The Costs of Burnout
The experience of burnout is obviously a trying one for any employee. It doesn’t help that burnout can be self-perpetuating, as many efforts to combat it—working more hours, or pushing yourself to complete tasks for which you don’t have the energy—just make it worse.
Burnout also has tremendous repercussions for employers. It’s estimated to cost businesses between $125 billion and $190 billion a year in healthcare expenses. Additionally, a Gallup report showed that burnt out and “actively disengaged” employees are costing their employers 34% of their individual salaries due to their poor performance.
And that’s only the employees who stay. According to a 2016 study conducted by Kronos and Future Workplace, 95% of HR leaders agree that burnout plays a crucial role in employee turnover. In fact, it can account for 20%–50% of the turnover that occurs at a given business.
Left untreated, burnout can lead to and worsen serious sri lanka telegram data health conditions. It’s such an insidious force that it’s associated with more than 120,000 deaths each year—deaths that, as this paper claims, could potentially be prevented if businesses altered their management styles.
The Risk of Burnout is at an All-Time High
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, burnout was a risk at any office. American corporate culture equates success with visible drive and quantifiable working hours. As such, burnout consumed many star employees as they strove to distinguish themselves from their peers.
Now, however, with approximately 60% of the workforce working from home, burnout has become an even bigger threat. This fact may seem counterintuitive at first. Employees have less rigid schedules and more time to complete their work—shouldn’t they be more relaxed?
Burnout does not result from a time-based problem, but an energy-based one. Working from home conflates our work lives and our home lives, combining the stresses of each into a constant stream of responsibilities vying for our attention. The “always on” mentality has become far more literal: when your home is your office, you’re never actually off the clock.
You don’t have your commute, your dress code, or in-person meetings to preserve the ordinary boundaries between professional zones and relaxation. And perhaps most significantly, the internet is always available, pinging you with unanswered emails, to-do items, and the siren song of social media.