Letter of the Day | Prevent workplace burnout

THE EDITOR, Madam:

Burnout is a real challenge. While mental and physical health are critical to productivity and business strategy, it is imperative to underscore methods to mitigate burnout. Underscoring work life balance and workplace culture to prevent burnout can help significantly as organisations can retain strong employees, strengthen engagement and increase productivity.

Building an organisational culture where employees feel valued, respected, and heard is critical. Employees value flexitime, remote work, four days work week. Notwithstanding, work-related illness can really cause severe strain on the budget and on the family, with the worse scenario resulting in death. Statistics show three out of every five workers reported experiencing negative mental and physical impacts due to work-related stress - 26 per cent noted a lack of interest, motivation, or energy, 32 per cent reported emotional exhaustion, and 44 per cent noted high levels of physical fatigue (American Psychological Association’s 2021 Work and Wellbeing Survey). Indeed, a jobs portal, revealed that while more than half (52 per cent) of workers reported feeling burned out.

Workplaces should be focused on creating desirable employee experience and a great organisational culture. It can be proven that high employee satisfaction and engagement can increase productivity, performance, attendance, staff morale and job retention. Highly stressed and overworked employees feel undervalued and experience burnout. The responsibility of the employers is to prevent employee burnout or mitigate it. This measure can be mutually beneficial to both the employer and the employee, and the productivity will be high. Here are some strategies that the workplace can used to prevent employee burnout:

• Prioritise well-being and stress management

• Support employees across the board

• Give work breaks

• Encourage flexible work arrangements

• Treat your employees fairly

• Take a holistic approach to wellness

• Create reasonable workloads and set clear expectations

• Provide feedback and be very transparency

• Provide resources for burnt-out employees

• Give your employees a voice and some amount of autonomy

• Increase employee engagement and foster social interaction

• Encourage emotional boundary setting and communication channels

• Recognise and reward employees’ effort

The response to burnout may demand a proactive and personalized approach to empower the employees to cultivate a resilient and well-supported team. Support is always a great intervention, as well as cultivating external sources helping the burnt-out employees to balance their responsibilities.

KAREN MCFARLANE