Michael Gungor made complete sense when he said, 'burnout is what happens when you try to avoid being human for too long.’ Many of us have started perceiving life as a mandatory race that we feel we need to run to survive. In this pursuit, we often tend to neglect the importance of our wellness and start inching towards burnout situations. This explains the reason why employee burnout is one of the most discussed phenomena in the contemporary business world.
In fact, it is quite possible that a large part of your workforce may already be at a discord with burnout experiences. As Forbes cites, 52 percent of employees have reported experiences linked to burnout in 2021. The rampant changes in work cultures and the ever-growing competitiveness seem to be putting employees under pressure. The anxiety around the pandemic could also be a huge contributor here. What is your take on these alarming rates of employee burnout?
In this special guest post, Jessica Robinson identifies the importance of employee recognition and how this can help to prevent burnout in the workplace.
Prevention is better than a cure
As an ambitious business leader, you want to take your business to new heights. For that, you always aspire to keep your employees motivated and productive at all times. But can employees deliver the expected efficiency and results when they are in the middle of serious burnout?
Productivity, as we know, is a measure of mental and physical soundness. With this in mind, putting quality strategies in place could assist in helping your employees keep burnout at bay. This would greatly benefit your employees and also meet your business goals as well. If not addressed, high burnout rates can greatly affect the overall performance of your organisation and derail your strategic goals.
Benefits of employee recognition in reducing burnout rates
Speaking of tactics to assist your employees in preventing burnout, have you considered the impact of focusing on employee recognition?
Here are five tips to help you deliver outstanding outcomes, and hopefully will inspire balancing business success with preventing employee burnout.
1. Recognition is the gateway to happiness
What do you think is the biggest antidote to stress and mental fatigue? The answer lies in happiness. Happiness enables people to leave behind their stressors and look at the pleasant side of life. Moreover, nurturing happiness is quite an effective approach in itself and it can help people overcome various stressors. After all, we are all companions in the pursuit of happiness, aren’t we? We are all searching for it to rejuvenate ourselves and focus on what’s most meaningful in our lives.
The effect of the state of happiness on human health is not something that is unknown or hard to decipher. To substantiate, research has shown that happiness leads to radiant optimism, a significant reduction in stress, healthy levels of blood pressure, and better sleep patterns. In short, happiness in every possible way can help your employees nurture their mental health and as an end result, combat burnout situations.
Now, the real question is what makes employees happy? Well, while there can be different dimensions in the workplace adding to employee happiness, recognition can make a huge difference to how your employees feel. Employees truly value receiving recognition for their efforts from their managers and leaders, and when their contributions are acknowledged this can boost feelings of happiness. In fact, as cited by OC Tanner, recognition in the workplace is of utmost importance for 37 percent of employees.
To add, organisations that have vibrant cultures of employee recognition experience 29 percent lower levels of frustration than companies that ignore recognition. This is where we can derive a direct correlation between employee recognition and fewer instances of burnout. Recognition can spark prolific happiness and joy among employees, lowering the risk of burnout.
2. Recognition facilitates high engagement
Between an engaged employee and a disengaged employee, who do you think is more prone to burnout? Of course, the latter is more exposed as disengaged employees can be carrying feelings of exhaustion. On the other hand, engaged employees will be happy to go the extra mile for the organisation they work for and even go beyond their usual working hours. They will have their own ways of managing stress and aim to enhance productivity in the best interest of their work commitments.
However, it is ironic that according to Gallup, no more than 20 percent of the global workforce is engaged. This is where the real challenge lies for organisations and this is where burnout is emerging as a large problem.
As a business leader, try to take notice of your disengaged employees. You may find identify ways to help them to rediscover their engagement, and hence feel less at risk to burnout. How are you going to accomplish this critical objective? This could be done by incorporating rewards and recognition as a core tactic in this pursuit.
To validate, further research reveals that 69 percent of employees assert that genuine appreciation can drive them to invest additional effort in their work. In simpler terms, employee recognition is a crucial factor for high engagement. Subsequently, engaged employees will be more likely to work with exemplary diligence and commitment. They’re also likely to feel less frustrated when they have additional tasks and responsibilities to deliver on.
In addition, they will be able to derive massive value from their work, and perhaps feel more optimistic. As long as they are engaged, work commitments will appear less of a burden to them, which is quintessential to reducing burnout rates.
