According to Insider, Selena Gomez, Hilary Duff, Meghan Markle, and Beyonce all complained about career burnout.
They are not alone: Celebs like Jared Leto and Jack Dorsey have a habit of isolating themselves from the outer world for weeks to gather their thoughts together and reinstate the mental balance.
Yet, companies with thousands of employees cannot afford to let their workers out for weeks. Apparently, they need to seek other ways of burnout elimination.
In this article, we’ll speak about how to use corporate events to increase employee retention and satisfaction.
Let’s get started!
Reasons for Burnout
The dimensions of the problem are significant, and the reasons are different. According to statistics:
- 48.4% of employees state that large workloads cause their work-related stress.
- 35.7% experience issues balancing between work and personal obligations.
- 26.3% of respondents are worried about job profitability.
- 40% are not satisfied with job security.
All these issues lead to exhaustion and a decrease in job performance, yet the outcomes may be way more severe.
According to the Mayo Clinic report, job burnout can result in such extreme conditions as insomnia, alcohol misuse, heart diseases, immunity problems, or even type 2 diabetes, which undermines a worker’s performance ability and quality of life from the long perspective.
Burnout Expenses
According to the Employers’ Total Annual Health Care Costs Survey, the companies’ expenditures on employee health have been growing steadily from 2015 to 2020 (from 11,750 USD per employee per year to 13,728 USD respectively).
Yet, atop financial expenditures on increasing healthcare costs, 2021 brought another challenge: massive worker quitting, which got the name “the great resignation.”
According to the US Department of Labor, more than 4 million people quit their jobs in April 2021, a record number ever registered.
According to Time, job burnout was one of the reasons that drove people to quit their jobs.
If previously burnout was considered a personal problem of an employee, with so many people turning in resignation letters, the attitude towards the issue changed. Companies suffering from staffing shortages started targeting burnout issues with more attention.
Burnout Elimination Strategies
Anthony Klotz, a professor of business administration at Texas A&M University, says: “Just keeping people from quitting is not necessarily a good business strategy.”
In new conditions, to keep their businesses running successfully, employers now have to think about how to make their staffers happier.
One of the effective strategies to eliminate burnout is organizing work events. The activities may include:
Family Fun Days
Lacking time for family and kids is one of the main reasons why staffers feel stressed and dissatisfied with their jobs. Organizing family events is a great way to avoid it.
An employer may invite employee families on-site or to another place, like a zoo or cinema, to spend time together. Moreover, sharing happy family moments with other colleagues may help build better and less toxic relations inside the teams.
Lunch-and-Learn Events
Having lunch catering during the learning seminar lets employees get the needed training in a less official atmosphere. This may help them combine the best two worlds: relaxation and work-related duties.
Fresh Air and Physical Activity
Physical activity is an excellent opportunity to rethink work issues, burn down stress-related adrenalin, and boost energy from the fresh air. Moreover, it’s the most accessible event to organize for any sort of business, whether it is a cosmetic shop or a dedicated development team.
Stretching exercises, basketball, or morning yoga bring employees together, help to build teams, and raise spirits.
The main thing here is to organize such events in their work time so that the staffers don’t feel pressure to spend their free time on work-related activities.
One-to-One Meetings
This type of event presupposes personal staffer meetings with a higher-level executive.
This way, employees get a chance to discuss their career path or worries according to job profitability, as well as evaluate their work input and get a better understanding of whether the management is satisfied with their performance.
Summing Up
Although employee burnout is a real issue, incorporating wellness programs can help businesses fight it successfully.
Employee events help to raise staffers’ morale, reduce stress, rethink the attitude toward work issues and bring more fun into daily activities. Overall, it can lead to savings on the worker’s healthcare spending and fight the result of employee turnover.
About the Author
Anastasiia Lastovetska is a technology writer at MLSDev, a software development company that builds web & mobile app solutions from scratch. She researches the area of technology to create great content about app development, UX/UI design, tech & business consulting.
