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Author: Mahendra Gupta

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.

 

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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.

How to optimise resources in matrix organizations?

Matrix organizations have prevailed for decades, predominantly in multi-project environments.

Gallup states that 84% of organizations are matrixed to some extent. A resource pool allocated to cross-departmental projects is typical in a matrixed organization, which means employees have dual or multiple reporting managers. 

Matrix organizations have proven beneficial in terms of breaking traditional silos within the organization, enhancing collaboration, and helping in better decision making.

However, critics have adjudged that managerial conflicts and challenges in monitoring and controlling resources limit such organizations’ effectiveness. Moreover, in matrix organizations, several projects across departments and locations are on the boil. So, shifting priorities that skew resource utilization is quite common. 

Optimizing resources against their availability and competencies is easier said than done.

To meet dynamic resource demands, resource managers end up over or under allocating resources, unintentionally. 

So the question is: How can matrix organizations optimize their resources amid the changing demands of multiple projects?

Many project-intensive businesses are still relying on clunky spreadsheets and homegrown solutions to manage their resources. These legacy systems are cumbersome and fail to mitigate the resource optimization challenges within the modern business ecosystem. To optimally tap your resource pool, you need enterprise-level resource planning and scheduling software. 

The following tips will ensure effective resource optimization in a matrix organization:

1) Enterprise-wide visibility:  Matrix organizations have multiple dimensions, so enterprise visibility is a prerequisite for effective resource optimization. Matrix organizations can benefit from resource management software that provides 360-degree visibility of all your resources and work demands.

Also, complete visibility helps keep track of tasks, resource availability changes, and impact on project health and workforce capacity. Hence, appropriate resourcing treatments are applied to optimize resources in a multi-project environment.


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2) Set clear expectations: According to Gallup, matrixed employees are more engaged than their non-matrixed counterparts. But they lack clarity on expectations at work. Therefore, maintaining open communication, including actionable performance feedback, is necessary for role clarity. It helps keep employees and managers on the same page, but it also drives outcome-driven alliances and informed decision-making.

Mc Kinsey’s research on Organizational Health Index (OHI) reveals that role clarity improves accountability, a critical component of OHI. Role ambiguity is highly pervasive for matrix organizations. So, leaders must ensure setting clear expectations aligned with business objectives is a continuous process. So, instead of annual performance reviews, regular feedback on employee progress can improve overall engagement.

3) Prioritize projects before allocating resources: In a matrix organization, it is common to have multiple active projects demanding a common skilled worker. Ideally, the allocation of highly skilled members should be prioritized for high priority projects. However, the distribution of skilled workers across all the projects is essential, otherwise, one project will get all the focus. 

The organization should also have an out rotation strategy to kick start new projects by pulling out the niche resource from ongoing projects. Accordingly, backfills can be trained and allocated to fill in the vacancies. This way, the current projects can continue their course, while new projects get off the ground on time. 

4) Identify and allocate competencies: One of the crucial steps for resource optimization is competent resource allocation. Most resource planning and scheduling tools help identify and assign the right resource to the right job. Based on criteria like skills, experience, qualification, location, and cost rate, resource managers can make optimal use of the resource pool. 

Besides, these tools’ self-serving model enables users to update their skill and training information, which undergoes verification before approval. So, the resource competencies are up to date in real-time. Subsequently, seamless resource requesting in matrix organizations takes place. 

5) Measure capacity vs. demand: Matrix organizations can vastly benefit from a resource capacity planning tool. It can forecast capacity vs. demand from multiple perspectives like role, department, skills, location, team, etc. The scientific forecasting model helps in identifying excesses or shortages ahead of time. 

Accordingly, resources can be hired, reskilled or upskilled, or juggled around project timelines to attain resource optimization. Besides, predicting resource demand for future or pipeline projects buys you time to have an optimally balanced and skilled resource pool. Having a judicious blend of full-time, part-time, casual, and contractual staff prevents last-minute hiring and firing costs. 

6) Minimize bench time: In large organizations, especially in IT firms, unplanned ramp down on current projects are common. Additionally, if pipeline projects are absent, the bench strength increases. This adversely affects the bottom line and narrows project margins. Foresight into future project vacancies helps identify resources on the bench due to under allocation of work. 

Proper capacity planning will minimize bench time by mobilizing resources from non-billable to billable work. In case benched resources lack the skills needed for a task, upskilling and reskilling them eliminates the hasty hiring process. 

The Takeaway:

Efficient and effective resource optimization within matrix organizations is achievable using modern resource management software. This tool breaks traditional silos within multi-project intensive organizations and facilitates quick reshuffling of resources across departments and locations. As mentioned above, these tips will resolve utilization issues and optimize your resource pool for enhanced profitability.