Are YOU Making Your Employees Burn Out?
Last year, we did a deep dive into burnout: what causes burnout, how it affects the workplace (hint: it’s not good), and what we can do to combat it. Much of the research and recommendations around burnout deal with the individual–how to combat burnout in our personal lives, or personally at work.
But there are organizational factors when it comes to burnout, too. And if we don’t know how our workplace structures might contribute to burnout, we’ll never be able to eradicate it from the workplace.
Before we jump into what might be causing burnout at work, it’s helpful to remember just what burnout is costing not just you personally, but your organization. According to Gallup, 67% of employees say they are sometimes, very often, or always burned out at work. That leaves them 63% more likely to take a sick day, 23% more likely to visit the emergency room, and over twice as likely to leave their job when they otherwise would have stayed.
Researchers at Stanford University wanted to understand exactly what burnout and it’s close cousin, stress, costs us. They found that work-related stress alone led to nearly $190 billion in health care spending (approximately 8% of all healthcare costs in the U.S.) and close to 120,000 deaths each year. That’s just workplace stress, not stress caused by other factors! Additionally, depression and anxiety (both commonly resulting from stress) cost the global workforce as much as $1 trillion in lost productivity each year, according to the World Health Organization.
What does this mean for your organization? It means that if you don’t have systems in place to support the well-being of your employees and reduce workplace stress, you’ll end up with higher turnover, lower productivity, and greater healthcare costs. Healthcare costs alone are as much as 50% higher in high-stress workplaces. Stressed employees are missing work, too: 550 million work days are lost due to job-related stress each year. They are 63% more likely to take a sick day and 23% more likely to visit the emergency room. These are hard costs for your organization, and we’re guessing you can’t really afford them.
Now, take a deep breath: it is possible to create a workplace that prevents burnout. To do so, we need to understand just what organizational factors are causing employees to burn out. Research points to seven “organizational risk factors” when it comes to burnout:
Heavy workload
Conflicts with coworkers
Diminished resources
Lack of control or input
Effort-reward imbalance
Understaffing
Rapid institutional changes
Do any of those risk factors ring true at your organization? Heavy workloads, for example, can look many different ways–maybe you’re requiring your team to be “always on,” working (or at least being available) late into the night and on weekends. Or it can look like “scope creep,” where a team member’s job description has slowly expanded far beyond what they were hired to do, and they simply have too much on their plate. (Often, a heavy workload looks like both of these things.)
Constructive criticism and a little bit of competition can be healthy at work, but one thing that isn’t? Conflict. Unfortunately, 85% of employees regularly experience conflict at work, dedicating an average of 2.8 hours each week to dealing with workplace drama–multiplied by each of your employees, equals a loss of hundreds of billions of dollars each year in the US alone. Stress, workload, and poor leadership are top contenders for why conflict occurs in the workplace.
We could go on, but you are probably catching on. Burnout isn’t a problem you can leave your employees to deal with on their own. If your team is burned out, pause and look at what workplace structures might be contributing to that burnout, or even be the chief cause of it. And take heart–it is possible to reimagine the work day and prevent burnout at work.
Want to learn how? Reach out to our team today!