This article comes from Entrepreneur.
Employee burnout is an issue for companies all over the world, and current trends predict it will become increasingly more prevalent in the coming years. Job stress, on the other hand, is something much more commonplace and has likely been experienced by everyone at some point in their career.
Burnout is not the same as stress. Stress can build into burnout when your team experiences chronic exhaustion, cynicism, and decreasing productivity. Don’t think your team is stressed? Think again. According to the American Institute of Stress:
Now that we know what stress is, let’s explore the differences between stress and burnout. The World Health Organization has included burnout in its International Classification of Diseases, describing it as “A syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.”
In a nutshell, burnout is always linked to your job, stress isn’t.
Gallup recently surveyed more than 7,500 full-time employees about burnout and found:
Therefore, nearly two-thirds of full-time workers are dealing with burnout at some point while working for you.
How can you identify if your team is simply stressed or teetering on burning out?
Here’s how to identify if it’s stress or if they’re heading towards burnout.
Is your team showing symptoms of burnout? Find out by asking them these questions, provided by the Mayo Clinic — during your 1:1 calls or meetings:
If they answer “yes” to any of these questions, here are some tips to combatting their feelings of burnout.
Burnout is caused by an imbalance between job demands and job resources, which is complex—so solely focusing on one of the big symptoms of it without addressing the larger factors driving it would be a huge mistake.
Factors may include:
The pandemic has increased the demands on your team, both in their personal lives and at work. It’s time to reframe the dialogue around burnout—calling out that it’s not an individual issue that can be fixed with quick self-help strategies. It’s a systemic issue that everyone, especially leadership, is responsible for reducing. We can do that by implementing meaningful strategies that address the core causes—which starts at work.
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