Overloaded employees underperform
Addressing the common workplace problem of employees feeling overloaded will lead to greater engagement among staff, according to employee engagement expert James Adonis.
“What that means is that employees will work with greater passion, which means fewer errors, they’re more likely to stay back, they’re less likely to complain, and they’re less likely to resign and to get sick as a result of the extra work,” he said.
How can you tell your employees feel overworked?
Mr Adonis recommends employers look out for:
- absenteeism
- change in body language and moods
- becoming withdrawn or short tempered
- responding in one or two words
“Usually,” he said, “there’s some kind of warning sign before they announce that they’re overworked. Managers need to be conscious of that.”
Managers are busy people too, and warning signs can be easy to miss.
What can an employer do to prevent feelings of overwork from occurring in the first place?
Make sure you’ve got enough people on board to do the work.
“In these times that’s easier to say and harder to do,” said Mr Adonis. “I think there’ll inevitably be cases where employees will be overworked and there’s nothing that managers can do to prevent that from happening.”
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What is 'burn out'? "Interestingly," said Mr Adonis, "have you ever seen two different people, let’s say Person A and Person B, and Person A is working eight hours a day and feels totally overworked and burnt out; yet, Person B is working 12 hours a day and doesn’t feel at all burnt out – it’s just what they do. So the question becomes, what does ‘burnt out’ mean?" |
“I don’t think the amount of work that people do is necessarily what causes staff burnout, there has to be something else,” Mr Adonis said.
“More often than not it’s because there’s been some kind of loss that triggers someone to feel that they now don’t have a work-life balance or they’re not on top of things.” When it comes to being overworked, he explained, this loss could be:
- loss of recognition – “maybe an employee is doing more work but they’re not being rewarded and acknowledged for it.”
- loss of communication – “even though they’re really not burnt out, they feel it, because all of a sudden they’re not talking to their boss as much as they used to.”
- loss of control – “sometimes people feel overworked when they haven’t got autonomy or influence over what’s been happening at work.”
- loss of values – “this is extremely important. If an employee feels that the end goal in doing the extra work is linked to their own personal goals and values, and that the two are intertwined, then work isn’t a big deal."
But when there’s a disparity, when there’s a gap between an employee’s personal values and those of the organisation, which is aspiring to get through that extra work, then it becomes a much harder slog.”
| An example: "Let’s say you get an employee who is just stuffing envelopes all day – something that’s way below their skill capability. They’ll get to midday and they’ll just feel terrible. But let’s say you’ve got a business owner who’s just started his or her own small business and they’re stuffing enveloped all day for two days; it’s quite rare for them to feel overworked doing that because they’re thinking, Wow! This is totally in line with my values because this will get me somewhere else. So the solution when it comes to loss of values is to make sure that managers have a connection between the goal in whatever overwork is being done right now, linked to the employee." |
To find out what values your employee holds you could run some sort of activity or exercise that gets them to sit down and think about what is important to them, advised Mr Adonis.
“People very rarely do that thinking exercise for themselves,” he said, “so if managers can help to instigate that kind of thinking amongst their employees they can discover what those values are. It doesn’t at all mean that goals change at work, it just means when managers communicate that goal and the reasons for it they can link that value back to the employee’s values, and all of a sudden purpose and meaning occurs at work and it’s not so bad to be working hard.”
James Adonis is one of Australia's most well-known management gurus. He is a leading international expert on employee engagement, and the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Team Leaders - a company dedicated to developing and recruiting the very best Team Leaders. See www.jamesadonis.com