How to Prevent Employee Burnout Before It Festers in the Workplace

Welcome to The Talent Marketplace by Fuel50. We share exclusive insights on employee engagement, career mobility, talent retention, skills development, talent intelligence, talent visibility, and more to support a successful transformation of the talent experience and help future-proof your workforce.

Feeling overwhelmed with heavy workloads, long hours, and deadline pressures is a common experience for many in the workplace. However, when these stresses become constant and relentless without alleviation, it pushes employees to burnout, negatively impacting their well-being and performance.

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines burnout as “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” WHO characterizes burnout with three factors:

• Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion
• Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job
• Reduced professional efficacy

According to HRE and research from Future Forum, employee burnout caused by stress in the workplace has reached new heights since their research began in May 2021. In their survey of almost 10,000 employees, 42% of workers reported feeling burnt out. These feelings won’t be going away any time soon. The ongoing impact of the pandemic and increased economic uncertainty is expected to exacerbate feelings of burnout for years to come.

While often incorrectly perceived as a mental health issue that an employee must deal with on their own, burnout is in fact an organizational issue that needs to be fixed at the root cause. SHRM calls for organizations to take a hard look at their workplace practices that are triggering stress and burnout for their employees:

“Burnt-out individuals show that there are urgent problems to be addressed at the heart of any organization. The real solution is to redesign workplaces so that the causes of burnout are no longer so frequent or intense. In other words, how can chronic job stressors be successfully managed at their source?” 

What Causes Employee Burnout?

To prevent and mitigate employee burnout, leaders must first understand its cause to better match policies to their people. According to Jennifer Moss, Author of The Burnout Pandemic, many organizations attempt to reduce burnout with quick fixes that simply aren’t effective long term. To counter this, leaders must prioritize listening to their employees and understanding their situation before implementing new policies designed to help.

Moss explains that there are 6 main causes of employee burnout:

1. Workload: Long hours and overworking can lead to exhaustion, stress, and loss of sleep.
2. Perceived lack of control: Micromanaged employees start to feel demotivated and discouraged.
3. Lack of reward or recognition: Doing work that is not recognized or rewarded by management contributes to an individual’s unhappiness at work.
4. Poor relationships: Having poor relationships with co-workers and leaders can lead to employees feeling isolated and disconnected.
5. Lack of fairness: Unfair treatment and bias in the workplace results in a higher likelihood of job dissatisfaction and employee burnout.
6. Values mismatch: Misalignment between an individual’s goals and values and an organization’s goals and values can result in disengaged employees.

Preventing Employee Burnout Starts With Open Communication

Leaders wanting to prevent burnout in the workplace must encourage open communication and ask the right questions to uncover why employees may be experiencing burnout – what are my employee's pain points? What are their frustrations? Why does our work environment lack the conditions for them to flourish? How can we support them moving forward?

Gaining answers to these questions will offer a good starting point for where things may need to change. While every organization will have its own challenges to overcome, there are strategies that are commonly used to help build a healthy workplace culture that stands against employee burnout.

Improve Employee Engagement Within the Workplace

Employee burnout is tied closely with employee engagement. When employees are engaged, they feel fulfilled, happy, and satisfied at work. Improving their connection and engagement with work can increase overall job satisfaction and simultaneously reduce stress.

According to Positive Psychology, engagement can be promoted through a culture of:

• Transparency: Give employees insights into how their work aligns with organizational goals.
• Leverage their skills: When employees are exercising their skills and strengths, they feel more competent and engaged.
• Autonomy. Employees are reportedly 43% less likely to experience high levels of burnout when they have the autonomy to decide how and when they complete their work.
• Recognition. Feeling supported and recognized for their work reduces stress and promotes a sense of belonging.
• Purpose. Feeling a sense of purpose in their work adds meaning to otherwise tedious tasks. Share the company’s goals and communicate their positive effect on the community to engage and excite employees.

Encourage Regular Check-Ins and Career Conversations

You won’t know how to support your people unless you understand how they are feeling. Regular check-ins are an important tool for leaders to connect with their team members and identify potential issues before they become bigger problems. Ask them how they are feeling about their current workload, if they are experiencing any issues or have any feedback, and whether there is anything you can do to support them.  

In addition to regular check-ins, implementing quarterly career conversations can help build a stronger leader-employee relationship. The goal of these conversations is to uncover your team members' values, goals, and passions so you can better support their development, growth, and progression.

Fuel50’s Talent Marketplace helps facilitate powerful career conversations through personalization exercises that reveal an employee’s career engagers, values, and motivators. Having a better understanding of what is important to your people enables you to connect them to relevant learning programs, internal opportunities, and projects to help them succeed and grow. This contributes to an employee’s engagement and happiness at work.

Not only do career conversations help in boosting employee engagement and happiness, but it supports the retention of key talent across an organization. An employee at a Financial Institution shares her experience of burnout in a role that didn’t match her values, and how Fuel50 led her into a more fulfilling role within the organization:

“I did my first five years in a very regimented, almost government style- business function. I got really unmotivated. I was nearly burnt out as that function was overworked, people were working crazy hours, I was in tears by 1pm in the afternoon…

Then I did the Career Engager exercise within the Talent Marketplace. I felt like it just really proved to me that I was in the wrong role. My results were clearly aligned to something that is making a difference...

This new awareness meant that I started to look around for other opportunities which were more aligned with my results. I started actively looking for roles [within the organization] in Well-being, Recognition, and HR. I got a new job in one of those areas three months ago. The Talent Marketplace helped me get the push that I needed.

"The difference being in a new role now? It is night and day. I went from being burnt out to now being happy to wake up in the morning to go to work. This new role is more like me. If my company did not have the Talent Marketplace available for me to access the Career Engager exercise, I for sure would have left the organization.”

Promote a Healthy Work-Life Balance

If we’ve learned anything from the pandemic, it’s that employees value work-life balance. It sparked a desire for flexibility to allow people to better manage their personal and work commitments. According to Forbes, employees with flexibility showed higher scores for productivity, connection, and company culture.

Each employee has different circumstances and needs, so it’s up to leaders to understand what balance looks like for each team member. While every role may not have the flexibility for an employee to choose where and when they get their work done, it’s important to have an open discussion about which parts of the work schedule may or may not be flexible and come up with alternative options to ensure employees feel supported to prioritize their responsibilities at home.

With burnout on the rise, it’s vital for organizations to tackle its causes head-on before it spreads further. An open dialogue between leaders and employees is the first step to gaining the mutual understanding and transparency needed to alleviate the stressors that cause burnout and ultimately support employees to thrive, grow, and be their best at work.  

“Though employees are ultimately responsible for their own happiness, it is our responsibility to provide the conditions that support, and not detract, from their happiness,” Jennifer Moss

Enjoying our newsletters? You may also like our Talent Experience Podcast, where we chat with leading HR analysts, industry influencers, and other thought leaders about their insights, stories, and advice on creating better work experiences. Available on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

For more research and insights on how to future-proof your organization, visit the Fuel50 blog.