Employee burnout at work is a regular occurrence in stable times of life, never mind during an ongoing pandemic where the workplace isn’t as we know it.
Lower productivity, emotional and physical exhaustion, lack of concentration, less recognition from managers, negativity, and a decline in health are all signs of burnout at work.
If you as the employer don’t recognise the signs of burnout within your employees, you could risk losing them. A high turnover of staff isn’t great for any business, it doesn’t look good when hiring in the future either.
What you’ll be glad to know is, it’s possible to bounce back from burnout. By prioritising employee wellbeing, you can bring your best team to work every day and ensure they never experience burnout.
In this Wellspace blog, we are going to focus on employee burnout and how you as the employer can help your employees avoid burnout at work.
What Is Employee Burnout?
Employee burnout is related to a long existence of work-related stress. Burnout at work is a state of physical and emotional exhaustion that also involves a loss of identity. Burnout isn’t a medical diagnosis. Some experts think that other conditions, such as depression, are behind burnout.
Helping Employees Avoid Burnout At Work
Understand The Signs Of Burnout At Work
Burnout doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a gradual process over time that displays itself in a variety of ways. Training your managers or senior employees to understand the key signs of burnout at work is crucial for longevity.
According to the World Health Organisation, the symptoms of burnout are:
- Individuals feel depleted or exhausted
- Employees are mentally distant from their job or have negative feelings or cynicism about their job
- Employees have reduced professional efficiency.
- Lack of motivation
- Making more mistakes than usual
- Trouble concentrating.
To take a proactive approach to burnout in the workplace, you need to learn these signs, look out for them in your colleagues, and communicate with them if you feel that they might be at risk.
Offer Flexibility
As we’ve just found out, burnout is caused by a combination of workplace stressors. To help your employees keep on top of the demands of both work and their personal lives, be flexible and offer flexibility.
Whether someone needs to go to the doctor’s, take their car to the garage, pick up their children from school or work from home to be in for a delivery, your employees should have the opportunity to fit work around their lives.
If it isn’t feasible to give your employees complete flexibility over their working hours, a flexible approach will do. By doing this, you’ll make it easier for your employees to maintain a good work-life balance because they’ll be able to better manage external pressures as well as keep on top of their workload.
Prioritise Wellbeing
The best way to help avoid burnout at work is by prioritising wellbeing. You can help your employees build their mental resilience and reduce their stress levels by providing wellbeing support.
Our Workplace app allows managers to oversee how their employees are feeling. Employees will be able to track and improve their wellbeing through a gamification app. It allows you to learn strategies to manage different areas of their mental health from stress to anxiety.
Whenever they need to, they can tap into the content and access useful advice from 1:1 support to a variety of new blogs being uploaded each week they can resonate with.
Other elements of wellbeing such as physical and financial wellbeing can also feed into people’s stress levels, so it’s important to take a holistic approach and include a wide range of resources, services and tools and Wellspace can provide it with all!
Communication
Make sure every voice is heard. As a manager, it’s your job to motivate and lead your employees. Hold regular 1:1 meetings, focus on the positives before communicating the negatives, send cheers and show your appreciation regularly.
Avoid Burnout At Work With Wellspace
Avoid burnout at work with the Wellspace App. Wellspace is on a mission to revolutionise workplace wellbeing. If you’d like more information on how we can help your business, then contact us, or if you prefer, call us on 0808 178 0748.
We are a team of wellbeing experts who thrive off offering guidance and support on issues that will inevitably take place in your company at some time.
