Providing a quality employee experience isn’t just about having swanky offices, offering gift vouchers, and organizing afterwork parties every other Thursday. If you want to retain your talent, above all else, you need to take care of people’s physical and mental health. After all, happy employees are also more engaged and deliver higher performance.
For many, though, the reality is quite different. According to one survey by the Boston Consulting Group, nearly half of all employees worldwide are currently grappling with burnout. This is a state of intense exhaustion that impacts our physical, mental, emotional, and cognitive capacities. The result? Your team loses steam—both in motivation and self-confidence. They find it harder to stay productive and are even more likely to resign.
So how can you prevent this burnout before it sets in? What employee burnout signs should you watch out for, and what triggers it? How can you raise awareness among your teams? HR managers: read on carefully—this information will prove very useful for you!
What are the telltale signs of employee burnout?
Recognizing the signs of employee burnout is essential to intervene in time and prevent the situation from worsening. Here are the main ones to watch out for:
Physical signs
Burnout often affects the body before manifesting itself more visibly on the psychological level. Physical signs of employee burnout include:
- sleep disorders: trouble falling asleep, insomnia, frequent waking, etc.
- intense fatigue: a feeling of exhaustion that persists even after a period of rest
- pain: backache, headache, stomachache, cramps, joint pains
🛑 One common consequence: increased absenteeism, as burned out employees often take time off work for health reasons.
Emotional and behavioral signs
Burnout also affects our emotional state and behavior, which can manifest in the following symptoms:
- isolation: tendency to isolate oneself rather than socialize with the group
- lack of emotions: detachment, loss of interest in one’s surroundings
- mood disorders: irritability, anxiety, aggressiveness, depression, impatience, etc.
- loss of self-confidence: constant questioning of capability.
- lack of motivation: employees stick to the bare minimum of their job duties. This is known as quiet quitting.
🛑 One common consequence: engagement nosedives, directly impacting team performance.
Cognitive signs
Finally, burnout alters cognitive abilities, making daily tasks increasingly difficult to accomplish. Signs include:
- trouble with concentration: an inability to stay focused on a task, and/or frequent distractions
- memory disorders: difficulty in retaining information
- organizational problems: difficulty planning, managing time or learning new things
- loss of creativity: difficulty coming up with new ideas or solutions
🛑 One common consequence: a drop in productivity, as the quality of work declines.
Which employees are most at risk for burnout?
Certain categories of employees are more at risk of developing burnout signs, in particular:
- employees over 60
- young professionals
- women
- managers
- teleworkers
- employees of very small businesses
Keep a close eye on all these groups. Also, look out for burnout symptoms in understaffed teams, parents (especially single parents), perfectionists, and those who find it hard to delegate and say no.
And above all, take care of yourself! In 2023, 71% of HR professionals said that burnout in their departments has become more prevalent than before the Covid-19 pandemic. So, learn to recognize the signs of employee burnout in yourself as well!
How can I prevent employee burnout?
Before taking concrete action, start by making your teams aware of the symptoms and factors that can lead to burnout. The sooner your staff can spot them, the sooner you’ll be able to intervene!
Understand factors of burnout
Burnout can have multiple causes, the most common being:
- work overload: employees lack the time to do their jobs properly, and often have to take on extra tasks—even when they’re already overworked
- lack of recognition and feedback for their work
- excessive control of work, often leading to loss of autonomy
- unclear, unrealistic, nonsensical and/or contradictory objectives
- conflicting relations with superiors and/or colleagues
- lack of support and mutual aid, often the result of an individualistic culture
- poor tooling: the tools provided are unsuitable or don’t work the way they should
- job insecurity, often caused by the fear of losing one’s job or seeing working conditions deteriorate
- lack of meaningful development and training opportunities
Set up concrete initiatives
To combat burnout effectively, it’s not enough to raise awareness among teams. Management must also be actively involved in implementing concrete initiatives! Here are just a few of the initiatives you can implement to avoid employee burnout.
1. Assess and adjust workload
Work overload is one of the key factors in burnout. The first thing to do (before signs of employee burnout appear) is to analyze your employees’ workload.
- Use tools such as Holaspirit to assess the amount of time an employee spends on each role. This will enable you to identify whether or not the workload’s appropriate—and also to make adjustments where needed.
- Reduce the number of ongoing projects. Put less urgent ones on the back burner and let simmer.
- Review the distribution of tasks within your team, especially if some members are visibly more overloaded than others.
- Relax about saying “no” to certain requests. Negotiate deadlines on non-priority projects.
2. Clarify roles, objectives, and priorities
Unclear or contradictory goals can quickly lead to anxiety, and eventually burnout. Here are our tips to prevent this:
- Clearly define everyone’s roles and responsibilities, and make them accessible to everyone. This is precisely what the Holaspirit organizational chart helps you achieve!
- Use the OKR method (objectives and key results) to create ambitious, easily measurable objectives that all teams are aligned with. In particular, this will enable you to connect team objectives to corporate goals, and thus give meaning to everyone’s work. (PS: an OKR module is also available from Holaspirit.) 😉
- Categorize and distinguish really urgent projects from those that are not.
3. Promote work/life balance
Promoting good work-life balance is essential to prevent employee burnout signs from appearing. Here are some effective initiatives:
- Set up a “right to disconnect” charter to avoid off-duty solicitations.
- Offer flexible working hours and/or teleworking days.
- Experiment with a 4-day week, or offer extra days off to give employees occasional extra rest.
4. Promote benevolent management
Don’t underestimate the importance of management in preventing employee burnout. Adopting a caring approach can make all the difference. Here are a few tips to help you do just that:
- Train managers to recognize signs of employee burnout and listen to the difficulties expressed by their teams.
- Encourage regular feedback and informal discussion to better understand each person’s needs.
- Create a climate of psychological safety where employees can take the initiative and make mistakes without fear of negative repercussions.
- Communicate on preventive actions. For example, publish a post on Talkspirit to show employees that their well-being comes first.
5. Improve physical and mental health
Implementing initiatives that improve employees’ physical and mental health is an excellent way of preventing burnout. If you’re short of inspiration, take a look at these ideas:
- Organize meditation workshops or sports classes to help employees better manage stress.
- Offer teambuilding activities to strengthen bonds within the team and avoid isolation—especially for teleworkers.
- Offer employee support services (like free consultations with a counselor or psychologist).
Also read: Tackling the Risks of Hybrid Work
These actions—when supported by committed management—help foster a healthy working environment and prevent employee burnout.
A final word
To prevent employee burnout, it’s crucial that you detect early symptoms of burnout such as persistent fatigue, loss of motivation, and isolation at an early stage. And above all: you need to act quickly by implementing targeted initiatives to prevent the situation from deteriorating.
HR and the C-suite, too, aren’t immune to burnout. Between managing teams and pressure from management, they need to keep an eye on their own well-being and react at the first sign of burnout.
One of the major employee burnout signs to watch out for is disengagement. Fortunately, there are a number of best practices to help prevent it.
Want to discover other strategies to boost employee engagement, avoid burnout and quiet quitting? Download our white paper below: 👇
Access the white paper
In our white paper “How to build employee loyalty and prevent quiet quitting?“, you’ll discover: the origins of the quiet quitting phenomenon, the main causes of disengagement at work, and the buttons to tweak to raise retention of top talent and stave off quiet quitting.
