How Can I Reduce Employee Burnout?
Burnout is a term that is often used to describe large amounts of stress which can affect a person’s mental and physical health. This can occur within the workplace due to large amounts of pressure, increasingly high workloads, and even problems within an employee’s personal life. By finding ways to ease strain, and identify the signs before they become a problem, you may be better equipped to look after your team members, improve their overall wellbeing, and reduce the likelihood of long periods of sickness due to stress.
Simplify Systems
When the current systems used within a company are outdated, or simply overly complicated, this can cause a headache for those who need to use them. One example of this can be the methods in which your HR team operate. Rather than expecting all information to be fed to these team members, you can reduce their workload significantly through the use of self-service HR software, which will give employees more power to update their details, make requests, and even complete onboarding processes. In turn, your HR team will then be able to give more time to recruiting and in-house tasks.
Keep Communication Open
Whether burnout is caused by issues within the workplace, poor health, or problems within an employee’s personal life, it can be a good idea to allow them to discuss these problems, or additional needs, with their line manager. Even if there is nothing that the company can do to aid the employee, it means that they will be aware of the problems, which can help within itself. At other times, this communication may allow a company to be that much more flexible with an employee’s needs, such as requiring time off for appointments. Some companies have found that the more compassion they show towards their employees, treating them like individuals rather than cogs within a machine, the lower the overall rate of stress, and the higher the positivity can be, within the workplace as a whole.
Create a Work/Life Balance
Even though it can be great to have employees who are willing to go the extra mile to meet a company’s needs, it is important that they also consider their own balance between undertaking work and engaging in a meaningful personal life. Enforcing the need for employees to take breaks, not work during their lunch period, and leave the office by a certain time each day, can help to avoid a need to stay later, or ignore their own well-being needs, to complete tasks. A work/life balance can help to bolster a person’s mental health which can, in turn, make them more productive during the times when they are at work.
Employee burnout can have devastating consequences on both the employee themselves and the company. By putting your employees’ health before the work undertaken, you will be more likely to have a happier team who are better able to focus on the tasks at hand.