Beating Employee Burnout
Carlissa Runnels • November 22, 2024
As motivated as we are to become great leaders and employees, we should be just as motivated to prioritize our own personal well-being. Otherwise, we can begin to experience signs of burnout, which can negatively impact our performance and health. When employees are consistently exposed to workplace stress, they are at risk of becoming burned out. If you experience constant exhaustion just by thinking of your work before you even get to the office, feelings of cynicism related to your job, or reduced personal effectiveness, you may be encountering burnout. Burnout will rob you of your joy, passion, and motivation. Therefore, to be the best version of ourselves personally and professionally, we must take steps to manage workplace stress. Many programs and models will help you accomplish this. However, you can also do three things on your own to increase your well-being and decrease burnout: (1) Identify the source, (2) Intervene promptly, and (3) Improve the environment going forward.
Identify
Identifying burnout might not be as easy as you think. This is because burnout can show up in various ways for different people. A few examples include excessive tardiness or absenteeism, irritability at work, or feelings of dissatisfaction. Take time to reflect and see if you are acting out of character negatively regarding your job and performance. If so, what is contributing to this change in your feelings or performance? It might be a situation where there are inconsistencies with your workload that are leading to your feelings of burnout. Or do you feel you no longer have any growth opportunities at your job; this can also be a source of burnout. Another source that many people overlook is a misalignment in company and personal values. The key to properly identifying burnout is to recognize what is causing your perception or performance to change and then drill down to the source.
Intervene
After identifying the source, the next step is to intervene promptly. This is important because acknowledging that there is an issue is not enough. We must take action if we want to see positive results. At the same time, you do not want to immediately put your solutions in place until you have adjusted the current situation. Doing so may reduce the effectiveness of our solutions. For instance, if your cause of stress is constantly working on the weekend and your solution is to stop working on the weekend, that is great. However, you missed the intervention step of setting boundaries and telling others that you will no longer work on weekends. As a result, people may still send you work during that time, and this could lead to other issues and greater stress. After identifying the source of your burnout, make the necessary adjustments, such as talking to your boss about your workload, being clear about your career growth expectations, expressing your boundaries, being open to accepting help, etc. Many people miss this step because we are so eager to implement solutions. However, this step is where the actual process of beating burnout happens.
Improve
The final step is to make improvements going forward. In this phase, you simply want to ensure that what you have implemented is sustainable. We do not wish to beat burnout this week, only to return to the same situation next month. The critical thing to remember here is that whatever solutions you put into place, find ways to maintain them in the future. This might mean that you implement your solutions on an incremental basis or start with small, manageable actions you are comfortable with. An example would be cutting back and working only one weekend a month instead of every weekend a month. This takes your intervention action of not working weekends and implementing it in a way that you can make continuous improvements without reverting back to the environment that caused your initial burnout. These steps are not all-inclusive ways to combat burnout; however, they are things you can do right now to decrease your chances of burnout at work.
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