In the reality of today’s world, the workload of all employees is growing significantly in different spheres of activity and in different positions, from rank-and-file to managerial positions. The reasons for the accumulation of stress are, as always, banal:
- Highly excessive workload. Regular overwork and unstable schedules always entail less time for proper rest.
- Growing responsibility for failure. This applies not only to everything that is directly related to work, but also to personal life, for example, a drop in income due to unclosed tasks can affect loan repayments, deterioration in the quality of food, life and so on.
- Performing additional duties that are not part of the main tasks. This is not only overwork, but also the need to solve something non-standard, associated with additional risks and responsibility.
- Unfavourable information background in the team and outside it: gossip, intrigue, internal and external conflicts.
- Personal problems, which may be related to both health and other difficulties — in family, in relations with friends, with state authorities, etc.
Internal factors arising in the working atmosphere and contributing to professional burnout may also include:
- Staff turnover: employees need to build new relationships with colleagues every time, both horizontal and vertical, when managers change.
- Staff shortages due to unforeseen situations or management actions.
- Constantly changing demands of managers: changing priorities too often.
- Inappropriate management style: e.g., strictly authoritarian.
- And other negative factors that are significant for employees.
How to realize that employee burnout is a problem in your company
Signs of emotional burnout:
- Behaviour changes significantly — apathy or boredom sets in, the employee starts to be late often, may periodically not go to work at all.
- Thinking changes — stiffness, unjustified sense of guilt, decreased concentration of attention and not only.
- Health and well-being deteriorate — complaints about sleep quality, increased fatigue, decreased immunity and appetite, and unreasonable headaches.
Signs of professional burnout (stress):
- Performance decreases.
- Chronic fatigue appears.
- The number of mistakes increases.
- Appear various fears, fear of change, anxiety.
- Irritability.
- There is a complete lack of initiatives, and enthusiasm decreases.
- There comes disappointment in the work and a constant pessimistic attitude is traced.
- There is indifference to what is happening.
As a rule, employees can not independently determine that they have the above-mentioned problems. But all this is clearly visible from the outside.
And a manager is the person who should timely monitor negative trends among their subordinates and take concrete steps to eliminate them. Higher managers should identify stress in lower managers.
Let’s take a closer look what organizational techniques and strategies will help to reduce employee burnout.
Methods to fight burnout
A lot of research and theoretical resources rely on personal strategies to prevent stress and professional burnout. But the issue we have outlined above (a person usually cannot detect burnout signs on their own) nullifies all these research and theoretical works.
What can modern management offer? Burnout can and should be treated as a dynamic process. This means that it will have its own qualitative and quantitative indicators, it can be predicted, detected, and it can be managed like any other process.
Stress management deals with this issue.
In order to identify professional burnout and stress in time, specific numerical indicators of professional stress for different categories of employees should be created within the company.
To obtain numerical values and fill in these scales, various testing techniques must be used. If there are no ready-made methods, they can be developed independently. For this purpose it is necessary to ‘inventory’ the key performance indicators of departments and services, positions, as well as existing or possible symptoms of burnout, and on their basis make a list of key stress factors.
To collect indicators, it is most logical to use special questionnaires or testing, including interactive testing.
Then, for each stress factor, a separate strategy for minimizing its impact should be developed. In many enterprises, the subject will have its own peculiarities — there is no ideal general recipe and cannot exist.
However, many types of problems can be repeated in different industries, so it is possible to develop general principles for them. More about them below.
Universal methods of reducing employee burnout
- Regular communication with subordinates on general and personal topics to identify problems, gather complaints and improve understanding, to increase authority and significance.
- Organizing cultural events — outings, corporate training, team building, group games and other leisure activities inside or outside the company.
- Periodic assessment of employee workload or episodic assessment, for example, in case of increased seasonal demand or after mass dismissal of employees. If necessary, revising norms and expanding staffing levels for balancing. Regular review of work schedules.
- Identification of conflict situations within the team and their successful resolution with minimal losses for all parties.
- Receiving feedback from subordinates on problems with specific business processes and situations within the company that can be improved.
- Proper management of labour indicators, especially those that affect the bonus part of the salary, such as sales plans, number of new deals, etc.
- Ensuring management transparency and a common environment for communication, task setting and tracking.
- Development and implementation of accessible channels of communication with superior management in case of conflicts with direct management.
- Maximum automation of routine labour.
- Ensuring internal corporate traditions and introducing rewards for professional achievements (e.g., a system of gifts and awards for professional and public holidays, bonuses for length of service and/or qualifications).
- Periodic rotation of employees within the company — to minimize the effect of fatigue from the same tasks.
- Involvement of a competitive system with additional rewards, both tangible and intangible.
- Corporate training and professional development.
Please note! Some of these activities, such as management transparency, setting and controlling tasks, assessing workload, ensuring communication and discussion of work issues, and more, can be realized through software tools such as Projecto.
Projecto is a cloud-based organizer that does not require long training, installation of any software on the workplace, lengthy implementation process and other complex activities directly related to additional stress.
Although software alone cannot solve the problem of burnout, the right software in the workplace will help to make tasks clear, put everything in its place and minimize employee stress due to forgetting something or misunderstanding something in the work process. And this is one of the important factors in creating a comfortable atmosphere and normalizing the workload, which will leave people with time and energy for their personal life and a full rest.
