Time to take a break: How to beat business burnout

Anxiety, stress and imposter syndrome have been issues that have been front and centre of workplaces for decades. However, in recent times, the issue of burnout has been put under the spotlight, especially as more employees are encouraged to return to the office after three years of hybrid working, so how can you beat the burnout blues? asks Adam Bowles, Country Director Australia at Advanced.

Exhaustion, self-doubt, feelings of being overwhelmed – the symptoms of burnout are many and they can be crippling. A recent Performance Management Report found that 42 per cent of employees are more stressed than they were last year. Only a fifth (21 per cent) said they felt less stressed, despite more human resources managers recognising their red flags.

There certainly isn’t a shortage of studies on the issue. In Australia, the 2023 State of the Future of Work Report from the Work Futures Hallmark Research Initiative (WFHRI) at the University of Melbourne found that prime-aged workers aged between 25 and 55 report the greatest burnout. Some 50 per cent of these workers reported feeling exhausted at work, whilst about 40 per cent reported feeling less motivated about their work than they did pre-pandemic.

The report also found that 33 per cent of respondents found it more difficult to concentrate at work because of responsibilities outside of work, and are more likely to feel like they don’t have enough time at work to do everything they need to do.

Recognising burnout and stress is a vital part of keeping a workforce healthy. But it’s only part of the battle – it’s not enough simply to acknowledge burnout; businesses need to take proactive and effective steps to address and prevent it.

In the four years since burnout was officially recognised by the WHO as an occupational phenomenon, it’s become part of the HR language. How do we prevent burnout? How do we support employees experiencing it? Is burnout happening in my organisation? These are all questions in need of answers and thankfully, there have been technological advancements to help better manage the workplace environment.

Tracking and addressing burnout

Tracking burnout can be easier said than done, and HR teams must ensure they have strategies in place to properly monitor individuals and teams in their business. It’s not enough to ask employees to raise concerns about their own mental health in relation to burnout; employers must proactively monitor their staff and their behaviour and act at the first signs of a problem.

Many employee perks can be framed as helping address burnout, but HRDs should tread carefully. A gym subscription, free fruit in the office and a hybrid working environment is not a one-stop solution for burnout. In fact, these can be Band-Aid solutions that do little more than prolong the burnout experience. Offering on-site restaurants or a gym in the office can actually serve to keep employees on-site for longer than they would otherwise have done, contributing further to the burnout they’re meant to be preventing.

Providing HR teams and managers with support, by digitising legacy systems, will help manage staff’s wellbeing. Nowadays, intelligent software solutions are available, such as performance management or people management solutions, to actively keep employees engaged with their career progress and tasks.

Continuous performance management is a good solution to the burnout problem because it gives greater clarity on how each person in a team is performing at any time. Rather than relying on quarterly, six-monthly or even annual reviews, continuous performance management encourages regular conversations between management and employees and provides team members with the opportunity to give and receive real-time feedback. These regular follow-ups give managers the opportunity to gain awareness of burnout caused by, for example, workloads and provide the opportunity to address or mitigate current and further burnout.

What actually helps?

Avoiding burnout means taking real and meaningful steps to change working practices for the long term. It might mean a blanket ban on meetings with more than three people (like Shopify), a stoppage to out-of-hours emails, four-day weeks or increasing annual leave. It might look like an organisational redesign to alleviate pressure on certain teams, or a recruitment drive to split the workload more fairly.

The point is that organisations won’t know what the right solution looks like if they don’t understand the scale and scope of the problem. HRDs should take action to understand the burnout picture at their organisation. Annual appraisals simply don’t work as a year-round view of how each person is performing at work and can’t alert managers that something is amiss with a team member, such as someone experiencing burnout. With people and performance management platforms currently available, which rely on regular discussions, there is an improvement in two-way communications, engagement and wellbeing, resulting in a happier, more productive workforce.

Recognising burnout and stress is a vital part of keeping a workforce healthy. But it’s only part of the battle, it’s not enough simply to acknowledge burnout; businesses need to take proactive and effective steps to address and prevent it.

Why does it matter?

If changes to address staff burnout aren’t made, many businesses may find themselves dealing with lower productivity and engrained wellbeing issues which could affect the long-term success of the organisation.

When a workforce experiences burnout symptoms at scale, the impact on a business can be catastrophic, so it’s vital that HR departments have a plan and the right software tools in place to recognise, prevent and mitigate burnout.

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