Ah, the end of the year. It’s that time when you wake up in the morning, and you’re just oh so cozy in your bed, but it’s so cold in your house that you just really don’t want to get up. On top of that, you’ve gotta go straight into a two-hour meeting as soon as you get to work—and you also just remembered that you signed up to bring a dessert for the company potluck, which you absolutely did not make the night before. With circumstances like these, it’s not hard to see why most people tend to feel a little less motivated when heading into the end of the year, even if this time of year proves to be the busiest for some companies.
Since we’ve been around since 1985, we’ve seen about 39 holiday seasons meaning we’re relatively familiar with that holiday burnout feeling. Across those 39 seasons, we’ve had numerous clients approach us with this issue, and for good reason: when you can’t encourage your employees or maybe even yourself to power through those last couple of sales calls or close those new deals, your business may not be ringing in a happy new year.
In this article, we’ll go over five tips to help you combat holiday burnout. We’ll start by discussing what burnout is and how to identify it. We’ll also talk about why burnout can be so dangerous for your company. By the end of this article, you’ll have all the tools you need to push through into the new year and to finally send that feedback on that one PowerPoint you said you’d do by the end of the day.
In this article, you will learn:
What Is Burnout?
Firstly, before we dive into ways to prevent burnout, we need to understand what exactly burnout is. Burnout can manifest in different ways for everyone, but there are some key signs.
Burned Out
According to the National Library of Medicine, the origins of the term burnout lie with American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger. Freudenberger first coined the term in the 1970s when describing the consequences of working in caregiving positions. Freudenberger focused on the industry's high stress and high ideal markers.
As time would go on, the term would come to apply to any number of people experiencing “burnout syndrome,” whether it be work-related or simply due to some other form of stress. Burnout syndrome in it of itself isn’t its own illness, but it is related to other mental illnesses.
What Are The Symptoms of Burnout?
Burnout typically manifests through three common symptoms: exhaustion, alienation, and decreased performance. Exhaustion is probably the most common and recognizable symptom, creating a general lack of energy and a down feeling in individuals.
This exhaustion can lead to alienation and decreased performance. Employees experiencing burnout may feel disconnected or uninspired by their work or stressed by their work to the point of avoidance. All of these things combined can take a serious toll on job performance as burnout it makes it much harder to concentrate and focus on the task at hand.
How Does Burnout Affect Your Business?
Burnout can have any number of effects on your business, largely relating to a decrease in productivity and a decline in employee well-being.
Employee Well-Being
The well-being of your employees can have a huge impact on your business. A study performed by the American Psychological Association found that 71 percent of workers who experience stress or tension in their jobs strongly agree that they will seek new job opportunities within a year.
The same study found that three in five workers experienced some sort of negative impact on their ability to do their jobs, whether related to lack of interest, motivation, or difficulty focusing. According to the Mayo Clinic, burnout can also lead to those affected to doubt their ability to do their job.
Productivity And Profitability
Productivity and profitability are heavily dependent on each other: a business must be productive to be profitable, and it must be profitable to attract productive workers or encourage its employees to be productive. When one of these things falls out of balance, the other one goes with it.
Burnout can seriously affect your company’s ability to remain productive. Employees who feel too stressed out by their work are more likely to not complete their work in a timely or adequate manner, or they may not complete their work at all. As stated above, this stress can also lead to employees leaving for different companies, leaving you spending time trying to fill a position rather than getting the job done.
3 Tips For Avoiding Year-End Burnout
Seeing as burnout largely comes from stress and the holiday season brings about a whole slew of new reasons to stress in combination with work, tackling burnout at this time of year becomes more important than ever.
#1: Balance The Workloads
One of the first steps you can take to reduce burnout for yourself or your organization is to adjust your or your employees’ workload. If you feel that one of your employees is experiencing burnout, ask them for feedback and what you can do to help them. If you’re their supervisor, consider what tasks can be distributed to another member of your team or taken down on the priority list.
Workload is also directly proportional to the amount of time someone works. According to Gallup, the risk for burnout increases significantly as people’s workweeks rise from 40 to 50 hours and from 50 to 60 hours. Keeping people’s workweeks at a typical 40 hours will help alleviate the risk of burnout, especially during the holiday season when spending time with family outside of work is on most people’s minds.
#2: Fostering Work-Life Balance
Work-life balance is a crucial piece in the puzzle of preventing burnout. As stated above, the amount of time people work and the time they spend at work can be key contributors to stress, which leads to burnout.
One method for improving your team’s work-life balance is to offer your employees a complete benefits package. Things like PTO and flexible work arrangements help employees maintain a strong work-life balance and minimize the risk of burnout. Things like holiday pay and floating holidays are also added benefits that can keep year-end burnout at bay.
In cases where you or your employees may already be experiencing burnout, controlling how much you are exposed to your work can be a crucial step to burnout recovery. According to Forbes, ensuring your environment outside of work has minimal things to remind you of work can be key to recovering from burnout.
#3: Take Care Of The Little Things
Ultimately, it’s the little things that can cause you the most stress—like when you get in your car to leave for work in the morning and forget your past self decided to put off getting gas until the morning. The same thing applies to burnout: if the little things aren’t there, stress piles up.
According to the Harvard Business Review, one key way to prevent burnout is understanding the difference between hygiene and motivation. Things that fall under the hygiene category are necessary to complete the job (salary, work conditions) whereas motivation helps to get that job done to the best it can be done (responsibility, opportunity to make a difference). When an organization has bad hygiene, burnout can be a result.
And it can be something as large as salary or something as simple as ensuring the vending machine in the breakroom is stocked up. Those little actions can be the difference between a top performer and one who is suffering from burnout.
Don’t Burn The Midnight Oil And Burnout
As joyous as the holiday season claims to be, it is also a remarkably stressful time. Between deciding who’s family you’ll be spending Thanksgiving with and racing to get the kids that last-minute gift that they just absolutely have to have, there isn’t much time left in the day to stress about work. If you do find yourself worrying about it, you may start to feel overwhelmed and, at worst, burnt out. With the knowledge that you’ve acquired from this article, though, you’ll be able to get out ahead of burnout not only for yourself but your entire team.
All this talk about burnout has us feeling burnt out. But what sorts of things can we do to make sure our—and your employees’—mental health is taken care of? Check out our article on how employee assistance programs can benefit your employees’ mental health.
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