Healthy Workplace Seminar- This Company Is Causing Burnout
I was a guest speaker hired to give a motivational speech to an organization to help
them enhance wellness and provide stress management techniques.
It was clear the audience was stressed out,cynical, burnt out and at the end of their rope. When I had to fill out a third report to itemize my second report I realized this company is the root cause of its own burnout. People become cynical when they have to fill out reports to explain mundane things like why they need a bathroom break.
Burnout is often built into the very structure of an organization. Tell tale signs workplace wellness is suffering:
* Impossible goals
* Just-plain-stupid policies and procedures that show a lack of trust
* Lack of Clarity in Roles
* Pointless Meetings
* Consistent attempts to take the Human Element out of the work
* Lack of inspiration, appreciation and recognition
Changing this usually requires an entire culture shift where the biggest shift is towards a different perspective. It starts with giving people the benefit of the doubt, honoring staff wellness,clarifying roles, reducing meaningless rules and paperwork, establishing policies that give leeway for trust, recognizing the human element and appreciating people a lot. It doesn't happen overnight and it requires a strong commitment from leadership.
Restructure to Decrease the Workload
The result of overload is resentment and frustration. If people are overworked, for an organization to focus on wellness and be more healthy and productive, people need to have less work. It's contrary to popular belief, but less work allows for the work to be more focused, productive with fewer mistakes. Employees will be happier, healthier and more positive. Stress management tecniques that encourage wellness will become a priority.
People often spend time at work at the expense of their family, but you can get another job, you can't get another family. One of the best managers I have ever had wrote employee's important "family dates" on her calendar (soccer games, vacations, recitals) and made sure those shifts were covered. If people worked late consistently they were told to go home. The bottom line is if employees spend too much time at work it puts pressure on family which puts pressure on the employee wellness and lowers productivity, everyone loses. Reflecting on their life, nobody ever says I wish I spent more time at work, people always say I wish I spent more time with family.
At a conference the guest speaker quoted Evan Robinson's article, "Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work": I looked up the reference:
More than a century of studies show that long-term useful worker output is maximized near a five-day, 40-hour workweek. Productivity drops immediately upon starting overtime and continues to drop until, at approximately eight 60-hour weeks, the total work done is the same as what would have been done in eight 40-hour weeks.
In the short term, working over 21 hours continuously is equivalent to being legally drunk. Longer periods of continuous work drastically reduce wellness and cognitive function and increase the chance of catastrophic error. In both the short-and long-term, reducing sleep hours as little as one hour nightly can result in a severe decrease in cognitive ability, sometimes without workers perceiving the decrease. (Evan Robinson)
Sometimes work can just be restructured to reduce workload. For instance, if people can be more focused on results not policies that require paperwork they will be more productive.
Clarifying Roles and establishing meaningful goals decreases workload and emotional stress management related to work. Very often work roles are redundant, inefficient and unorganized, get to the bottom of it by letting employees restructure their own roles and goals. The result will be leadership, increased wellness and employee ownership.
Appreciate the Human Element
There is nothing worse than being treated like a machine, designed only for function. The more you try to replace the human element with technology and functional outcome the less human an organization is. Our customers, our employees, our shareholders are all human. When we introduce more technology to simplify our work it usually requires people to multitask (do several things at the same time) but research shows we can only really focus on one thing at a time. The result is we don't do as good of a job and mistakes often occur.
We focus on technology and quick results and we lose the human connection. It takes time to slow down and connect, build rapport and really establish relationships based on people not productivity and results.
And in the long run it's worth it.
As an employee in an organization like this, recognize there is only so much you can do. If you are being pushed to the limits and in the throes of burnout that no stress management seminar could fix your first action is to take time for your self, to engage in some deep self-reflection and look for root causes of the burnout issue. Then, consider action steps to reduce or eliminate the degree of burnout you are experiencing. Also be a wellness advocate and speak to company employees the virtues of stress management.
by: Jody Urquhart
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