In reality, organisations with active employee engagement are 22 percent more profitable - this conveys another inspiring reason to recognise and celebrate your people. Let’s see how innovative you can be with employee rewards and expressions of appreciation.
3. Recognition can be synonymous with exclusive wellness perks
Business leaders are on the lookout for creative and outside-the-box ideas for employee recognition, and many have been successful in decoding the correlation between rewards and motivation. The more creative the rewards, the greater the impact. What is the most creative reward you have ever offered to your team?
Well, speaking of creative rewards, why not make rewards out of exclusive wellness benefits? For example, you could offer access to paid wellness programmes to your employees as a token of appreciation. Additionally, you could offer gym memberships and exquisite mental wellness and mindfulness programmes that demonstrate the investment you’re making in your employees wellbeing. They would be happy to receive access to worthwhile ways for boosting wellbeing and reducing stress. There could also be some financial wellness perks as well as work-life balance coaching for employees.
The idea is to address the major stressors of employees by rewarding them with opportunities to focus on their wellness. Unlocking wellness assistance will enable employees to have enough measures in place to prevent burnout. Moreover, when employees see their co-workers embracing wellness perks, they too will feel motivated to upskill their performance.
This can also present an important opportunity for managers and senior leaders to receive training on how best to support their employees mental health. A perfect blend of recognition, wellness and training can be incredibly innovative and effective to boost your workplace culture. In addition to helping employees to prevent burnout, this blend will render a wide spectrum of business benefits. Allow recognition and wellness to be natural virtues in the workplace and cherish the benefits!
4. Recognition rejuvenates a sense of belonging
When you recognize your employees and reward their contributions, this helps to nurture a sense of belonging. Their individual growth in your company is associated with the success of the organisation, and therefore feeling like they belong will create a more positive attitude towards their workplace objectives. Regardless of their workload and responsibilities, through experiencing recognition this will provide a boost in motivation to do their very best for the company and fellow colleagues.
As per the Harvard Business Review, a strong sense of belonging among employees can bring down absenteeism due to sickness by 75 percent. This clearly indicates that a sense of belonging has a positive effect on employee wellness, and further implies that by fostering that feeling of belonging amongst your employees, this can reduce the risk of burnout.
As a business owner, you will also be glad to know that a strong feeling of belonging among employees can boost their job performance by 56 percent. Also, when employees feel they belong in their organisation, the turnover rates reduce by 50 percent. This shows that cultivating belonging via recognition is a win-win situation for all.
This sense of belonging has been challenging to nurture in this new culture of remote working driven by the pandemic. Therefore, if your organisation has gone remote or adopted a hybrid model of working, you may have to consider additional efforts to showcase employee recognition - no doubt you’ll experience a meaningful outcome as a result.
5. Recognition leads to employees feeling more secure
There could be a broad spectrum of reasons as to why employees may find themselves prone to burnout situations. Among these, the fear of job insecurity can be a leading reason, as the magnitude of competitiveness in the contemporary job market can feel overwhelming.
In fact, ever since people have witnessed major company layoffs as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, the sense of insecurity among employees has risen due to various uncertainties. In the event your employees may feel concerned about this, can you help to reassure them and encourage them to look beyond these apprehensions to focus on their role?
One of the most effective ways to do this is to express recognition and appreciation, wherever due. When employees receive recognition and rewards, they can feel a greater sense of security. Of course, anyone who receives recognition is valuable to the organisation, hence recognition can make employees feel more confident about their role. In addition, settling any fears of losing their jobs can help to reduce the vulnerabilities of burnout.
Multifaceted benefits
As you can see, recognition has multifaceted benefits across all business domains. From employee engagement, to employee retention, to employee wellness and happiness, recognition can play a sacrosanct role.
Speaking of burnout, in particular, the fact is that employee burnout is real and addressing it sooner rather than later can produce many benefits. Addressing it and putting preventative measures in place early on demonstrates that you care for your employees.
Productivity and burnout are counterintuitive. So, whether you look at it from the purview of your relationship with your employees or as an entrepreneur, it is vital to focus on preventing burnout to ensure a happy, healthy and productive workforce.
Jessica Robinson is a charismatic corporate leader, a selfless educator, and a versatile content creator. Despite a management degree, her vision behind blogging is not only to follow her passion but to create more informed societies. Her selflessness reflects in every piece of her work on The Speaking Polymath.