Chika Uwazie’s TalentBase: How To Make Sure Your Employees Don’t Burn Out

As a manager/employer, your job is to make sure that a healthy company culture is maintained and that includes a lot of things. One of them is to make sure your employees don’t burn out.

The describes work related stress as “ the response people may have when presented with work demands and pressures that are not matched to their knowledge and abilities and which challenge their ability to cope.

This is something all of us are familiar with, but what we don’t know is that it has devastating effects on the employees and the company. Here are a few

Work related stress can lead to health related issues which will affect the employee’s ability to work efficiently which will in turn affect business success.

Stressed employees might transfer their frustration to other employees and this makes the work place very toxic.

Work related stress can also affect your customer service (in a bad way) which will in turn affect your company’s reputation.

Now that we know some of the things that could happen if your employees are stressed, here’s how you can deal with or prevent it entirely:

You Have To Listen
First and foremost, you have to listen to your employees so you can understand the root cause of their stress. It could be things like personal factors, workload, work life balance and so on. Once you find out exactly what it is, you have to find efficient ways to deal with them.

Don’t Overwork Your Employees
It is important not to overload your employees with work because this is actually counter productive. Stanford Researchers estimate that productivity starts to decline sharply when working hours per week exceed 50 hours (it is like flogging a dead horse). Yes, I get it, as a manager/employer, you want to get things done and fast (and there is nothing wrong with that) but you have to make sure you are not giving your employees more than they can handle.

Be Fair
I talked about not giving preferential treatment in my blog post on how to work with a family member and this applies here as well. It is extremely demoralising for employees to see another employee receive preferential treatment. It is okay to have a favourite employee but under no circumstances should she/he get special treatment because of this.

Provide Proper Equipment
There’s nothing worse than having to use tools that are inefficient and slow. For your employees; This is extremely frustrating, demoralizing (which are the symptoms of burnout)  and can reduce productivity greatly. There are a number of tools available that can make work less stressful and adopting them could help reduce work-related stress tremendously.

Have Fun
This is the last point but definitely not the least. You need to find a way to make your employees have fun at work. Make them do some yoga or a little exercise, have a picnic or a little office party, watch a movie together or something (you can get more tips on how to make the workplace fun here). The list is endless, you just have to find what is right for your workplace and when you do, you will find satisfied, happy and loyal employees that are stress free.