3 Tips to Help Your Burnt-Out, but Still Enthusiastic Employees
3 Tips to Help Your Burnt-Out, but Still Enthusiastic Employees
A Happyologist (yes, that’s his real job title) and a CMO share strategies for keeping workers engaged.
Illustration: Getty Images
It’s a modern workplace dilemma: employees remain highly committed to their company’s goals and missions but are also experiencing burnout, according to recent research.
A DHR Global Workforce Trends report found that 88 percent of workers reported “feeling enthusiastic about (their) work and/or emotionally invested in achieving the goals of (their) team or overall organization,” yet 82 percent of workers say they feel burned out to some degree. A survey from isolved, a human resources services and software company, had similar results: 92 percent of employees say they are “fully committed to their jobs and company mission,” and 79 percent say they are burned out.
How to best address this contradiction? Michael Nutter, who has the unlikely job title of Happyologist (his role includes company culture, engagement and communications) and vice president at Impact Advisors, a healthcare consulting company, and Celia Fleischaker, CMO at isolved, shared three principal techniques to help workers thrive and be productive.
Collect data on employee satisfaction and dissatisfaction to find ways to improve
Regularly ask employees about their satisfaction with their work-life balance, career development, team and projects so you can pinpoint the main problems they encounter and how they might be solved, Nutter says. Once you identify the gaps, you can bring in an expert in that area or ask employees how best to improve.
He adds that it’s important for business leaders to be vulnerable and open with employees when asking what they need.
“Take the time to do whatever you have to do, whether that be personal interviews or a group survey,” Nutter says. “Don’t ever be afraid to ask, ‘How can we help you?’”
Target your messaging to specific audiences
Having information on employee experience and satisfaction can also help understand how to best communicate with members of your workforce who may be of varying age groups and at different points in their careers, Fleischaker says.
“HR has typically looked at employee comms as this monolith,” she says. “Being able to have the data to understand the segments at a pretty micro level and then being able to use tools to adjust the messaging to speak to them is really important.”
Nutter takes a similar approach, saying he often writes a draft message that has all of the key information in it, and then has team leaders edit and customize it to match their workers’ communication styles before sending it.
Meet employees’ needs throughout their workplace journeys
Needs can vary from when employees first join the company to when they are ready to be an alum, Fleischaker says. Mapping the journey and identifying what’s most important at each stage can help leaders improve engagement, she adds.
“What is it that they can do to use that data and look at that stage of the journey to better communicate with them?” she says. “How do they better support them? How do they give them the training, the mentorship that they need to reduce attrition there?”
At Impact Advisors, Nutter and his team do a “happy check” with employees at the three-month and nine-month marks, where they ask how satisfied they have been since joining, covering aspects like their team, projects, work-life balance and career development. They also check in at the one-year mark for a “Value Interview Process” check to ensure people are still engaged with the company mission and aligning it with their personal and professional goals.
We would encourage
We encourage involving your sales team by asking them to come up with ways to WOW the customer, without adding additional expense to the bottom line. We pose this question in our service training modules and are always encouraged by the creative ideas. When your team has buy in to a new service idea they tend to follow through with consistently delivering those ideas.
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BY DIVYA BHARDWAJ CARL PHILLIPS
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