How Companies Can Combat Employee Burnout

Employee burnout is no longer just viewed as a human resources issue, it’s also a health issue. In fact, scholars at Harvard Business School believe that stress in the workplace is the cause of eight percent of America’s spending on healthcare and causes 120,000 deaths a year.

Considering the physical and mental toll being overworked puts on people, it’s no wonder that a 2017 survey from Kronos contributed half of employee turnover to burnout syndrome.

To help businesses leaders deal with employee turnover, Forbes developed an article that classifies the different types of burnout and how each variety can be improved upon.

The first type of burnout Forbes cites, overload, is caused by giving an employee a workload that’s unreasonable. One way to remedy this is to have management set goals that the employee can realistically meet, while also providing the resources and support needed to achieve these goals.

On the opposite end of overload is another form of burnout — one that is created by not giving an employee enough of a challenge. The issue with insufficient challenge is that it leads to apathetic employees who feel their job isn’t helping them to grow professionally. To combat insufficient challenge, employees should identify the strengths of their employees and then give them work that plays to those strengths, while also challenging them.

The final form of burnout is experienced by employees who care about their job, but don’t feel that they’re good at it. They feel like a sham, and as a result, they respond with passivity and resignation. To solve this burnout, Forbes suggests employers provide these employees with support and guidance while also giving them the chance to make their own decisions.

Owners and managers of commercial cleaning businesses should try to identify and fix these varieties of burnout the best they can. Because if they do, it might help to improve turnover and retention issues that have gotten way out of hand.