Situatie
While job burnout has risen in recent years, leaders can take steps to mitigate it and promote sustainable productivity for employees and executives.
The World Health Organization has defined job burnout as an occupational phenomenon characterized by exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced professional efficacy as a result of chronic workplace stress.1 Burnout can lead to voluntary turnover, lost opportunity cost, preventable medical costs, and ultimately, lower revenue and higher operating costs.
Insights for What’s Ahead
• Understand the implications of employee burnout on organizational profitability. Poor mental health due to workplace factors, compounded over time by lack of resources or support to address it, has made employee burnout an epidemic in the workforce with staggering financial implications.
• Help remove the stigma of talking about mental health. Survey data show that many employees are reluctant to speak with their manager about their mental health. Managers should help remove the stigma by openly discussing mental health with their teams and encouraging team members to look out for and support one another.
• Address workplace factors that can lead to burnout. To reduce the impact of burnout on your organization, train managers to set clear expectations, communicate empathetically, and promote psychological safety on their teams. Make the well-being of employees a performance metric for managers.
• Allow employees to truly take time off and balance work and life. Individual workloads and project timelines should be structured to allow employees to take time off so they can rest and recharge without feeling they are leaving colleagues unsupported or having anxiety about falling behind or being expected to be “on call.”
• Attend to executive and manager well-being and encourage leaders to lead by example. Executives and managers have the highest rates of burnout. To address this, create an organizational culture that empowers them to practice and promote wellbeing and set an example for their team members.
What Organizations Can Do to Address Employee Burnout
While stigmas surrounding mental health have greatly reduced in recent years, our recent survey of US
employees indicates that 40 percent of workers still do not feel comfortable speaking to their manager
about their mental health. Additionally, 59 percent of survey respondents say they have needed to take
time off to address their mental health, but only 15 percent felt comfortable asking for a day off for mental
health.
8 This means that managers cannot wait for their employees to tell them they are at risk of
burnout; they need to be proactive in discussing it with their teams.
Rather than singling out individuals who may be at risk of burnout but reluctant to talk about it, managers
should have team conversations about mental health and encourage team members to look out for and
support one another. Leaders can train and encourage managers at all levels to have these
conversations, setting a tone across the organization that discussing mental health is acceptable and will
not result in negative repercussions.
Address workplace factors that can lead to burnout
Our survey also found that the top factors contributing to workplace burnout are workload, poor
communication, work-life balance, time spent in meetings, and decreased connection to the mission.
Managers have the highest direct impact on their employees’ experiences and are thus uniquely
positioned to alleviate the factors that lead to burnout on their teams.
When asked what would help support their mental health, 47 percent of all respondents said training
managers to promote a healthy work-life balance and 23 percent said encouraging managers to
redistribute work more evenly. To tackle burnout at the ground level, managers should be trained to recognize signs of burnout and given the resources and support to advocate for their team’s well-being, ensure work-life balance, and promote psychological safety as a part of the operational strategy.10 CHROs should consider the following:
• Initiate programs that train managers to recognize the signs of distress and navigate available
resources for those who exhibit these signs;
• Incorporate employee well-being metrics into the performance metrics for managers, holding
them accountable for their team’s well-being;
• Work with CFOs to articulate the financial impact of employee and executive burnout to justify the
time and support given to employees and, in particular, managers.
Much like athletes who take time to recover after competitive events, employees need time for rest to
perform at their best. Many organizations try to address this need by implementing policies such as
unlimited personal time off and mental health days/sick days. However, time off without proper workload
management, along with changes to organizational culture around time off, is an ineffective solution to
burnout. Employees don’t just need time off, they need time off without guilt or adverse repercussions
when they return to work.
To make time off both acceptable and beneficial, have managers review deliverables and timelines so
that team members can creatively flex individual workloads and project timelines while still ensuring
fairness and business results. Managers can also be encouraged to carefully assess the need for a
meeting, versus a simple email or announcement, and determine who actually needs to attend those
meetings that are necessary.
Many organizations have found success with such strategies as
organizational policies restricting the sending of emails outside of traditional working hours, or email
signatures indicating that responses outside of work hours are not expected; shortened meeting times;
“no meeting” workdays; company-wide days off; and four-day workweeks.
In our survey, a flexible/hybrid work schedule ranked second in a list of workplace policies that would
support employee mental health.12 Organizations can explore creative ways to offer flexibility for their
employees tailored to their preferences to promote work-life balance and thus alleviate one of the major
contributing factors to burnout.
Attend to executive and manager well-being and encourage leaders to lead by example
Our survey indicates that executives and managers are reporting higher rates of burnout than ever,
commonly citing low work-life balance and rising job demands as the cause. Other recent surveys
revealed that:
• 35 percent of managers reported feeling burnt out frequently, compared to 27 percent of
individual contributors.13
• 70 percent of executives said they were seriously considering quitting their job to find one that
supports their well-being.14
• 81 percent said that a job that supports their well-being is more important than advancing their
career.15
Attend to executive and manager well-being by encouraging such practices as delegating tasks when
possible, setting strong work-life boundaries, or even enlisting a well-being coach. These practices can
have exponential impact, as not only will executive well-being improve, but executives will be setting a
powerful example for their team members. By taking care of themselves, executives signal to their
employees that doing so is not only permissible, but preferable. Leaders at all levels can have a
significant impact on workplace burnout by promoting a healthy work-life balance and modeling
prioritizing well-being in the workplace.
Burnout is an important indicator of deteriorating employee experience. Anticipating and addressing
burnout should be part of an overall organizational strategy to create a differentiated employee
experience, which results in sustainable productivity and strong competitive advantage.
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