Even the most capable of employees are not immune to the impact that burnout can have on their workplace performance and personal lives.
With recent studies showing that 75% of executive employees experience burnout at work, the added stress and anxiety caused by Covid-19 has led to a further 40% saying that they’ve specifically felt under pressure during the pandemic due to the worry of job losses and anxiety surrounding working from home.
However, with many higher–level tier executive staff used to working in high-pressure situations for prolonged periods of time, they are also rather skilled in hiding the signs of burnout until it’s too late.
If you want to safeguard your teams and high performers against the risk of business burnout, here are a few warning signs to look out for as well as some wellbeing tactics to help improve the mental health of your staff.
Open up a dialogue
If you find that many of your executive staff or management employees aren’t too forthcoming about their own mental wellbeing, it could be a sign that they are internalising any problems until they reach crisis point and require time off work to recover from burnout.
To make sure that you are able to detect and act on burnout as soon as possible, open up a regular dialogue with your executives. This gives each person the opportunity to raise and discuss any concerns they may have regarding workload, job security or anything else that is causing their stress levels to spike.
Know your boundaries
If you’ve spotted that some members of your team are going above and beyond while working from home you’ll probably be feeling quite pleased, but it’s well worth keeping in mind that putting in extra hours continually over long periods is a one-way ticket to burnout.
As a first port of call, an informal conversation to find out why your staff feel that it’s necessary to give up their own time to help you meet your business objectives can be very enlightening. With that insight, you may want to then reassess how the workload is split up or consider how additional tools or resources could help key team members to work more efficiently. One thing that is easily overlooked is the importance of setting clear boundaries so everyone knows what’s expected and what taking on too much looks like.
Mental health benefits
If you’ve noticed that staff that normally release stress at the gym are starting to become withdrawn and losing their sparkle, it could be that they need another outlet to help fight back against business burnout.
Perhaps consider the mental health benefits of subscriptions to online exercise classes for your teams as they continue to work from home or give them the flexibility to head off for a run whenever they start to feel overwhelmed. Simple adjustments like these really can help build your team’s resilience to burnout.
