5 Tips to Manage Burnout at Work

To maintain a healthy workplace and create a unified workforce, it’s important to put employee wellbeing first in everything you do.

Managing stress at work is tough, so a compassionate approach to management can do a world of good for your team. The last thing you want is for your employees to reach the point of burnout, since this can be highly detrimental to their physical and mental health and of course limit their effectiveness and contributions.

While it might be easy to place the blame on the shoulders of the individuals for letting stress get to them, it’s as much a result of the workplace dynamic as it is the responsibility of the employees.

Once you have workers who have reached the point of burnout, it isn’t a simple case of fixing the problem with a bandaid either. A weekly yoga session isn’t going to cut it, so you’re best off addressing the problem with a proactive approach.

In this guide, we’ll go through some of the best strategies for preventing stress in the workplace so you can get the most out of your team and minimize the risk of burnout.

Table of Contents

Make Time for Rest

Everyone knows that the workplace is made for productivity and hard work, but it’s this pressure to perform day in and day out that can lead employees down a dangerous path that can end in burnout.

Yes you want your workers to give you everything, but at the end of the day you didn’t employ robots with unlimited batteries. You need to see your team as your peers, as humans with needs rather than productivity machines.

While they can take care of themselves, there are some things you can do as a manager to reduce the level of day-to-day stress they experience in the workplace which can build up over time.

So what exactly can you do to alleviate work-related stress?

Enforce several breaks throughout the day
Refrain from pressuring employees close to deadlines
Set up vacation opportunities

Nobody is capable of working for more than four or five hours straight without experiencing a lapse in concentration and productivity. With that in mind, why would you expect your team to work around the clock on a project when their work rate will drop off regularly?

If you consider the pomodoro method, which involves working for 25 minutes before taking a quick 5 minute break, you can apply a healthier work dynamic for your team.

While it doesn’t have to be perfect, you can establish a system in which workers are allowed to take several short breaks for every few hours of work. The benefit of this is that they will be able to put a lot of effort into a project in short bursts, rather than trying to sustain their motivation levels for long periods of time.

If you’re feeling like trying something completely new, you could even experiment with reduced working hours and see if your team can reach the same or even higher levels of productivity in a different work schedule.

Prioritize Worker Wellbeing

If you want your workers to be happy and productive, you have to prioritize their wellbeing.

What that means is that no project is worth reprimanding a worker over if the outburst is only going to increase their already high stress level.

Different people respond to different forms of motivation, and for some, nothing is more detrimental to motivation than feeling extra pressure being piled onto them by their superior or colleagues.

So long as you provide clear expectations when you assign tasks, you shouldn’t have too many issues with confusion or unsatisfactory work.

You can also make an effort to check in with your team on a regular basis, so workers can raise any issues they may have regarding their wellbeing or thoughts about improving the way they work.

You might find that software for employee monitoring, can help with this check in process. With access to key information about how each worker spends their time, you can evaluate whether there’s an issue that you could address with them.

Emphasize Healthy Company Values

If your company believes in the grind, and that every worker has to be a self-starter, a go-getter, and a high achiever, then you are inviting pressure that doesn’t need to be there.

The more you talk about performance, hard work, and time constraints, the more you are going to open the door to stress and potentially burnout too.

That isn’t to say that you should be laissez-faire about how you run your company, but you need to use the right words and forms of motivation to instill a healthy sense of loyalty in your employees.

Extend an Olive Branch to Employees

If you notice that a worker is having a particularly hard time, be it due to stress they’ve brought from home or from work-related pressure, you should set aside some time to check in with them and assess the situation.

Empathy is your most powerful tool in this situation, along with compassion.

If your workers feel like you genuinely care about how they feel, and not just about what they do, then they are much more likely to want to work for you and less likely to feel isolated.

If you can instill a sense of community in the workplace, burnout will be far less frequent, as everyone will have someone to talk to when things get tough.

Encourage Workplace Socialization

While the COVID-19 pandemic has made workplace socialization much trickier, you should do whatever you can to encourage it among your employees.

Humans are social beings, and without being able to laugh and share experiences with coworkers, we can get stuck in our heads and spiral.

As such, whether it’s through Zoom calls or in-person meetings, you need to help your team get together often and discuss whatever it is that’s on their minds. This can alleviate pressure and instill a sense of comradery among a group of individuals.