Apply these 7 tips and prevent your employees from dropping out due to burnout
Sometimes life is suddenly much harder: there are problems, something nasty has happened, or you get less support from those around you. When all of this combined demands more of you than you can handle, you become overloaded. You lose track and get out of control. You develop symptoms that prevent you from doing your daily activities properly. We call this span. Do the symptoms exist for more than six months? And are you especially tired and exhausted? Then we call it burnout.
You have a high chance of being burnout if you have been suffering > for 6 months:
- Physical fatigue: feeling exhausted
- Mental fatigue: difficulty keeping your attention (concentration) and/or remembering things (memory);
- Restless sleeping
- Being irritable (easily angered or irritable)
- Can’t stand crowds or noise
- Easy crying
- Peak
- An agitated feeling
In addition to the above symptoms, you feel that you can no longer cope with the many problems in your life. You feel powerless, as if you no longer have a grip on your situation. Like losing control of your life. You no longer manage to keep doing your regular daily activities well. For example atje work, study, home, in your contacts or in traffic.
7 tips to prevent employee burnout!
They may seem like open doors, yet you can achieve positive results by taking preventive action and following the following tips:
- Show commitment. Take regular time to have a chat with your employees. So that you know what’s going on. This also falls under the theme of sustainable employability.
- Stay positive toward your employees. Compliment and express positive expectations. Everyone enjoys being appreciated, and happy employees perform better.
- Signal negative changes. The behavior of people with mental illness often change, so does their work attitude. Some retreat into their shell, while others become more present or irritable. All of a sudden, they work overtime often, arrive late more often or regularly call in sick for a day. It is therefore important to take the time for your employees and show interest to get to know them better in order to (re)recognize negative signals.
- Lower the barrier to seeking help. Show that mental health problems should be negotiable. Also at work and with colleagues. For example, organize an event during working hours on the theme of (work) stress and burnout. Invite a specialist in the field who invites discussion. Thus, the topic becomes recognizable and thus more discussable.
- Ensure a good balance between work and leisure. If the workload is very high or just too low, employees become stressed and thus more prone to mental health complaints. Engage in conversation if you notice that an employee is overworking (too) often, but also if you see that an employee is bored in their work. Convince your employees not to take their work home with them. Leisure time is for relaxing, not for working. For example, the company Google did a test and had employees turn in their cell phones and laptops at the end of the workday so that they literally could not take their work home with them. This was found to have a very positive effect on employees’ stress levels.
- Keep communicating. Show that problems are negotiable. Make sure your employees are aware of this, that they can go (discreetly) to a designated confidential advisor, for example.
- Establish a healthy work culture. Pay attention to themes such as exercise (for example, through a bicycle plan), healthy food in the company canteen, put fruit on the table in the workplace, make sure the office is cozy. This shows that you care about the well-being and health of your employees and they will be more inclined to follow your example (sometimes career questions also exist, make this topic negotiable).
The government has provided a budget for personal development. Click here for more information.
Suffering from incipient burnout or overwork?
Please feel free to give us a call to get acquainted and based on that, assess whether we can help you -> 085-4018200 or hoekanikjehelpen@panthion.nl
