According to the Glint Employee Wellbeing report, employee burnout increased by 9% from April 2021 to July 2021. Employee burnout came to limelight when the world health organziation officially included it in their classification of diseases list two years ago. Fast forward to today and the problem has only got worse despite wider adoption of remote work.

According to Sir Manchala, “There are three underlying reasons for potential burnout: a shrinking window of transformation opportunity; paradigm shifts across all industries in business models post-COVID; and the fact that we are still in a recessionary environment due to drops in consumption and stress in global supply chains meaning [IT organizations must] ‘do more with less.”

How can business leaders overcome this challenge and protect their employees from work related stress and employee burnout. That is exactly what we will discuss in this article. In this article, AntiDos will highlight seven effective ways business leaders can safeguard their employees from burnout.

7 Ways To Protect Your Employees From Burnout

Here are seven ways business leaders can use to protect their employees from burnout and work related stress.

1.Know About the Obstacles

Employee burnout starts when your employees try to find escape from the day to day pressures. Business leaders must acknowledge it and empathize with the employees instead of adding fuel to the fire. Even acknowledging and empathizing with your employees won’t be enough, especially if you can not address the issue. As a business leader, you need to go above and beyond to take measures to prevent employees feeling stressed out. Even if you don’t have all the answers, you need to tell your employees that you are looking for solutions to resolve this issue.

2.Set Work Boundaries

The pandemic forced businesses to embrace remote work trends but the problem it created for workers is that they could not create boundaries when to pull the plug. Despite showing great adaptability and resilience, remote workers still struggle with setting boundaries. This sudden shift gave little to no time for creating and implementing proper protocols for such a drastic shift.

As a result, businesses found it difficult to map the number of working hours with the level of output their remote workers are generating. This was especially true for the IT industry where you have to be present 24/7 for monitoring purposes. Instead of fixing the already prevalent issue of work related stress and employee burnout, this made the situation even worse.

As a business leader, you need to set clear expectations from your remote workers and set clear boundaries around the working hours. Not only that, you should also ensure that your remote workers not only fulfill their commitment and don’t get burnout due to work related stress. You don’t want your employees to be underutilized or overworked and setting boundaries will help you strike the perfect balance between the two.

3.Prioritize, Prioritize, Prioritize

Instead of going at it all at once, you need to prioritize tasks based on the urgency and impact. It is better to prioritize your tasks to protect yourself from work related stress and employee burnout. Additionally, focus your efforts on digital transformation as it can reduce your reliance on manual processes and minimize human involvement. By automating mundane tasks, you can reduce the burden off the shoulders of your employees and make them focus on critical tasks.

4.Evaluate The Impact

When analyzing the impact of your steps, make data your friend. Create surveys and take regular feedback from your remote workers about the challenges they are encountering. Instead of conducting traditional meetings, you need to conduct one to one meetings with every remote worker virtually. This will go a long way in creating an environment of trust.

More importantly, it will give you valuable feedback about the challenges your employees are facing so you can take steps to resolve these problems and provide them with a better working environment. When your employees feel that they are being valued by managers, it will create a positive image and encourage them to not only openly share their problems but their feedback on how they can improve things further.

5.Develop Solutions

Once you have both the qualitative and quantitative data at your disposal, it will make it easier for you to identify some of the biggest issues of your company. Target core issues first and do what you can to resolve them. Communicate the time it would take to resolve the issue so your remote workers. This will tell them that you are serious about resolving these issues and not just faking it. Clearly highlights what steps you have already taken and what steps you will take in the future to address these core issues.

6.Work Smarter and Take Breaks

Just because you are working remotely does not mean that you should not take any breaks. Taking regular breaks during the work shift is critical to protecting you from employee burnout and work related stress. As a rule of thumb, take a break after every hour of work for 15-20 minutes to recharge your batteries. Whether you are working remotely or in a traditional office environment, your goal should be to achieve more in less time. To do this, you will have to adopt agile and improve your productivity and efficiency.

7.Communication and Commitment

To succeed in today’s dynamic remote work environment, IT and business leaders should go more hands on with their teams. For this, you have to constantly stay in touch, communicate and harness the power of faster and effective decision making.

Provide constant feedback and update stakeholders about the progress you have made to address the burnout issue. Make sure you fulfill all your commitments otherwise, you will slowly but surely lose trust of your employees. There is nothing worse than losing faith in your own team.

Which steps do you take to protect your employee as a business leader? Share it with us in the comments section below.