Managing different tasks and projects can be challenging – without taking into consideration how this can vary between months, as a result of holidays or part-time workers.
According to a CIPHR survey, 79% of adults feel stressed at least once a month. Following this, Champion’s 2022 Workplace Health Report evidences the number one cause of stress at work is excessive workloads, with lack of control being the second cause.
As a business owner or manager, it’s important to provide a high-quality service to your clients to support your company’s profits and growth. However, whether you have a big or small team, organising your team’s workload is essential to preventing overworking, as this can sometimes result in tasks not being completed, or done to a poorer standard, which can often lead to eventual burnout.
What is burnout?
Burnout is described as a state of physical and emotional exhaustion. Common symptoms to look out for in your employees are:
- A constant feeling of tiredness
- Feeling helpless
- Feeling detached, distant and lonely
- Feeling overwhelmed
- Procrastination or taking longer on jobs and tasks
- Self-doubt.
Burnout isn’t usually something that goes away by itself. To reduce the likelihood of burnout and its effects, you’ll need to address the underlying issue/s causing the exhaustion of your employees.
Preventing burn out
As a manager, it’s important to take a proactive approach to prevent stress from developing into burnout. As the number one cause of work-based stress is an excessive workload, supporting your employees with efficient time planning is an important step to reducing work pressures.
Using timesheets and job schedules can help you to allocate tasks based on skills and capacity. Budgeted hours will give each member of your team a guideline of how long each task should take – creating a structured weekly plan for everyone. Strong team management can encourage all employees to work together and support one another to get the job done.
Regular employee reviews can also improve the productivity of your employees, helping them to stay motivated and thrive within your business. By regularly checking in with your employees, you have the opportunity to see if they feel overworked – enabling you to take necessary actions, adjusting time plans or workloads, for example.
Further steps you can take:
- Encouraging open communication – creating a culture of communication can encourage your team to reach out to one another, sharing any problems or concerns without any feelings of judgement. This can result in a stronger and more supportive team, who feel open to suggesting how to improve workplace stress.
- Promoting a healthy work/life balance – a healthy diet, exercise and sleep have all been proven to decrease stress. Make sure you’re promoting a healthy lifestyle through your company’s culture, offering support where possible. Allowing flexible working can also improve productivity – remember, not everyone’s an early bird or night owl.
- Using an integrated system – streamlining all your processes into one place can ensure all documents and team data are accessible – including job schedules, timesheets, working hours and holidays. An online system provides you with the ability to adapt, optimising your schedules based on a clear understanding of team capacity.
By taking these steps, you can get an understanding of your team’s capacity to ensure you’re reducing workplace pressures and supporting your employees where you can.
Burnout can lessen your employees’ desires to learn, progress and grow within your company. Providing a healthy workplace environment and culture is vital to preventing employee burnout, and by streamlining your internal process, you can prevent your team feeling over-stretched.
Taking care of your employees and your systems should be a priority to ensure your business can grow successfully.
Get in touch for more information.