Work Burnout: 5 Ways To Read The Signs And Help Employees Recover

1. Anxiety

Everyone experiences some level of anxiety now and again. Uncomfortable situations, such as workplace confrontations or pressure from deadlines, can cause more anxiety for some individuals.

Thus, job burnout sees a correlation with heightened anxiety in employees, where they are unable to finish work on time that was previously second nature to them.

This is because anxiety makes you feel that even simple tasks are insurmountable challenges. The mental exhaustion that follows makes you avoid tasks or take forever to complete them.

2. Poor Physical Health

The most prevalent and obvious burnout symptoms are physical reactions of the body to stress, such as panic attacks, chest pains, increased heart rate, nausea, headaches, and insomnia. Employees may lose their appetite and even lose weight, or they may start to gain weight from using food to cope with their stress.

3. Lack Of Creativity And Purpose

It’s alright to occasionally struggle with a lack of connection with your work. However, when employees are burnt out, their drive to create is lost. Even as they complete tasks, they will still bring an energy of aimlessness to work.

4. Emotional Numbness

Emotional numbness during burnout means losing interest in things you once enjoyed. At work, it can manifest as usually energetic and motivated employees who stop participating in meetings, avoid taking on new projects, or stop returning phone calls and emails.

From the many burnout symptoms out there, emotional numbness is the most alarming one. This is because you often lose the desire to escape from it once you become emotionally numb. This is also known as habitual burnout — the point at which stress is so endemic in your life that you are unable to distinguish it from ‘normal life’, and you are therefore likely to experience ongoing mental, physical, or emotional exhaustion as a result.

5. Cynicism

One of the subtle signs of burnout at work is cynicism. It usually manifests as a higher sensitivity to feedback among employees.

Employees affected begin to view workplace criticism as personal attacks and thus react with increased defensiveness, anger, or other signs of stress. Feedback is often blown out of proportion, and you might hear them say statements like: “I guess I can’t do anything right.”

You might also like: Stress-Proof Your Workplace: A 5-Step Guide for HR Managers

1. Set a good example

Though workplace culture doesn’t change overnight, the impetus must come from the top to address job burnout. This can be achieved by:

• Taking regular breaks between meetings
• Sending emails only during reasonable work hours
• Setting healthy limits on how much work encroaches on evenings and weekends
• Prioritizing downtime with friends and family

The quote here feels fitting – “bring humanity back into the room,” as Whitney Johnson, the author of Build an A-Team: Play to Their Strengths and Lead Them Up the Learning Curve, told the Harvard Business Review. This way, you create a value system in the workplace that signals to employees how they should approach their tasks and working relationships.

2. Build a connection

As mentioned earlier in the article, one of the symptoms of burnout is feeling disconnected from our work. As a leader, you can provide an antidote to this by developing a shared sense of “why”— why are we driven to accomplish this project? Why will it benefit the customers, the company, and your employees’ careers? When people have a shared connection with the work they perform, they are more likely to feel positive about doing it, especially when circumstances are more demanding than usual.

3. Talk & Listen

According to research done by Gallup, employees whose managers listen to their work-related problems are 62% less likely to experience burnout.

When asking employees what bothers them and then listening to their feedback, you might feel you have to face shortcomings in your own management style or face criticism of the organization you both work for. Use this communication as a ground to be compassionate towards your employees and their struggles, and let them know that they matter.

4. Advocate for your team

Once you know what struggles your team members are going through, it’s up to you to communicate them further up to senior leadership. People who are burnt out are facing too much emotional exhaustion to advocate for themselves. Let your boss know that while your team is committed to their projects, they are also tired or otherwise affected, which could have adverse consequences. It could lead to employee errors that are costly to rectify or to the loss of people who are valuable to the organization. Once that is done, you can ask for reasonable deadline extensions, shorter meetings, and other measures that will put your team at ease.

5. Show appreciation and praise

There can be phases in your organization where work frenzy is inevitable. In those times, it is important to show appreciation and praise your employees’ efforts. Celebrate the moment together when your team hits a milestone or a particular crunch time ends.

This will help cultivate a sense of community and social support, which further makes stressful demands more manageable during those short periods.

You can also choose to lean on us if you’re finding it challenging to eliminate work burnout in your company on your own. Howdy offers a suite of burnout-prevention and wellness tools for your company to help restore employees’ work-life balance. Schedule a presentation of Howdy here.

Our resources work in tandem with organizational policies that support employee wellbeing.

Your management’s commitment to cultivating a positive and healthy work environment is critical to beating workplace burnout.

Article written by Payal Mohta, Journalist

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