How to prevent employee burnout

- When it comes to burnout, people often step in too late. The damage is already done, and it's a matter of being reactive to the situation that you have in front of you. Prevention is far better than recovery for everyone involved. So how can you proactively prevent burnout? We're going to discuss three core preventative focuses that you can take as a manager. The first is to support the building of resilience. Building resilience takes time, and so investing early and consistently is key. It will be worth it because it equips your employees with a series of behaviors and thought processes, which over time strengthen their ability to overcome and prosper from the negative and difficult events faced in their daily work. It means that they can more easily bounce back from challenging events, and it reduces the physiological and mental burden that can come from excessive stress, thereby helping to proactively manage the likelihood of burnout. There are lots of things that you can do to help improve the resilience of your employees. You can promote curiosity. This encourages them to seek out new experiences that are perhaps outside their comfort zone. You can also promote healthy sleep habits. Everyone knows that everything seems worse after a bad night's sleep. And although sleep's not part of the normal workday, ensuring your team are educated on the best practices for sleep really helps to reduce the risks associated with a lack of sleep. The second focus is to eliminate presenteeism, the act of working harder and longer hours when really you should be resting and recovering at home. We all know what it's like, it's the week when you've got the most work to do out of the whole year, and you come down with a heavy cold and fever. But because the work has to be done, you take some medicine and then you struggle on. And when this is just a one-off, then it's recoverable. But when it becomes a pattern, then it can start to have a negative impact. And when it's a recurring theme, you also start to ask yourself is me getting sick meaning that I'm feeling more stressed about work, or is it my work that's making me sick, because that's a real thing. And it doesn't have to be a cold and fever. Replace that fever with exhaustion and fatigue, and you have the same downward spiral, a sense that whatever you do is never enough to get everything done. I'm sad to say that for many organizations, it's still the piece of advice they don't want to hear, support your people to work less. But it's critical. By keeping alert to these red flags, by keeping workloads under check and by calling out presenteeism when it occurs, you can course-correct challenges before they lead to full-on burnout. You can ensure that your people are mentally fit to perform well at work. At work, everyone has high expectations. Organizations wouldn't be successful if they didn't aim high. But those same expectations can also lie heavy on the shoulders of your people. What's more, people often set their own expectations, and it's often the case that people's expectations of themselves are even higher than both set by others. It's worth knowing that our expectations actually change our brain chemistry, so we're talking about very real physical effects here. If you add to the mix someone who's a bit of a perfectionist, then you may potentially have trouble brewing. As a manager, you need to set reasonable expectations for the delivery of work and encourage teams to share the responsibility. We all have to work together to prevent burnout. It's so worth the investment into building resilience, reducing workloads and managing expectations because when burnout occurs, it can have such a wide-ranging negative effect on all involved.