Why Avoiding Employee Burnout is Essential for Companies and Their Workers

In today's fast-paced and competitive business landscape, companies strive for success and growth. However, amidst the race for success, the well-being of employees is often overlooked. Employee burnout has emerged as a significant concern, affecting both the workforce and the overall company performance. This blog explores the critical reasons why avoiding employee burnout is not just a compassionate choice but a strategic imperative for companies and their workers alike.

What Is Employee Burnout?

Employee burnout is a type of workplace stress – but not necessarily caused simply by an over-demanding workload. The person suffering from employee burnout probably doesn’t realize at first that it is happening to them. They say, for example, that a frog could boil to death without feeling any discomfort – as it is a cold-blooded creature that adapts to the temperature of its environment. In a similar way, employee burnout can ‘creep up’ on a person. As deadlines get shorter and various workplace issues conspire to cause employee burnout, victims will most likely keep adapting to these conditions, but then, one day, often suddenly, it all goes badly wrong, and the worker can become seriously mentally and even physically ill. This is when you should think about taking an extended break from your job, and it is it's worth looking into sabbatical leave.

What are the early symptoms of employee burnout?

One of the first tell-tale signs of employee burnout is the emotional exhaustion of the sufferer. The slightest setback can cause them to burst into tears or simply not function for the rest of the day. A psychologist specializing in treating employee burnout gave an example:

“One evening, a patient of mine had a particularly hard day at work. It was wintertime and she was suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) as well as employee burnout. She told me how she arrived home to her empty apartment in darkness and walked in, flicking the light switch to illuminate the hallway. The bulb blew at that instant. But rather than just cursing mildly and using the torch on her phone to find a replacement bulb from a kitchen drawer, she simply found her way to her bedroom, got into bed fully clothed, and cried herself to sleep.”

Employee burnout can lead to plain and simple depression, in fact, it may well be another phrase for exactly that, clinical depression caused by events in the workplace. Depression is a condition that tends to recur if its primary source isn’t dealt with. In short, things need to change in the patient’s life. So how can both employers and employees help to prevent this debilitating condition from occurring?

What causes employee burnout?

First of all, the office should be an enjoyable place to work. Employees need the right tools to do their jobs well; one example is Ongage, a simple and effective e-mail marketing platform that takes much of the stress out of daily interactions with potential customers. But when systems, procedures, and interpersonal relationships at work go wrong, these are the initial causes of employee burnout. Some of those causes are quite surprising:

• Excessive workload – having too much to do, with not enough time to do it, is a surefire way to cause employee burnout if it extends for more than a few days at a time. When tasks start piling up, with no end in sight of a realistic date when there might be a let-up, the stress becomes overwhelming. With all this Big Data flying around the internet, sometimes, the more we find out about it – the less we actually learn, and the more stressful things get.
• Boredom and tedious repetition – It might sound ridiculous, but a lack of interesting work can also contribute to employee burnout. It’s not so much about not having enough to do, but rather constantly repetitive tedious work with zero job satisfaction just leads people to be completely disaffected. There’s an old expression ‘the devil finds work for idle hands’ Likewise, people who are bored can start to get up to malicious or destructive tasks simply to take their mind off the tedium.
• Underpayment – When employees feel that they’re not being sufficiently rewarded, again, they become distracted from tasks based on an attitude of ‘Why should I care? -they don’t value me anyway’. Feeling undervalued can also lead to depression and consequent burnout.
• Workplace culture – The general culture of the office and management’s style of leadership can be a significant contributor to burnout. If employees simply don’t look forward to coming to work, dreading that first logging on to their workstation each morning, it won’t be long before they leave to find a better job or, in the short term, start taking excessive sick leave.
• Micromanaging pressures – one thing that is guaranteed to make a worker feel incompetent, undervalued, and slave-driven is some manager heading up to their desk every half an hour or bombarding them with emails like: ‘Have you done task X as yet, we need it straight away.’ The end result is an employee who no longer feels in control of their workflow, and becomes disinterested or overly stressed. In short, one of the major causes of employee burnout is excessive micromanagement – leading to significantly reduced productivity. People generally work best when they are trusted to do a task. The manager says: ‘We’re relying on you for this Chad, and we know a guy with your skill and professionalism won’t let us down…’ That’s the way to make employees feel valued, avoiding burnout.

Is employee burnout common?

For all this doom and gloom, how widespread is employee burnout? A survey by Deloitte in 2015 indicated that of 1000 US professional workers, 77% had cited burnout in their current or immediately previous job, which had happened more than once.

So that’s over three-quarters of an office workforce is burned out at any one time if the office culture is toxic or contains many of the potential causes of burnout. That’s going to be a lot of people off sick and looking actively for other jobs – not a good statistic by any means.

