About the Author
Andrew Filev is the founder and CEO of Wrike, a cloud-based work management platform.
The World Health Organization now officially recognizes burnout in the workplace as an occupational phenomenon. This is the first time that it is directly related to the classification of diseases as an occupational hazard. Why has it become such an important topic?
If you look at the last ten years of the world economy, you will find that the race was quite difficult. The economy had almost collapsed in 2009 and has since rebuilt to new heights. It is the same year that the adoption of smartphones and social networks began to accelerate rapidly. These technologies have put enormous pressure on brands to act much faster than ever.
Brands had to deliver an exceptional customer experience and generate revenue from new digital channels. In fact, some call our current era "the post-digital era" because consumer expectations have reached a point where a fast digital experience is a barrier to entering any market, meaning that brands that they cannot provide survive. These new forces have encouraged workers to stay connected to their employers through their devices, wherever they are.
Unfortunately, the technology has developed faster than the label. We still believe that because we can communicate with our work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, we have to. Even when you are not actively working, phone notifications and vibrations constantly remind you that there is still work to be done. After a decade, all of this stress has been so unsustainable that countries like France and Japan have implemented right-to-disconnect legislation and other reforms to help employees find a balance.
In your opinion, what role should business leaders play in managing employee burnout?
Tools designed to improve employee flexibility have proliferated, but have since reached a point of diminishing returns, instead of consolidating communications, they are flooding us with messages and notifications. Business leaders need to think proactively about the role technology plays in stress for their employees and try to streamline their stacks of records to make sure technology supports their team. It is not just a source of distraction or burden.
Rather than letting your team work 24 hours a day, your technology should encourage flexibility and allow employees to disconnect. Leaders must also show an example on this front and respect the limits of their teams. In a survey we conducted on work stress, more than a quarter (28%) of UK workers said that receiving SMS or emails from their boss outside of working hours had a significant impact on their stress level. . Of course, this also means that companies must adopt best practices for project planning. Therefore, it is less necessary to rush at the last minute to achieve your goals.
What role does business technology play in employee stress and happiness?
When information is structured and accessible to the people who need it to do their jobs, business technology can reduce stress and speed up work. People like to be productive and get frustrated when they think technology doesn't allow them to function. However, when technology hinders productivity, stress increases. Additionally, technology impedes productivity in many ways.
- Communication overhead: there is so much communication within a system or stack of systems that it is almost impossible to separate the signal from the noise;
- Fragmentation: You spend a good part of your day trying to find information that you are sure you have seen, you don't know exactly where. This slows down projects and forces teams to use different sources of information, which means that some may be outdated, incomplete, or irrelevant;
- Ergonomics - Difficult or slow technology to use, a source of frustration for anyone trying to exploit it. In the post-digital age, business technology must be as intuitive as the personal applications we use every day on our phones.
I cannot stress enough the importance of reducing the stress and frustration of performance. We recently conducted a survey that found that UK job management groupware users were 61% more likely than non-users to say they had a "very good" relationship with their managers. . They were also 152% more likely than non-users to say that their company's mission sounded "too loud," showing that if you can allow people to work smoothly, they'll find happiness instead. labor.
How can companies order their technologies to help combat employee burnout?
A decade ago, bottom-up technology adoption was a rapidly growing trend. Therefore, companies have been through a period characterized by a wide range of redundant and redundant technologies that varied from one computer to another. At the time, the trend was good, re-engaging workers when company technology was terribly out of date, but creating confidentiality, security, and information fragmentation issues.
IT managers must audit their systems, see how many applications are used within their teams, and examine the gaps created by these systems. It is in these gaps that there are painful manual processes for workers who must ensure that information is in sync with each other.
In an ideal world, different teams in a company will plan projects and collaborate on a single, unified solution. Realistically, this can take multiple systems, but they need to be integrated in a way that effortlessly allows work and updates to pass from computer to computer and system to system. the other to support cross-functional collaboration and use automation to eliminate silos and eliminate routine tasks. Tasks.
Collaborative work management helps companies offer flexible work. But how else does it help manage employee burnout?
Some psychological forces are at the root of burnout, and one of them is the concept of perceived control, which means that people experience less stress when they feel able to control their situation. CWM software effectively gives people control over their work, giving them the ability to work the way they want, designing workflows, and viewing projects and tasks in a personalized way.
Another major cause of stress is the frustration of waiting for people to do what you need to get ahead on projects. The challenge is that people often don't know the priority of the job or don't have the context they need to get started. And the GCM sets priorities and can keep all relevant conversations, documents and calendars in one place.
The question of what I call hidden work, or tasks that are work but not necessarily followed in a project plan. Schedule meetings, answer emails, manage document versions - all the tasks that take up a large part of our work time, whether we realize it or not. The GCM can automate or reduce many of these functions, leaving more time for people to focus on the work that produces the results.
Unrealistic expectations are also difficult, and the challenge is that management has no visibility into their team's workload. CGM platforms can provide a clear picture of an employee's ability to delegate tasks, set deadlines, and prioritize tasks. 51% of UK workers say that receiving assignments with unrealistic deadlines has a significant impact on their stress and that managing resources can help balance tasks within a team.
Since realistic deadlines can be achieved, resource management can increase team capacity. They also follow the work further, so teams can start planning and reducing last-minute glitches in invisible delays, which should cut down on email and late-night messages.
Most workers have had at least one failed technology deployment during their careers. So when you introduce a new tool, you are surprised. Change management is essential in any transformation program, and especially one that requires a daily change of habit for large numbers of people. You can spend a lot of money on technology and cause it to crash because no one adopts it, so you have to have a plan. Context and clarity in communicating with your employees as to why you are implementing a change is essential.
Start with "why" and look at it from a "what's in store" perspective to help sell the idea to your employees. The better you can define the link between the application and the results (professional and personal), the more favorable and enthusiastic your users will be to adopt it. We always encourage our users to start with critical use cases, first addressing an immediate need and then building on this success to expand use with the help of Other Use Cases.
It is also essential that a solution is flexible enough to meet the diverse preferences of your staff. You probably won't have much luck forcing people to use a tool that makes them work the way they do, you need a tool that works like them, but with optimizations.
Doing the right thing to choose the right tool and implement it effectively will pay off in the long run.
Andrew Filev is the founder and CEO of Wrike, a cloud-based work management platform.