The beginning of a new year may seem like an odd time to think about employee burnout, but it may be the perfect time to start addressing it, according to a new post on Forbes, which cites a recent Kronos survey that finds 46 percent of 600 HR leaders said that burnout accounted for up to half of their annual employee churn volume:
While unsatisfactory compensation, an unreasonable workload and excessive overtime were listed as the top three reasons for burnout, it’s possible that in each one of these cases of churn, management also failed to check in with their people. It’s likely that HR leaders weren’t in touch with how employees were feeling at the time they chose to move on. Instead, they had to learn it the hard way, in exit interviews.
While there may be no simple answer to the burnout problem and no amount of team-building or sweetening the benefits package will ever convince some burned-out workers to stay, there are things HR leaders can do to dampen the deleterious effects of burnout, starting with the on-boarding process:
Onboarding is your opportunity to plug people into your culture.
Onboarding is like a first impression on a date, and if the employee feels that they are in a sink-or-swim environment, it can be tough to put down roots. Make your new hires feel comfortable and assimilate them naturally into your team. Make it a pleasant experience instead of overloading them with too much dry or detailed information. Ask department leaders to host new team members the first few weeks. These leaders can take a new hire to coffee as well as introduce to other team members. Make the onboarding experience personal and memorable and be sure job descriptions are simple and clear.
To learn about the other four burnout-reducing strategies, read the entire Forbes post here.
