the pandemic, work-life balance has come to the forefront. Even more so when looking at employee perks, creating a work-life balance should be a top priority for all employers.
As a result, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that accommodating a work-life balance can help employees feel burnt out. How you provide your employees with a work-life balance will be different for each organisation. It’s important that you ask what they value. While you think finishing early is a great career perk, your employees might value a work-from-home day from time to time.
Provide recognition and reward
One of the main symptoms of burnout is the feeling of constantly working towards something for absolutely no reason. Employees who feel like this can often become detached from their work. To avoid this, you want to ensure that employees are working towards something, whether that be a larger goal for the entire organisation or team or individual goals.
Developing these goals needs to be a joint effort, with employees included. When employees or the team have met the goals, they need to be rewarded. This is incredibly important. Small rewards such as a five-dollar coffee card are better left, as they don’t have any real impact. Instead, offer larger, more impactful rewards.
Speak and listen with empathy
When discussing burnout with employees, it’s important to speak and listen with empathy. Burnout is a sensitive topic and one that should be taken seriously. Listen and understand what is causing burnout in the workplace, offering solutions about what can be improved.
Final Thoughts
Burnout is tricky, and it’s something that everyone will potentially deal with at least once in their working career. Although it’s a setback and can have negative effects, much can be done within the workplace to promote a healthy work-life balance.
Salexo Consulting is here to help you find your dream employee. If you’re on the hunt, contact our experienced team. In the meantime, follow us on social media and read through our blogs for insider information.
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What is workplace burnout? & how can you prevent it? Salexo Consulting takes a look, giving you all the strategies you need for a healthy workplace.
