We know that companies can do much to protect themselves – and their employees from the cost of burnout. While most studies of burnout focus on the individual, a new study has been conducted and looked at the practices and patterns in organisations the people worked for.

Similar outcomes from our engagements with our clients support the study too. A company in order to get all its people engaged and see multifold productivity, must be absolutely open-minded and keen to look at these six areas.

The six (6) primary ways as shown by Daniel Goleman, organisations demoralize and demotivate employees include:

  • Work overload – Too much work to do, with little time and support. With job cuts supervisors are required to handle more employees, nurses more patients, teachers more students, bank tellers more transactions, managers more administrative duties. As the tempo, complexity and demands of work escalate, people feel overwhelmed. Escalating work erodes the downtime during which people can recover. Exhaustion accumulates, work suffers.
  • Lack of autonomy: Being accountable for work but having little say in how to go about it. Micro-management means frustration when workers see ways to their work better but are held back by rigid rules. This lessens responsibility, flexibility, and innovation. The emotional message to workers: The company lacks respect for their judgment and innate abilities.
  • Skimpy rewards: Getting too little pay for more work. With cutbacks, wage freezes, and trends towards contract work ad cutbacks in fringe benefits like health coverage, people lose their expectation that their salary can increase as their career continues. Another loss of reward is emotional: Work overload combined with too little control and job insecurity robs work of its intrinsic pleasure.
  • Loss of Connection: Increasing isolation on the job. Personal relationships are the human glue that makes teams excel. Shuffled job assignments lower a sense of commitment to the group work. As relationships fragment, the pleasures that come from a sense of community with workmates erodes. That growing sense of alienation fuels conflict, even as it erodes the common history and emotional connections that can help heal such rifts.
  • Unfairness: Inequalities in how people are treated. Lack of fairness breeds resentment, whether due to unequal pay or workloads, disregards for grievances, or policies that seem high-handed. Rapid escalation of top executive pays and bonuses while salaries of the bottom tiers rise little or not at all undermines people’s trust in those who run the organisation. Resentments breeds in the absence of honest talk. The result: cynicism and alienation, along with a loss of enthusiasm for the organisation’s mission.
  • Value conflicts: A mismatch between a person’s principles and the demands of their job. Whether this pushes workers into lying to make a sale, skipping a safety check to get things done on time, or simply using Machiavellian tactics to survive in a viciously competitive environment, the cost is to their moral sense. Jobs at odds with their values demoralize workers, leading them to question the worth of the work they do. So do lofty mission statements when belied by the day-to-day reality of operations.

It is never too late to make a change. Review, rework and recharge!

We can assist to create that DREAM team you have deserve! Reach us through our email: info@executiveedgeconsulting.co.ke. Or call 0733 893-807 or 0703 299-569