What can you do to prevent employee burnout?
Employee burnout can be very serious and can lead to high employee turnover, low productivity, and a variety of health problems. It’s important to take steps to ensure that your workplace isn’t causing workers to become burnt-out, and actively preventing burnout from happening in the first place.
What is burnout?
Burnout can happen when employees experience work-related stress resulting from possible factors such as a work-life imbalance, a lack of support from their manager, or no control over day-to-day work activities.
Employees who experience burnout can take months to recover fully and can cause workplace disengagement, and even short-to-long-term leaves of absence. Burnout can cause symptoms like:
-Depression
-Physical or emotional exhaustion
-Irritability
-Difficulty concentrating
-Sleep disruption
Is there any way to prevent burnout?
The best way to address burnout is to put a program in place to prevent it. While there are different working conditions in every organization, here are some suggestions on how to prevent employee burnout:
1. Implement Manager Training
Offering basic training to managers so they can spot signs of burnout is an important preventative practice. Managers should monitor workloads and check in regularly with employees to make sure fatigue levels are being managed. Getting input from employees makes them feel valued.
2. Prioritize Work-life Balance
When an organization prioritizes work-life balance with policies and solutions to achieve this balance, all employees benefit. Not sending emails after hours, and contacting employees during their off time are just small improvements with big rewards. Try implementing early closures on Fridays during the summer, or monitoring vacation and personal time to make sure employees are getting enough rest.
3. Offer a Wellness Program
If your organization has a Honeybee Allowance Account available to employees, your wellness program is already covered. Honeybee Allowance Accounts can be used for fitness classes, yoga, and even health club memberships. Plus, if your organization has a Honeybee Health Account, employees can use their benefits to cover massage therapy, psychotherapists and counseling. Giving your employees unlimited time to use these benefits creates an environment of wellness.
4. Provide an Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
An Employee Assistance Program (EAP) is a benefit program that assists employees with problems helping them with their health and mental well-being. An EAP provider like Inkblot Therapy may offer counseling to help workers deal with stress and other personal problems that may be affecting their job performance, or just to aid them in their everyday wellness.
There are many things your organization can do to prevent employee burnout. From managerial training to implementing wellness programs and best practices, a focus on well-being leads to happy employees.
Did you know that you can add an Employee Assistance Program (EAP) to your Health Benefits plan?
The success of your business depends on the well-being of your people.