5 Effective Strategies to Address Employee Burnout in an Organization
Gallup’s survey reveals that 76% of employees experience workplace burnout at least sometimes, with 28% reporting feeling burnt out “very often” or “always.”
The statistics mentioned above indicate that numerous employees constantly experience burnout-related issues. This is mainly due to unrealistic deadlines, unclear job expectations, long work hours, etc. It can result in lowered productivity, high turnover, prolonged absenteeism, etc.
However, organizations can implement specific measures that can help minimize or prevent burnout and create a positive work environment. This, in turn, helps improve team performance and the firm’s bottom line.
This blog discusses the signs of employee burnout and how SAVIOM’s resource management solutions can help combat it.
Let’s begin.
Signs of Employee Burnout in an Organization
According to the World Health Organization, employee burnout is a phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. Furthermore, it can be characterized by feelings of depletion, exhaustion, negativity, and lowered professional efficacy.
When employees feel burnout, it hampers their performance, affects work quality, and tends to make more mistakes. Therefore, organizations must observe the symptoms and take corrective actions before it becomes a severe issue.
Here are 5 essential signs of employee burnout to watch out for:
- Increased absenteeism
Employee absenteeism is a common sign of burnout. When resources experience exhaustion, fatigue, etc., they might take more unplanned leaves to alleviate their work stress and cope with burnout. Additionally, they may try to avoid the work environment due to a lack of motivation to perform their respective tasks.
- Lack of engagement
When employees lose interest in work, struggle to complete their tasks on time, or make frequent mistakes, it becomes a symptom of burnout. Due to the high-stress levels and exhaustion, they can become disengaged from daily tasks or find work monotonous and meaningless.
- Lowered productivity and performance
When organizations face performance and productivity issues with employees, it shows that resources are experiencing burnout constantly. When they cannot cope with current deadlines, are overwhelmed with work, or feel a loss of purpose, it reflects on their overall work efficiency.
- Decreased personal health
Employees undergoing persistent work pressure are likely to experience deterioration in physical health. It manifests in symptoms like panic attacks, migraines, chest pain, loss of appetite, etc.
- Increased workplace conflicts
Symptoms like irritability and sensitivity in employees are a clear indication of burnout. Feeling overwhelmed and exhausted can cause high emotional sensitivity and lead to conflicts between coworkers.
Knowing some of the main symptoms of employee burnout, let’s understand the ways to tackle it in an organization.
Five Ways to Prevent Employee Burnout
If left unaddressed, employee burnout can adversely impact organizational growth and financial stability. Therefore, companies must implement effective strategies to minimize burnout and improve employee engagement.
Listed below are the ways to eliminate burnout.
1. Set realistic deadlines considering employees’ leaves
Before initiating a project, managers must prepare a work breakdown structure (WBS) that includes tasks and sub-tasks. It will enable them to assess the skills, timelines, and number of resources required to complete the project’s activities. This will help managers establish realistic deadlines and deploy resources based on the criticality of tasks.
Additionally, managers must review the resource schedules and consider their leaves before allocating them to ongoing or future projects. This will ensure the projects are happening smoothly and help employees take time off to rejuvenate themselves, thereby minimizing burnout.
2. Allocate resources based on skills & availability
Before allocating resources to projects, managers must assess their attributes like skills, capacity, availability, competencies, experience, etc. This will ensure competent resource allocation, preventing under/over-skilled employees from being assigned to specific project tasks.
Moreover, when resources are deployed to projects based on their available capacity, it will prevent under/overallocation and maintain a balanced workload. This will reduce employees’ stress levels and enhance engagement, thereby reducing the risk of burnout and ensuring successful project delivery.
3. Monitor resource utilization levels regularly
Managers must constantly track employees’ utilization levels to prevent workload imbalances. When resources are persistently overutilized, it will lead to burnout. This will directly result in productivity and performance issues, reduced deliverable quality, and unplanned attrition.
Identifying over/underutilization in advance will enable managers to take corrective measures to optimize the workloads. Additionally, it will help managers mobilize resources working on non-billable tasks to billable/ strategic activities. This way, organizations can prevent burnout and improve billable utilization rates.
Advertisement
4. Apply appropriate optimization techniques
When resources are allocated to projects or tasks beyond their capacity, it increases stress levels and leads to burnout. Therefore, managers must implement appropriate optimization techniques such as resource leveling and smoothing to ensure that the employees are neither under/overloaded with work.
Managers can implement resource leveling for projects with flexible timelines where they can adjust start and end dates per the employee’s availability and schedule. Contrarily, they can apply resource smoothing for time-sensitive projects through which the work of overloaded resources can be redistributed, or additional employees can be added. This will ensure uniform workload distribution and lower the risk of burnout.
5. Build the right mix of contingent & permanent staff
Most organizations struggle to complete projects with the available resources during demand peaks. Hence, they over-allocate their existing employees to meet the project deadlines. However, constantly overloading the staff will affect their productivity, thereby leading to burnout.
Therefore, organizations can hire contingent workforce or outsource the work to global employees to reduce unwanted stress and enable employees to focus better on high-value tasks or projects. Thus, organizations can minimize project resource costs, maintain the workflow, and prevent burnout.
These are some of the best techniques to prevent burnout in an organization. Let’s learn how a resource management tool can help address burnout.
How Does Advanced Resource Management Software Help Overcome Employee Burnout?
A next-gen resource management solution like Saviom, with its advanced capabilities, will help employees work more productively. It enables organizations to optimize their resources and tackle burnout effectively.
The tool’s 360-degree visibility into resource attributes like availability, skills, capacity, etc., helps managers identify and allocate competent resources to projects at the right time and cost. This will help prevent under/over-allocation of skilled resources to projects/tasks.
Moreover, the forecasting and capacity planning features enable managers to foresee and plan for pipeline project demand. Based on that, they can create the right mix of permanent and on-demand resources to meet seasonal fluctuations effectively.
In addition, the system offers real-time reports like forecast vs. actuals, utilization heat maps, availability, etc. These enable managers to forecast and track availability, monitor utilization levels, compare them against actuals, identify variances, and take remedial measures in case of over/underutilization.
Furthermore, the software’s open-seat feature allows employees to choose projects of their interest. Working on projects aligning with their skills will motivate employees, improve engagement, and prevent burnout.
Lastly, the tool’s timesheet feature helps managers to monitor the employee’s leaves and their time spent on various tasks. Based on this, managers can set realistic deadlines to complete the project activities.
Thus, robust resource management software can address employee burnout and boost overall productivity.
Conclusion
Resources are the driving force for the success of an organization. Hence, it’s crucial for firms to take care of their employees’ well-being and recognize their efforts. This will motivate them to work harder and achieve better results. Implementing effective strategies and advanced resource management software will enable organizations to prevent burnout and improve the resource health index.