How To Avoid Employee Burnout

Employee Burnout

Burnout is something that the majority, if not all, of employees will experience at some point in their working lives.

As much as we’d like to, it is impossible to give 100% of effort to everything at all times. Especially when you factor in responsibilities out with the workplace.

Our friends over at Breathe recently commissioned a survey stating that 81% of employees are feeling the impact of burnout from unused holidays.

As an employer, you have a responsibility to actively look after your employee’s wellbeing.

Managing Workloads Effectively

Firstly, you can prevent employee burnout by managing workloads effectively. There is nothing worse than when your to-do list is onto the 3^rd page, and people keep adding to it. Don’t get us wrong, we enjoy being busy, it can sometimes make the day go faster. But not busy to the point where we are continually rushed off of our feet – this is when mistake can start to creep in.

Therefore, we manage workloads effectively within our team by ensuring people have their own clearly defined roles that they can focus on. If their workload is quiet, they can then assist with other work. As they say, teamwork makes the… collaboration fuels success.

Check out our podcast episode below on managing people effectively.

Promote a Healthy Work – Life Balance

As an employer, you can help promote a healthy and positive work – life balance by implementing a hybrid working scheme. This is especially important if you have employees travelling a fair distance to get to the office. We operate with a hybrid working model at The HR Booth for a few reasons. Firstly, it allows employees increased flexibility for dealing with real – life responsibilities such as childcare. Secondly, a few of our team live a longer distance away from the office, therefore we don’t expect them to be working continuously in the office. We offer them the opportunity to do some work at home instead.

How does this help?

This can help with burnout, as if you are stressing about childcare or doing longer travelling, this can turn into burnout. As we mentioned, manage your team effectively by offering them the opportunity to have a good work – life balance, and also trust your employees to implement this correctly.

You can check out our blog on this topic here.

Alternatively, if podcasts are more your thing, then we’ve linked one in below for you.

Keep Employees Engaged

You can ensure your employees keep a high level of enthusiasm and engagement for their work, by offering them skill development opportunities. All employees should have an appetite to learn & develop in employment. During your appraisals with employees, one question could be, “what opportunities would you like, that would help you learn & develop?”. Take on their response and action this appropriately. This is one question that we ask all of our employees at our appraisal meetings.

What you can do

For example, the request could be as simple as looking to gain more experience working with clients. Therefore, at the next appropriate opportunity, that employee could go along to a meeting, shadowing another member of the team at a client meeting. This will provide learning opportunities to the team member, ensuring they are kept engaged in their working environment. These gestures can be simple and easy to implement and can go a long way to benefiting your team and business in the long – run.

Reward Your Team

It is always nice to be recognised by your employers, for good work that you have done. You will find that the morale within the workplace will rise, and motivation may rise too, as other members of the team will be keen for recognition. It helps create a positive culture and one where the full team will pool together to strive for success. For more information on implementing a good workplace culture, have a read at our blog with Alistair here.

Real – Life Examples

This could be in the form of colleague of the month, which is something a lot of our clients already have implemented. Alternatively, at your weekly meetings, you could leave some time allocated within that meeting to ‘shout out’ employees who have delivered a high standard of work that week. Whatever way you do it, make sure employees feel valued and respected.

Taking Regular Breaks

Ensure your team take regular breaks during the day. We regularly make sure our team step away from the computer to get their lunch. It has been pleasing to see our team take the initiative here and go on their own team walks at lunch. However, this is not always possible. Yesterday, our team went to go for a walk at lunchtime and, what can only be described as a hail storm started. But you get the idea! Breaks away from your desk help break up the day – small changes like this can prevent burnout.

Let’s Get Active

You can encourage your team to get up, about and active by implementing a Walk & Talk. This is something that we, at The HR Booth, do on a daily basis. It is an allocated time slot to go a walk as a team and talk about anything non – work related. It is a chance to relax a bit and switch off from our manic working schedules.

What else can I do?

Another example that we have heard from our clients is ‘no – meetings periods’. This is essentially a time period where nobody has any meetings. Ensuring they have a set time to either go get lunch or, if this is happening out with lunch hours, then it gives you time to properly catch up on some work. You can view this as a mindfulness hour. We appreciate that this will only work in some industries. For example, we have meetings with our clients that take priority. However, in this instance we could apply this only to internal meetings. It is a great way to allow everyone to focus, and will also reduce stress levels ( an increased stress level can lead to burnout ), as you know you have a free hour later in the day to catch up on work.

Monitor Stress Levels

Keep an eye on your team by monitoring stress levels and performance. As a line manager, this is likely part of your responsibility anyway. However, always look for a drop in performance or even a drop in mood – as this employee may be experiencing burnout. Regular check – ins and having an open door policy also help here.

Encourage Colleagues Support

It is important that the support comes from within. You will want your employees to be striving for success internally, and this can then be shared out amongst your external audience – whether that be through social media or through your clients. Initially, it will be down to senior management to drive this, then make it clear to your employees that they also have to be supporting each other. This can help create an open culture within the business and your team will thrive.

Get Employee Feedback

Unsure on how to implement this? Then ask your team how best to implement this. You can do this via surveys or face – to – face feedback. It is very simple and quick to set up a Microsoft Forms survey to send out to your team. This can be anonymous if you wish, as this may help your employees be more open with you. Once you have received the feedback, make sure you take time to review it and then implement as and when necessary. This will boost your employee morale, if they see you implementing any of their ideas. This also helps create an open – forum feel and can include ideas that will be directly beneficial to reducing the chances of your employee’s experiencing burnout.

Why not have a listen to one of our previous podcast episodes, in which Alistair chats about the benefits of receiving regular feedback from your team.

As we say, don’t try and burn the candles at both ends. Burnout will often win. Why not consider implementing some of this advice that we’ve shared within this article and see what works for your business. Almost all employees will feel a tiny bit of burnout throughout their working life ( as a minimum ). As their employer, it is up to you to work out how best to help them reduce the effects of burnout. This will come down to the culture that you set within your business and always make sure to operate with an open – door policy, ensuring that employees can come to you with any issues that they may have.

We are here to support you on any workplace related matters. If you have any questions about how best to support your employees, then please feel free to contact us via the contact form at the bottom of this page and we’ll be more than happy to help you.