Gallup.com recently conducted an extensive survey relating to Employee burnout.  The results reveal a few surprises and on the heels of the survey, the company also published some ideas for helping to ensure that your employees don’t suffer that fate. 

Once an employee feels genuinely burned out, odds are excellent that they’ll simply leave for greener pastures.  Below, we’ll summarize both:

First, the biggest surprise was the fact that a staggering 76% of employees experience burnout at least some of the time, with 7% reporting that they are extremely burnt out and on a constant basis, and 21% of employees reporting that they feel burnt out quite often.  Only 4% of employees report that they are never burnt out.

If an employee does suffer feelings of burnout, they are 63% likely to use a sick day, even if they’re not sick, and 23% of burnt out employees suffer side effects so severe that they have to visit the emergency room.

It gets worse.  Since the global pandemic has forced many traditional office workers into their homes, employees are experiencing burnout relatively more often than they have in the past.  Further, the fact that most of your employees are now working remotely complicates your job as a manager in a variety of ways.

Most managers assume that the best way to fix the issue is to provide additional time off or ease back on the number of hours an employee has to work in order to get the job done.  Unfortunately, this is a myth. 

Although total hours worked does have some bearing, how people experience their workload has a stronger influence on burnout than the raw number of hours worked.  In other words, how you manage your employees plays a huge role in whether or not they experience burnout.  The top five reasons that employees ultimately feel burned out are:

• Unfair treatment at work
• An unmanageable workload
• Unclear communication from management
• Lack of manager support
• And unreasonable time pressure

As you can see from this list, most of the things that lead to employee burnout are caused by specific actions (or inaction) by management.  Fixing that starts with taking an honest look at how you manage your people to understand whether or not you are guilty of any of the above, and if you are, taking immediate steps to correct those behaviors.

In terms of unclear communication, the easiest way to improve things on this front is to use multiple communications channels.  Email alone isn’t enough.  You should be reaching out to your team via phone and text message, as well as utilizing some type of video conferencing solution like Zoom, Skype, or Google’s Meet.

In addition to that, be sure that not all of your communications with your employees are strictly work related.  Humanize your approach and take the time to engage in personal conversations.  This can be as simple as sharing a meme or forwarding a funny joke you received.

If you do that, and keep your work-related communications clear by only including one salient point per work-related email, and further, if you take the time to evaluate your other potentially harmful behaviors as mentioned above, you’ll go a long way toward reducing the chances that your employees will suffer from burnout.

The post Remote Employee Engagement Survey Results Contain Several Surprises appeared first on Successories Blog.