quotes from article, my comments in italics
"Instead, business leaders may need to change how their organizations operate.
One great way to start?
Ask employees what small changes will help them most."
When was the last time you engaged your employees?
Successful turnarounds often start with the (new) CEO meeting everyone in the business, getting to know them on a 1 to 1 basis, and what problems they experience. Involving themselves in the business helps them understand what impedes it, so they know what needs to be worked on and how they can facilitate it.
One reason people get burnt out is from banging their heads against the wall with issues senior management fails in addressing.
“When Stanford researchers looked into how workplace stress affects health costs and mortality in the United States (pdf), they found that it led to spending of nearly $190 billion — roughly 8% of national healthcare outlays — and nearly 120,000 deaths each year. Worldwide, 615 million suffer from depression and anxiety and, according to a recent WHO study, which costs the global workforce an estimated $1 trillion in lost productivity each year. Passion-driven and caregiving roles such as doctors and nurses are some of the most susceptible to burnout, and the consequences can mean life or death; suicide rates among caregivers are dramatically higher than that of the general public — 40% higher for men and 130% higher for women.”
“FACT: companies without systems to support the well-being of their employees have higher turnover, lower productivity, and higher healthcare costs, according to the American Psychological Association (APA). In high-pressure firms, healthcare costs are 50% greater than at other organizations. Workplace stress is estimated to cost the U.S. economy more than $500 billion dollars, and, each year, 550 million work days are lost due to stress on the job. Another study by the APA claims that burned-out employees are 2.6 times as likely to be actively seeking a different job, 63% more likely to take a sick day, and 23% more likely to visit the emergency room.”
“gold standard of measuring burnout — the eponymous Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) — and the coauthor of the Areas of Worklife Survey. Maslach worries about the new WHO classification in the IDC11.” “Categorizing burnout as a disease was an attempt by the WHO to provide definitions for what is wrong with people, instead of what is wrong with companies,” she explains. “When we just look at the person, what that means is, ‘Hey we’ve got to treat that person.’ ‘You can’t work here because you’re the problem.’ ‘We have to get rid of that person.’ Then, it becomes that person’s problem, not the responsibility of the organization that employs them.”
“a survey of 7,500 full-time employees by Gallup found the top five reasons for burnout are:
Unfair treatment at work
Unmanageable workload
Lack of role clarity
Lack of communication and support from their manager
Unreasonable time pressure
The list above clearly demonstrates that the root causes of burnout do not really lie with the individual and that they can be averted — if only leadership started their prevention strategies much further upstream.”
“It’s hard for leadership to then ignore needs after witnessing them first-hand.”