All companies and organizations want to attract and retain top business talent. This is a given if you want to run a successful business. It would be counter productive to build the best workforce one could hope for, only to lose way too many valuable employees to rapid turnover. Employee recruitment, installation and training can mean big expenditures and a huge drag on the bottom line.
One of the biggest preventable causes of high employee turnover is job related burnout. It is a little understood fact most employees do not burn themselves out. A full 90% of the time, it is the work environment which burns out the employee.
You can take a dedicated, on fire employee who functions efficiently with enthusiasm and impassioned purpose, put them in the wrong work environment and you will burn them out every time. This can be mitigated where present and prevented where absent.
Why is this important? Burned out employees create additional workplace problems which demand additional resources. Dissatisfied workers lead to inferior products and services which leads to dissatisfied patients, clients or customers. Dissatisfied consumers lead to a loss of business and falling profit margins. Businesses can be destroyed by workplace burnout.
It is amazing how many times this scenario is repeated every year in businesses all across this country. It just doesn’t have to be this way.
Learning to recognize job related burnout when it appears in the workplace along with identification and mitigation of the underlying causes can improve employee satisfaction, prevent high employee turnover rates, decrease customer complaints and improve customer satisfaction. This has the potential to both save and generate large amounts of capital.
Look for the first signs of job related burnout – rising employee dissatisfaction, high employee turnover rates and decreasing customer satisfaction. If job related burnout in your workplace is suspected, a burnout checklist can be applied to gauge the depth of the problem. Alternatively, a workplace consultation or assessment for burnout conditions could be obtained.
If the conditions for job related burnout are found to be present, much can be done to mitigate or ameliorate its effects with Resilience Training, the state opposite of burnout. Resilience is characterized by vigor, dedication, absorption – what every administrator wants in every employee within their organization. This results are more than cost effective. They can be transforming.
It begins by assessing the workplace for the presence or degree of burnout amongst the employees. This is most easily accomplished using an instrument which has become the gold standard for measuring job related burnout – the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI).
The MBI directly measures the level of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and the lack of a sense of personal accomplishment where present. These are the three hallmarks of job burnout. The MBI will assess for these with a high degree of sensitivity and specificity. This provides a mechanism for measuring the outcomes of any interventions.
The next step would be to determine the presence or degree of the six major job mismatches between the employee and the job which will cause employees to burnout. These mismatches are – work overload, lack of control, insufficient reward, breakdown of community, absence of fairness and conflicting values.
Once the underlying causes are known, mitigation and prevention strategies can then be designed and deployed. Follow up becomes the third and last component of a full workplace consultation for job related burnout. For prevention, vigilance through ongoing, periodic reassessment becomes fundamental.
Bottom line – high employee turnover is often caused by job related burnout. The detection, mitigation and prevention of job related burnout is an extremely cost effective solution. An assessment for job related burnout, coupled with resilience training, could be the “make or break” difference for any organization with high employee turnover.
Call me to discuss at 919-735-0433 (please ask for Fay or Jayme) or for more information —