Burnout is Real: What Every Leaders Must Know to Prevent It

 

If employees in your office experience changes in behavior and emotions. Such as becoming easily irritated, lack of enthusiasm, preferring to be alone, or frequently taking sick leave. You should never take it for granted! Because this can be a sign that your employee is experiencing burnout syndrome!

Burnout syndrome is really dangerous. Because this won’t only affect the employees themselves, but definitely will also affect the performance of the team and the company. To ensure that you can avoid this from happening among your employees, keep on reading to get the full gist!

What is burnout syndrome?

Burnout is a stressful condition that takes place continuously in a person. This can trigger changes in behavior, attitudes, and emotions in a negative direction. Burnout syndrome also means extreme fatigue syndrome that occurs in a person due to prolonged stress that has failed to be handled properly.  This syndrome can lead to mental and physical health problems.

Thus to conclude, work burnout is physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion due to work pressure and the work environment.  For example, the volume of workload is too large, the level of work risk is too high, or the work demands are too heavy. Job burnout is an epidemic in the modern work environment.  And it is most often experienced by employees with high-stress levels of work.

What are the common characteristics of burnout syndrome?

Physical tiredness is when a person feels all the energy within them has been drained because of one thing.  For example, working too hard or studying too hard.

Emotional exhaustion is characterized by a bad mood. Such as feeling alienated, irritable, difficult to focus, worried, cynical, and apathetic.

Mental fatigue is characterized by demotivation, hopelessness, and a feeling of failure (inadequacy).  As well as consider all their efforts in vain and useless.

How to overcome work burnout?

The most effective way to deal with burnout syndrome in employees is to find the biggest stressors in the workplace and fix them. In addition, providing rest for employees is also important as a rehabilitative effort to restore them physically and mentally. Here are some small changes that can help reduce stress and burnout at work.

Give clear boundaries regarding work space and time

Give space and time for employees for their personal lives. Start by not calling or sending emails, chats, and even sending short messages to employees – related to work outside office working hours, even if it is important or urgent. Also, avoid holding office events on weekends even if it’s a casual event.

Avoid hiring employees outside the job description

You should never ask employees to do tasks outside of their responsibility. When you want to hire an employee, always pay attention to what your office needs before creating its job desk. Make sure the employees are well informed of what work responsibility you expect from them.

As a good leader, don’t ask them to do things outside their responsibility, even for something that looks easy, such as asking them to take turns cleaning the office area. This is not right to do, just because you want to save expenses by not hiring a janitorial team. Instead, you can hire office cleaning services Singapore to help clean the office out regularly.

Reduce overtime and set work patterns

Working overtime too often can easily make employees energy drained. Thus, you can reduce overtime work by setting shift work patterns and ensuring that employees will have to take turns when doing overtime. This can be very helpful to prevent employee fatigue.

Give appreciation and reward

Reward is definitely one thing that can make employees happier! A culture of giving appreciation will create a good work environment because everyone’s contribution will be recognized and their role is considered important.

Allow employees to work remotely

Recent research shows that remote work can help reduce workplace boredom and pressure, especially for millennial workers. Thus, this can help to improve the productivity within employees. If possible, you can allow your employees to at least have 1 day a week to work from home.

Give employees quality time off

For burnout employees, rest is the key to self-rehab.  Encourage employees to take time off and do other activities outside of work, or maybe spend time with their loved ones. Hopefully, after taking the much-needed time off, their work performance will be back to normal.

An unhealthy workload and work environment can trigger employee burnout! Thus make sure that you become a great leader by ensuring that your work environment is non-toxic. Paying attention to your employee’s needs is equally as important to your clientele. Because the employee is the motor that can help the company achieve greater success.

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