What can you do to ensure that your employees are not suffering from burn out?

Experiencing burn out can be constituted by many different factors. The usual factors are extra hours spend at work, the amount of quality of work expected by managers, as well as amount of work that is required to be completed within a short notice.

However, burn out can also be easily associated with employee’s morale – which can consist of unfair sentiments arising from unfair compensation – on whether someone is getting more highly paid, while performing the same duties or the salary is the same, with one having more duties and responsibilities. It can also be associated with poor management and misalignment of direction. To put it simply, imaging redoing a work several times because of changes of instructions by the management.

These are what you can do to ensure your employees are not suffering from burn out:

Listen

Regardless the amount of work load, you should always make time to engage them to prevent burnout from happening. You should listen, whether is it in an actual complain, or through subtle signs like their tone, their frustrations at work. If you do realize that they might be experiencing a burn out, you can allow them a voice to understand the root of the problem.

This strategy works best, if you empower your employees. Let them know you are always there readily available to hear complains and grievances without providing a judgement – and above being a leader, you’re also a friend.

Provide

To be fair to your employees, you should provide avenues for them to raise their unhappiness to you – whether in the form of a regular employee survey, or one to one talks with their leaders. You need to be able to provide them accessible advice and help to complete the tasks given, or a reasonable deadline for any tasks assigned.

You are also able to provide the environment which minimizes burn out – by providing more welfares such as random parties, good food and providing day offs to celebrate company’s successes.

You can also provide employees with the education on what a burn out feels like – so that employees would be more aware, and will take the necessary actions to reduce burn out.

Be Fair

Evaluate yourself. If you are making decisions irrationally, by providing unfair treatments – then you need to be the change. You must recognize effort rationally and to communicate the rationale on why decisions are made (I.e., why did you promote this person), to reduce any tensions arising from inequality.

If your employee is putting in effort, while still not delivering -  it is of no harm to provide encouragement as well and to see how you can help the employee in reaching the organization’s goals.

Discriminatory Job Advertisements

In Singapore, there is an organization to ensure that no companies use discriminatory wordings in their job advertisements. If you are in the Human Resource Industry long enough, you will commonly know them as TAFEP – or Tripartite Alliance for Fair Employment.

Basically, TAFEP ensures companies uses fair practices during hiring or while at work. There have been a number of companies who have been given demerit points, fined, or asked to attend compulsory courses by TAFEP to ensure that discriminatory practices do not happen again.

But do you know that apart from the benefit of ensuring fair practices - there is another benefit?

Increased Applicants

Studies have shown that job advertisements which do not seem to steer towards a preference for a gender type are able to attract more applicants. With a wider pool of applicants, you can have more choices about who is going to be the good fit with the company.

Recruitment website ZipRecruiter found that job listing with gender-neutral wording gets 42% more responses than listing with gendered wordings. In this case, gendered wordings could also imply words that people associate with masculinity or feminism. 

Increased Employer Branding and Increased Employee Retention

Imagine if you are in a company, whom you are aware are hiring based on discriminatory practices – would you not think that they might promote based on discriminatory practices as well instead of meritocracy?

If they are going to promote based on discriminatory practices, current employees would be concerned. If gender, race and age are going to be a consideration factor for the time when you would get the promotion, then we would not suggest waiting too long.