Employee wellness has taken the spotlight these days due to the pandemic. Many employers have been concerned about the well-being of their employees and putting guidelines in place to prevent them from getting sick with Covid.
Unfortunately, not as much emphasis has been put on employee burnout. It is very easy to overwork your employees and cause them to get burned out physically as well as mentally. Besides the fact that you could be violating MA overtime laws, overworking your employees could have long term negative effects for your company.
In this article, we will go over several ways to prevent this from happening.
Give time for recovery
There are going to be periods in which there is a lot of work that needs to be done and people will be asked to sacrifice personal time to make sure it is done. When there are deadlines to meet, then this is a very common time when people need to work a lot of overtime.
The problem that can occur is that the company doesn’t follow up after the deadline and make sure that workers have time to recover from the long hours. Giving people some half days or even full days off after a deadline is going to help them gain back some energy to continue putting full effort in at work. When they are tired, you are only going to get minimal effort as they don’t have much energy left if you don’t give them a break.
Let them work from home
Long commutes are one of the biggest reasons employees are burned out. Many people face a commute of close to three hours round trip per day. This means that with an average 40 hour work week, you can add another 15 hours away from home to that. This makes for a very long week that is tiring and stressful.
If you allow employees to work from home at least one day a week then this can lift the burden of a long commute considerably. There are many offices that have gone full remote due to the pandemic and are not experiencing any loss in productivity. This means that it shouldn’t be a problem to let them work a few days from home.
Focus on productivity and not face time
When people feel they will be judged harshly for leaving work on time then this leads to them staying later without actually working more. Productivity drops considerably when people feel they can’t leave before their manager because they need to put in facetime.
This is one of the worst things you can do both for your employees well being and also for productivity. Focus on how the work gets done and now how many hours a person works.
Cut down on meetings
Every hour spent in a meeting is one hour less an employee has to get the work done. If they can’t get the work done then it means late evenings spent at work instead of at home with family.
Cut down meetings to one per week and have a daily email with all the important points you would have made in a meeting.
