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Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress. It comes with feeling overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and unable to meet constant demands. As the stress continues, people begin to lose interest and motivation, have major sleep issues, as well as other psychological and physical problems.
Burnout reduces productivity and saps energy, leaving people to feel increasingly helpless, hopeless, cynical, and resentful.
How to know when employees are experiencing burnout?
The main signs of burnout at work are reduced productivity, emotional and physical exhaustion, lack of concentration, a drop in recognition from managers, negativity, and a decline in health.
Burnout is more common in the more engaged employees. An employee has to be all in and care deeply about their work to get to the point of feeling burned out. That is why employees’ burnout can lead to high turnover of your top performers.
So, how can you prevent your employees from burning out?
Make inclusion and wellbeing a part of your work culture.
When an organization makes inclusion and wellbeing a priority and provides the right environment for people to be themselves, feel safe, and provide adequate resources for employees to live healthier lives, they take better care of themselves and this reduces the risks of a professional burnout.
On the other hand, if an organization's culture promotes working excessively for long hours, working during personal time, and generally putting work ahead of family, these burnout-inducing habits are going to be difficult to break.
According to Gallup, there are 5 key elements of well-being: financial stability, physical health, social life, community, and career. All these elements are interrelated and extremely important to lead a healthy and happy life with no signs of burning out.
Train your managers to prevent burnout.
Managers have a major influence on the working experience of the employees. So, they have to know how to reduce stress at work.
Managers are to set clear expectations, remove barriers, facilitate collaboration, and ensure that employees feel fully supported to do their best work. Only so managers can help employees prevent burnouts before they happen and help them manage the signs and symptoms of burnouts when it arises.
Encourage teamwork and shared accountability.
When people collaborate and support one another, the working process seems easier and challenges – smaller. This greatly reduces stress levels and helps to avoid burnout.
Finally, burnout is a major problem most business leaders today pay no attention to. Learn how to prevent and combat this problem among your employees to make them much happier and more productive. Less burnouts bring greater achievements!
I'm a connector, leader, change-maker, mother and coach. My experience of going through many burnouts motivated me to find solutions to improve the culture in the workplace and achieve more.
