Office Burnout – Are you or your team at risk?

Britain’s SMEs make up 99.9% of the UK’s private sector businesses, which employ nearly three-fifths of its workforce and account for almost half of the turnover. But full-on pursuit of commercial success may be putting owners and employees of these businesses at increased risk of ill health and burnout.

Described as a type of stress, office burnout can manifest itself as a state of physical, emotional or mental exhaustion combined with doubts about your competence and the value of your work.

Unfortunately, long working hours are often embedded into SME culture. According to our recent research:

• 47% of employees in SMEs across the UK said they regularly work 4 or more hours of overtime per week
• 29% of these put in 7 or more hours
• For over half (52%), the extra hours are unpaid
• 27% have cancelled family time and 19% have missed a child’s event such as a school play
• 54% of employees have continued to work after putting children to bed
• 21% of employees take fewer than 30 minutes for lunch
• Watch our short animation below, to help employers spot the signs of burnout, in your staff or yourself.

Please visit AXA PPP healthcare to watch our video – ‘Are you at risk of work burnout?’

Help manage stress in the workplace

Stress usually comes when pressure seems unremitting and an individual feels unable to deal with it, leading to extreme worry and feelings of helplessness and hopelessness.

It’s not possible, nor indeed desirable, to ‘stress-proof’ your workplace, however there are a number of things that you can do as a boss to reduce the likelihood of unnecessary stress occurring:

1. Prioritise work and try to ensure unnecessary tasks are eliminated
2. Ensure your team are adequately trained to do the work expected of them and regularly review their training needs
3. Try to ensure people have some variety in the work they do
4. Wherever possible, give people control over the work they do and encourage them to take responsibility for how they do the work
5. Make sure each individual in the team works to clear, agreed objectives, reviewing these periodically to ensure they remain up to date
6. Be aware of any signs of conflict within the team and be ready to intervene to resolve any issues
7. Look out for signs of bullying behaviour and be ready to deal with it directly
8. Communicate regularly and clearly so that everyone is clear about what is happening at work
9. Provide regular, constructive feedback – not just at appraisal time but on a more frequent basis
10. Encourage a healthy work-life balance – ensure that your people take their annual leave and discourage your team from regularly taking work home in the evenings or at weekends.

For more information on wellbeing in the workplace, please visit AXA PPP healthcare.

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