10 Best Practices for Avoiding Work Burnout

What Is A Work Burnout?

It’s emotional and physical stress that develops due to work-related difficulties. It’s an exhaustion that includes the feeling of zero accomplishments and identity ignorance. A burned-out employee can’t do his job well because he’s lost faith in it and sees no point in continuing to do it.

What makes an employee sure that he’s burned out? Are there more clear signs?

How to Tell You’re Heading to Work Burnout

There are many issues that tell you’re heading to work burnout. Some affect work, and others could affect social life and life in general, they include:

Having Focus Issues

If you can’t gather your thoughts and concentrate on the task at hand, you’re surely suffering from work burnout. This as well accompanies productivity issues and the inability to finish any task immediately as the negative thoughts take control of the mind making them absent all the time.

Changing Fixed Habits

Habits you have kept for years, now they’re fading out and disappearing, changing core elements in your personality. Communication habits turn to have narrow limits making you socially anxious. Everything becomes indifferent to you and every action you take you’re pessimistic about.

Feeling of Dissatisfaction

Now, the job you’ve been seeking for so long is not good enough. The state of dissatisfaction transfers from one work element to another. Every task, every email, and every response to a colleague became meaningless and useless. The dissatisfaction by the end transfers from work activities to other daily life activities.

Why would a person reach that state?

What are the Causes of Burnout?

The reasons why a person could lose motivation are infinite and refer to organisational culture, corporate policies, individual actions, and unwise management. The reasons are:

Workload With No Effective Result or Appreciation

Doing much work can sometimes be stressful, but stress can be ignored when you finish every task satisfied with accomplishment for the appreciation you receive. All tasks you do receive the same cold reaction: no positive feedback, and no guidance that tells you how to improve.

Vague Job Objectives

Every task you’re assigned has no clear reason; you are not provided with the big picture. This lowers your engines before you even start the mission. You’re just a machine that delivers completed tasks without knowing “The Why.”

Monotonic Work

Believe it or not, work monotony could be a work burnout trigger. Doing tasks as part of a daily routine, no challenges, no special cases, everything moves slowly in one direction with no incentive to learn a new skill or gain new knowledge.

Working in a Toxic Environment

Toxicity has different forms. A colleague could be the main source of toxicity. A bad manager could cause bad effects on your career, resulting in rapid burnout, and even being unfit in an organisational culture could produce toxic residuals.

Lack of Control

For every task you are assigned, you haven’t involved your creativity in, you haven’t participated in your point of view, and you’ve never been looped in the decision-making process. All these situations that make everything managed away from your hands make you feel valueless.1

Results of Having a Work Burnout

According to research prepared by Stanford University, work burnout has led to the deaths of 120,000 Americans yearly in the USA. It also causes financial losses that are estimated at 190 billion USD every year.

10 Best Practises for Avoiding Work Burnout

These are guiding principles that an employee can make use of to know how to avoid work burnout. They also help him have a peaceful work environment and keep their spirit enlightened at all times. The practices are:

1- Regularly Talk to Your Manager via a Direct Channel

Transparent communication with your boss is a cure for any issue you carry about work; a negative comment, a complaint, misbehaviour, or even the way your manager treats you. All these topics should be openly discussed with no fears or virtual borders, this makes your mental and physical state always better.

2- Have Lunch in a Place Away From Your Workspace

Whether you work remotely or on-site, your workspace should be different from your lunch room. Changing places, even if they’re a few steps away, creates a dynamic state that your mind needs to renew its energies and create better opportunities to think and concentrate.

3- Don’t Mix Work Hours With Personal Life Hours

Even if you work remotely from home, fix your work hours and prevent them from creeping into the rest of your life. Making the separator between work and life weak and transparent always harms both sides.-

4- You Should Move

Breaking your work hours with a few steps in the open air will always help. Working remotely from home, a cafe or even a workspace is great but it could be better, why don’t you take a break and have a walk in the nearest park for just 15 minutes? 

If you work at the office, taking a cup of coffee in a near cafe is definitely a good idea, moving will protect you against any burnout strikes.

5- Focus On One Task at a Time

You know the time your work session takes. Make every session tailored for only one task. This guides you to determine your priorities and know the urgent tasks, and those with less urgency. Also, you will forecast the time each task will need to end it. Based on this information, you can manage assignments and finish them on time with full concentration.

6- Manage Your Breath

Breathe deeply, inhale and exhale slowly! It’s a simple practice that you can apply everywhere. It activates your lungs, blood cells, and blood circulation. This also refreshes your mind and helps it to be clearer, which means better analysis, quick critical thinking, and producing effective solutions.

7- Make Your Workspace Better

A simple action such as organising your work desk could be beneficial in combating burnout. If you are an attention-to-detail person, crowded spaces are not healthy for you. You should divide files and folders on your computer to serve your comfort, making all data clear and accessible. Put something nostalgic that reminds you of a special memory and keeps you in a good mood.

8- Unplug Your Connection Regularly

Your screens and internet networks keep you connected to the business world. However, the continuous connection keeps you under stress. You should fix certain hours every week or a day on the weekend that makes you unplugged from stressors and set a digital detox.

9- Give Up Being a Perfectionist

Consuming much time and effort on work that just needs to be done is a burnout trigger. Perfectionism is a concept that fools employees, it encourages them to do more quality and efficiency, which is a good characteristic, but it pushes them to the extreme, that’s dangerous.

10- Review Your Employer’s Values

Your organisation’s values could be one of the main reasons for burnout due to their mismatching with your values. If you can’t adapt to those values, it’s time to look for new opportunities or maybe it’s the wrong career, and you should do a shift.

Still Don’t Have the Clearest Vision?

Whitecollars offers Career Counselling that helps you with your career step by step. We provide you with all the factors that make you stand out from the crowd, a strong CV, a LinkedIn profile that attracts recruiters, and guide you in how to manage any interview, however difficult it is. Visit our service pages to know more about us.