What exactly is burnout?
Work burnout is a state of chronic emotional distress caused by work-related stress. Gallup, a globally recognized analytics company, released a report on employee burnout. It found that 76% of employees experience burnout at least sometimes, and 28% experience it “very often” or “always.”
This report was released in 2019, well before “pandemic” became a household word. There’s little doubt that the rate of burnout has gone up now that nearly every employee has had to adapt to drastic changes in how they do their jobs and live their daily lives.
How does burnout affect employees?
Work burnout takes a heavy toll on your employees’ physical and mental health. It can lead to depression, apathy, irritability, insomnia, and even physical ailments such as headaches and digestive issues. It’s difficult for an employee suffering from burnout to manage these symptoms, and eventually, it will impact their work performance.
1. Job dissatisfaction
Feeling stressed out at work every day is a huge emotional burden. Burned-out employees are more likely to be actively looking for another job. In 2017, the average cost of training a new employee was $1,886. It’s less expensive to examine the common causes of work burnout and address those issues within your organization than it is to keep replacing employees as they burn out and quit.
2. Sick days
Burned out employees take more sick days than usual due to their feelings of exhaustion and malaise. People often can’t pinpoint the exact cause of their issues and may mistake burnout for an actual illness.
3. Underperforming
Burned out employees can’t recover through sheer willpower. No matter how herculean their efforts, their performance will slip unless changes are made to address the workplace issues dragging them down.
4. Self-doubt
One of the most emotionally debilitating aspects of burnout is an ever-growing sense of self-doubt. It turns your once-confident employee into someone who second-guesses every decision and needs much more guidance than before to successfully complete a project.
5. Bad attitude
We all know how difficult it is to keep a positive attitude when we feel exhausted, stressed, and miserable. Employees with burnout can only keep their issues bottled up for so long before they start seeping out in the form of cynical comments, exasperation, or passive aggression. This type of behavior can quickly bring morale down for your whole team and increases the risk of burnout for others.
In contrast to the harmful effects of employee burnout, “engaged employees who have job flexibility tend to work more hours per week than the average employee, while reporting higher wellbeing. When people feel inspired, motivated, and supported in their work, they do more work — and that work is significantly less stressful on their overall health and wellbeing.” (Gallup)
How can Onehub help you prevent employee burnout?
It can be difficult to recognize burnout in your employees due to the personal nature of many of the symptoms such as depression, self-doubt, and insomnia. The effects burnout has on an employee’s work can often be mistaken for them having a bad week or feeling under the weather. It’s more effective to create a work environment that helps prevent the common causes of burnout rather than trying to address it in individual employees.
The most common causes of employee burnout:
- Unmanageable workload
- Lack of clear communication from managers
- Feeling unsupported by management or colleagues
In addition to Onehub’s cloud storage and document sharing solutions, you can also create multiple online Workspaces to use with employees. Using a digital Workspace promotes clear communication, effortless collaboration, and support from managers, helping employees do their best work. It’s one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to prevent employee burnout.
According to Gallup’s report, “Employees who have a space that helps them connect with coworkers are 26% less likely to feel burnout frequently.” In the past, this collaborative space took the form of conference rooms. Today, many companies operate with remote teams, whether by choice or as a result of COVID-19. The new era of collaboration resides in digital Workspaces.
When you create a Workspace with Onehub, you’re setting up a structured, collaborative environment for your employees to work within. Once invited to the Workspace, employees have access to the time-saving and easy-to-use features below.
Comments and messages promote communication between team members.
A clear way to connect with team members and management makes employees feel more comfortable reaching out for additional information or support when needed instead of trying to power through on their own. Employees can post comments on files or folders and can easily communicate with everyone in the Workspace by posting messages for collaborators.
Tasks help employees keep track of their workload.
Workspace users can assign tasks to themselves or others, assuring every aspect of even the most complex projects is done. Your team can comment on tasks and track them toward completion on the tasks page. If an employee has a question about an assignment, they can reply to the task asking for clarification. It’s a fast, organized way to track what needs to be done and communicate with team members about specific items on the to-do list.
File syncing and versioning means employees always have the most updated information.
Trying to collaborate on a file saved to a local server often results in multiple unsynced versions, leaving employees confused and increasing the risk of mistakes. Using Onehub sync ensures workers always have the most up-to-date versions of files. They can also quickly restore older file versions if needed, meaning nothing important is ever lost.
High-quality online previews save time.
Viewing high-quality previews directly in a browser means employees don’t have to waste time downloading a file and opening another application to view it. They can quickly preview files, whether they’re at their desk or on the go with only their phone for access.
Full-text searches quickly retrieve files.
Constantly sorting through files on a local server with limited search features wastes time, adding additional work hours to the week and piling on more stress. Onehub improves searches by securely indexing every word in the files uploaded to a Workspace. This allows users to quickly search through their entire account to find what they’re looking for every time.
Favorites keep your most-used Workspaces at the ready.
Employees can pin their most-used Workspaces to keep them at the top of the homepage. This shortcut means employees don’t have to endlessly scroll to find the Workspaces they use daily. It’s a handy time-saver and keeps the most essential work top of mind.
Onehub’s Workspaces provide the supportive infrastructure your workers need to avoid costly burnout. You can try Onehub for free, no strings attached, to see how much it improves your team’s performance.
