Workplace burnout has reached an all-time high during the COVID-19 pandemic. Employees are plagued with uncertainty and heightened stress. They are feeling exhausted and unmotivated at work and home. While this hurts employers, it has a detrimental effect on an employee’s long-term physical and mental health. After all, burnout actually alters the brain’s neural circuits. As a result, our brains are physically changing after prolonged exhaustion. These findings show the detriment of not taking burnout seriously and reveal that the only effective way to mitigate the effects of burnout is to prevent it altogether.
Knowing this, it becomes critical to play offense and spot signs of workplace burnout early on in your employees. As a business owner, you must act swiftly and guarantee that you can avoid the consequences of mass employee burnout. Here are three ways to act:
1. Anonymous Workplace Surveys
One of the best ways to be proactive is through anonymous workplace surveys that ask for feedback on operations and managerial styles. Anonymous surveys create open lines of communication and allow employees to feel more comfortable providing feedback, which can help mitigate burnout. Burnout often starts as passive burnout, which consists of feelings that are more intense than the average setback at work and often lead to despondency. By administering anonymous surveys early, you can help prevent passive burnout from spiraling into signs of active burnout (frequent outbursts of frustration or verbal discontent), where it might be too late to address.
2. Challenge the Culture of Immediacy
In the modern world, there is a constant pressure to always be more. Whether it be more productive, delivering faster results, or increasing your overall output. However, this mindset isn’t always practical. It can create unnecessary workplace stress that contributes to burnout. Consider asking yourself questions like the following to engage your employees:
- “Can I extend this deadline?”
- “Is my current staff operating beyond my capacity, and should I hire additional work to complete this project?”
- “Is there a way to alter workplace expectations to be more conducive to high performance?”
3. Compensate Your Workforce Well
One of the best ways to boost workplace morale and motivate employees is through providing competitive pay or incentives. When employees’ pay reflects their efforts, they will feel less compelled to leave for your competitor next door because of their missing out on. However, you shouldn’t focus only on compensation; compensation can often be a mere patchwork approach to a much larger problem of burnout.
Here at NTG Staffing, we want to help you navigate the waters of ever changing workplace trends and help fill your staffing needs when they arise. We have structured our Recruiting group to strategically best serve the needs of our clients. We invite you to contact us today for more details on how we can help transform your workforce to help your business succeed.
