Notes from research what to do workplace
Burnout is an organizational issue. If you are facing burnout, is not in your entire responsibility to fix it, the fact that you have it is a symthom of a systematic issue that happens in your workplace, and it is a major red flag.
The Always-On manager fails to take time to step back and think strategically about their role. They can only see trees and not the forest. As a result, their department never has the desired impact on the business's bottom line, and the team burns out, one at a time.
https://medium.com/management-matters/the-mangers-driving-the-great-resignation-29406ae74c56
Environmental causes: Organization
can instead be explained by the level of “mismatch” between an individual and six strategic areas of the workplace: workload, control, reward, community, fairness and values.
- Feelings of lack of control:
- An employee is said to have control when she is able to participate in and influence workplace decision-making and is also able to exercise professional autonomy. Control has to do not only with how and when the job is done, but also how much leeway employees have in determining when they can take a break or when they can schedule their vacation
- In terms of burning out, workers who feel they have little job autonomy or control are at greater risk (Paine, 1982; Glass et al., 1993). Lack of control can take a number of different forms including supervisors who micromanage or organizations that do not allow employees to participate in policy or other work-related decisions (Glass et al., 1993). Lack of control is particularly stressful in an environment in which downsizing and job restructuring are taking place.
- fix: Give more control to people, autonomy and power of decision making
- Role conflict or role ambiguity:
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Role ambiguity is a term used to describe the lack of clarity, certainty and/or predictability one might have expected with regards to behaviour in a job (due, perhaps to an ill-defined or ambiguous job description and/or uncertain organizational objectives).
Employees who work hard on what they think is an important project only to find it shelved or placed on the back burner, as well as employees who don’t understand the scope and parameters of their job, the goals they should be pursuing, and what their priorities should be are more likely to suffer from role ambiguity.
In contrast, role conflict involves competing and incompatible demands placed on an employee. This can involve the sometimes contradictory demand of being both a supervisor and a friend, the irreconcilable demands of providing good service while striving to reduce costs, or the difficulties of doing a job which is at odds with one’s own values. Where role conflict and role ambiguity are high, high levels of burnout are also found (Tunc and Kutanis, 2009).
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Lack of support from management: Leadership style in terms of credibility has to do with the extent to which workers feel they can trust the person in charge.
Where workers feel they can trust their managers/supervisors, they are less likely to question managerial objectives or to refrain from volunteering to take on additional work required to accomplish these objectives. Where leadership credibility is low, the extent to which employees are burned out is likely to be higher
- Social support:
- Part of social support concerns appreciation and is a major buffer against stress. People who feel unappreciated almost never reach out to show appreciation of someone else’s work. Our experience has shown that one of the best ways for individuals to encourage others to pay attention to their work is to start acknowledging the good work of others. peer appreciation (which is easy to institute) reduces the need for approval from above (which is frequently difficult, if not impossible, to institute).
- Younger employees need more social support from their supervisors to reduce stress. They tend to rely far more on assistance and encouragement from their supervisors to help buffer higher levels of job stress.
- Have good social support and a network of people with similar interest have lower scores on emotional exhaustion
- Conflict: Although conflict may occur for many reasons, the feeling that one has too much work and too few resources with which to carry it out is likely to contribute to interpersonal conflict in the workplace
- fix: social support
- Reciprocity:
- Reciprocity involves the amount an individual invests in a particular relationship with another and whether, and to what extent, that investment is returned. In the case of workers who feel they are contributing more to relationships with clients, patrons, patients, etc. than is being returned, there is an increased risk of burnout. But a perceived lack of reciprocity may exist not only with the recipients of one’s care but also with colleagues. The later contributes a lot to burnout, and by colleagues also mean: supervisors. Indeed, employees who feel a lack of reciprocity with their employing organization have been found to experience an even greater distress than when that lack of reciprocity exists with patients and co-workers
- employees are expected to give more in terms of time, effort, skills, and flexibility, whereas they receive less in terms of career opportunities, lifetime employment, job security, and so on. Violation of the psychological contract is likely to produce burnout because it erodes the notion of reciprocity, which is crucial in maintaining well-being.
- Underwork: Underwork has been described in a number of ways including not being challenged enough on the job, or not having enough work to do, or lacking interest in the tasks that need to be done, or trying to look busy because there is not enough work. Certain experts who deal with the syndrome call it “boreout” – a syndrome with symptoms almost identical to burnout but which is differentiated by the fact that it afflicts the under-challenged
- Leadership style: There is an established link between type of leadership style, negative emotions, stress and burnout.
- employees working with a transformational leader rather than a transactional leader are less likely to see an impending stressor as threatening. Transformational leadership has been found to increase well-being and job satisfaction, and to decrease burnout in employees
- A transformational leadership style is one in which the leader attempts to inspire and motivate by appealing to an individual’s sense of self-worth in addition to other unique emotional and developmental needs.