Studies have also found that workplace burnout can also be seasonal. Look again at the example of the woman who was suffering from SAD who took to her bed due to a blown lightbulb; apparently, in the UK, around 24% of employees suffering reported that it was worse at certain times of the year, January being the worst, returning to a job they didn’t enjoy after a long Christmas holiday and short hours of daylight.

Consequences of employee burnout

• Unforced workplace errors – When employees go through burnout, they make a lot more mistakes than usual as they become disengaged from caring about their work and are less inclined to be careful.
• Lack of motivation – Clearly, if you’re finding your job stressful – then you’re not going to be motivated to succeed. In fact, the reverse might apply – employees start doing malicious acts of sabotage or make deliberate ‘mistakes’ as a way of getting back at their employer for causing their misery. How many people can be in a bar with their friends on a Friday night, then wake up on a Saturday already dreading their return to work 48 hours hence? What used to be called the ‘Monday Blues’ is just an early sign of employee burnout.
• High Staff Turnover – If people are constantly leaving to work for competitors, there’s got to be something wrong with the general culture of an organization’s workplace. As well as reputational damage, constant recruitment of new hires is expensive and leads to gross inefficiencies, when a significant proportion of any workforce are all ‘newbies’.
• Loss of customers - If employees are offhand and inefficient due to burnout, that is going to be quickly reflected in a lack of repeat business. Obviously, employee burnout has a measurable and very significant impact on any company’s bottom line.

How to stop employee burnout from happening?

Preventing employee burnout is crucial for maintaining a healthy and productive work environment. Here are some strategies to stop employee burnout from happening:

Consign multitasking to the bin!

People constantly ‘context switching’ between tasks doesn’t make them more productive, just more stressed and exhausted. Encouraging employees to turn off various communication tools like e-mail, Slack, and others whilst they focus on one particular task is healthy. Finish that document, save it to a folder then turn on your e-mail, take 15 minutes to deal with messages- turn it off again and move on to the next task on the list. It’s surprising how much more effective and less tired people become.

Management should lead by example

If your workforce mainly works from home, or if a manager is still working after, say, 6 pm, don’t send an email requesting a task that evening, which often carries the implication of a required reply ASAP. Use a scheduler on the email client to send it at 9 am the next morning. Employees won’t feel the need to be working until all hours.

Turn work/life balance into reality

This could include strategies such as:

• Strictly no emailing or phone calls over the weekend. Foster the concept that responses should be based on the quality of their content, not how quickly they are sent.
• Employers can also allow ‘mental health days and flexible working hours. Some people work best in the small hours, so if they work from home, you can allow a few hours ‘swapped’ from daytime to do this – but it must be at the employee’s request, not a management edict!
• Listen to your workers - schedule regular review meetings and appraisals, and encourage constructive criticism from staff, if they feel that they have a ‘voice’ burnout is much less likely to happen.
• Provide opportunities for employees to gain new skills and ever-expand their portfolio of professional development, and above all, ensure that employees have the resources and support they need to work in a happy and friendly environment. Windows that don’t open, air-conditioning that doesn’t work, kettles and toasters broke in the staff kitchen- all these things conspire to demoralize and contribute to burnout. Spending $25 on a new kettle might mean the difference between someone looking for a new job, as they think that their employer can’t even be bothered to let them make coffee in the afternoon.

Finally, in today’s workplace, it’s important to consider the difficulties and potential conflicts between cross-generational teams. As people are living and working longer, it’s not uncommon now for workplaces to include Boomers, Millennials and Gen Z. Boomers refer to a demographic of people born between 1950 and 1964, millennials born between 1981 to 2000, and Gen Z workers will have been born after 2001.

Clearly, one of the biggest challenges for Boomers is adopting new technology; they have all the wisdom of decades of experience but might struggle with video conferencing software like Troop Messenger, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams. In terms of work styles, younger people may prefer being able to work flexibly, whereas the older generations think of fixed hours as job security and are very accustomed to a nine-to-five schedule.

Then there are communication preferences, older people often prefer calling on the phone or walking up to a desk and communicating with a colleague directly. Younger people call this practice ‘desk bombing;’ and find it irritating – preferring to send an email with their query.

All these issues can be resolved by simply educating each age group about the way that their older or younger colleagues prefer to work and why- people often adapt very quickly when they understand the world from another person’s perspective.

All in all, employee burnout doesn’t have to happen – we only need to treat each other as we ourselves would prefer to be treated. And remember, human beings have two ears and one mouth – that’s because they should spend more time listening than talking. It’s a simple solution – but it works.