If you’ve chosen to read this article, you need this article. Burnout is real and can impact your work and personal life severely. We’re here to help you with tips to avoid the worst as the year wraps up and help you have a more peaceful start to the new year for yourself and your team. Owning and working for a small business can feel chaotic at times. There are ways to minimize the chaos's impact by preventing workplace burnout.
How To Avoid End Of Year Burnout In A Small Business
Learn to identify work burnout.
How common is burnout? 76% of workers have experienced it. The WHO puts it simply: burnout is chronic workplace stress that hasn’t been managed successfully. In other words, feeling stressed out for one intense or negative day doesn’t mean you’re experiencing burnout. Feeling that stress more often and consistently is the difference, plus not being able to manage it as successfully as you might manage infrequent stress. Avoiding burnout at work is worth consideration.
These are the common results of work burnout:
- Feeling exhausted and depleted of energy
- Feeling pessimistic or cynical about, or distanced from your job
- Reduced ability to perform well at work and reduced confidence in your performance
- Diminished desire to learn and grow at work
Know the burnout culprits.
There are five top causes of work burnout to know. Have you been experiencing these?
- Unfair treatment at work
- Unmanageable workload
- Unclear communications from your manager
- Lack of manager support
- Not enough time to do all of your work
Small Business Tips To Prevent Burnout
Be a good listener. Be all ears when a team member comes to you with a work problem. Step up the frequency of your check-ins, and commit to ongoing communication. A manager willing to listen to work-related issues makes employees 62% less likely to be burned out.
Encourage your team to work together. Coworkers can be a great support system for each other. It is the manager’s responsibility to foster an environment where your team helps one another.
Ask for input and ideas. Employees will feel a greater sense of connectedness and control if their opinions are encouraged and heard.
Make the work mean something. If your small business doesn’t have one, work together on a mission and align your work with that mission. Everyone benefits from a feeling of purpose.
Play to your team’s strengths. If you have an employee that is exceptionally skilled at something, let them work on related projects. Being able to do what you’re best at reduces the incidence of burnout by 57%.
Improve your work environment. Employees want personal workspaces and private space when they need it. Take inventory of your current setup. What could foster more teamwork and still give people their personal space?
Make employee goals achievable. When small business goals are tied to incentives, it becomes very distressing when they are unrealistic. Working on goals together helps give everyone a little more control and a lot more satisfaction.
Give more autonomy. Hire good people and let them do their jobs. Get out of their way! Ideally, give your workers flex time and flexibility in their workplace, realizing that both may not be possible for many small businesses. Without flex time and the ability to work remotely or in the office, you’ll need to look to other ways to give a sense of autonomy or flexibility.
Make inviting team spaces. A place where your team can collaborate should have a door, a work table, the technology needed, comfortable chairs, a whiteboard, and good acoustics. And don’t discount good lighting! Maximize productivity with natural lighting or daytime lights. Having spaces with windows can boost your team’s mood.
Reducing burnout in the workplace as a small business employer is the right thing to do for yourself and your employees. It comes down to being realistic about what is achievable, promoting good moods through collaboration and better workspaces, and communication. The end of the year can be a crunch time to get the results you want to report. You may be dealing with your own burnout, in which case you can connect with your team more to help. You’re all in this together.