- transactional leadership is of these types: contingent reward, management by exception-active, and management by exception-passive
- Contingent reward” involves the provision of a reward (money, positive feedback, commendation) in exchange for good job performance
- “Management by exception” may be active or passive. In the active form, the leader monitors an employee’s work, and if job performance deviates from expected performance standards, correction in the shape of negative feedback, discipline or punishment takes place.
- In the passive form, the leader is not actively involved in the monitoring of work, and only steps in when any deviation is brought to his or her attention
- Unmanageable workload & time pressure: they contribute strongly to emotional exhaustion. Overload is bad for both the individual and the organization – the quality of work drops, co-workers have no time for collegiality or to build community, and morale and motivation suffer.
- When to know? If it's hard to find relief at work. If restful moments between events are gone, and each demand rolls in the next one. When this happens exhaustion builds up, additional demands are not manageable and the current scramble for survival often results in a shortage of resources.
- Workload can be of two types – either quantitative (e.g., high job demands with too little time in which to carry out those demands) or qualitative (e.g., jobs with a great deal of complexity or requiring a great deal of concentration
Organizational issue
Burnout is an organizational issue. If you are facing burnout, is not in your entire responsibility to fix it, the fact that you have it is a symthom of a systematic issue that happens in your workplace, and it is a major red flag.
as employees, are not responsible for solving it. Still, it is not entirely out of our control. We can choose to set boundaries that protect our mental, physical, and emotional health. The challenge is that our efforts to do so are often hijacked by guilt.
overload the most capabale: The overload problem is compounded for companies because the best people are the ones whose knowledge is most in demand and who are often the biggest victims of collaboration overload.
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Giving people the time to do work that drives the company’s success will pay huge dividends by raising productivity, increasing productive output and reducing burnout. Everybody wins.
Organizational measures
This is a post focused mainly on the individual, rather than the organization. However, provided most of the causes of burnout have origin in the organization, some actions that the organization can look at, in order to address properly are:
- Define roles
- Prioritize work
- Work on important non urgent things
- Provide people more control, for example over: autonomy, opportunity for promotion, feedback and social support
- Adjust organizational structures and routines, decrease decision nodes, to address excessive collaboration
- Evaluate leadership style of managers, target to transformational service leadership
- Workload:
- Reduce workload
- if not possible workload is expected to be busier than usual, but only temporarily, managers need to let employees know what has brought about this change, how long the increased amount of work is expected, and why additional staff are not being hired.
- Identify and reduce boredom
- create “a culture of ‘psychological safety’ in which ‘it’s okay to ask questions’
- allow to change tasks, make rotations
- encourage physical and mental health
- model desired behavirour
- Managers need to be aware they model behavior including work-life balance. Where managers work excessive numbers of hours and do not take time out for family or vacations, they signal to subordinates that this is expected behavior and, in turn, increase the levels of stress in the workplace.
- A stressed-out manager may exhibit signs of irritability, impatience, frustration or irrational thinking
- scheduling a “walking meeting” where meetings take place while going for a walk around the block
- dont skip vacations
- consider sabbaticals
- For employees who are burning out, a sabbatical might be the first big step towards recovery. Ironically, individuals who are at risk for burning out might be those most reluctant to relinquish control of their specific area of work.
- Control
- give people more autonomy and flexibility
- let people have a say on how the work will be done
- Reward
- Keep in mind employee aspirations, to satisfy them
- Community
- encourage people to do activities that are not work related together
- building a better community in the workplace involves more than just workplace friends, it also requires supportive managers.
- Employees who are treated with respect and made to feel valued in the workplace have less difficulty handling heavy work demands than their less respected co-workers
- Fairness
- handle promotions fairly and transparently
- constructive feedback
- having clear and transparent procedures
- Values
- do values inventory, find discrepancies between written and acted
How to measure it
Burnout: negative scores on exhaustion, cynicism, and professional efficacy
Overextended: strong negative score on exhaustion only
Ineffective: strong negative score on professional efficacy only
Disengaged: strong negative score on cynicism only
Engagement: strong positive scores on exhaustion, cynicism, and professional efficacy
the overextended group has just one key problem: workload (high demands and low resources).
But the disengaged or ineffective groups seem to have other problems, including fairness in the workplace, or social rewards and recognition.
The burnout group has major issues with multiple aspects of the workplace—a pattern that stands in sharp contrast to the “exhaustion-only” overextended group. Any solution that an employer undertakes to improve the work-life experience needs to account for the varying sources of the five different patterns, rather than assuming that one type of solution will fit all.
For organizations that do not have internal resources to conduct an applied study of employee burnout and engagement, an alternative option is to obtain assessment services from consultants or test publishers. External surveyors can assure confidentiality by acting as intermediaries between employee respondents and management. They often have a greater capacity to generate individual or work group reports.
source
https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/managing-burnout-in/9781843347347/xhtml/B9781843347347500050.htmst0020