The 3 areas most likely to cause employee burnout
Overloading workers and excessive collaboration are among the significant issues, and stress-management classes don’t help.
By Ted Kitterman
The working world is scrambling to find answers for rampant workplace burnout and the mental-health crises brought on by almost two years of pandemic stress.
Many employers have agreed that they are responsible for the mental health of their workforce, but the attempts to address the crisis often fall short of addressing underlying issues. Time and again, organizations try to solve workplace issues with one-off trainings and additional programming, but refuse to look at the No. 1 culprit for workplace burnout: excessive workload and toxic work culture.
In particular, stress-management classes and relaxation seminars do not measurably improve worker mental health. Researcher William Fleming, with the University of Cambridge in the U.K., analyzed data on 26,471 employees to discover the impact of one-off trainings on employee well-being.
The results show that such classes could actually have a negative, rather than a positive, effect.
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Tags: excessive collaboration, HBR, overloading workers, stress management, time management
