1
IN 5 EMPLOYEES IS HIGHLY ENGAGED AND AT RISK OF BURNOUT
Authors:
Emma Seppälä and Julia Moeller February 02,
2018 UPDATED May 16, 2018
Dorothea loved her new workplace and was highly motivated
to perform. Her managers were delighted with her high engagement,
professionalism, and dedication. She worked long hours to ensure that her staff
was properly managed, that her deadlines were met, and that her team’s work was
nothing short of outstanding. In the first two months, she single-handedly
organized a large conference – marketing and organizing all the details of the
conference and filling it to capacity. It was a remarkable feat.
In the last weeks prior to the event, however, her stress
levels attained such high levels that she suffered from severe burnout
symptoms, which included feeling physically and emotionally exhausted,
depressed, and suffering of sleep problems. She was instructed to take time off
work. She never attended the conference and needed a long recovery before she
reached her earlier performance and well being levels. Her burnout symptoms had
resulted from the long-term stress and the depletion of her resources over
time.
Engagement means flourishing, or does it?
Employee engagement is a major concern for HR leaders. Year after year, concerned managers and
researchers discuss Gallup’s shocking statistic that seven out of 10 U.S. employees report feeling un-engaged.
Figuring out how to increase employee engagement has been a burning question
for companies and consultants across the board.
The many positive outcomes of engagement include greater
productivity and quality of work, increased safety, and employee retention.
These outcomes are in fact so well established that some researchers like
Arnold Bakker, Professor of Work and Organizational Psychology at the Erasmus
University Rotterdam, and colleagues have linked engagement to the experience of “flourishing at work.” Similarly, Amy L. Reschly, Professor of Educational
Psychology at the University of Georgia, and colleagues concluded that student engagement at schools was a sign of
“flourishing.”
While engagement certainly has its benefits, most of us
will have noticed that, when we are highly engaged in working towards a goal we
can also experience something less than positive: high levels of stress. Here’s
where things get more nuanced and complicated.
A recent study conducted
by our center at Yale University, the Yale Center for Emotional
Intelligence, in collaboration with the Faas Foundation, has cast doubts on the idea of engagement as a purely
beneficial experience. This survey examined the levels of engagement and
burnout in over 1,000 U.S. employees. For some people, engagement is indeed a
purely positive experience; 2 out of 5 employees in our survey reported high
engagement and low burnout. These employees also reported high levels of
positive outcomes (such as feeling positive emotions and acquiring new skills)
and low negative outcomes (such as feeling negative emotions or looking for
another job). We’ll call these the optimally engaged group.
However, the data also showed that one out of five
employees reported both high engagement and high burnout.
We’ll call this group the engaged-exhausted group. These engaged-exhausted
workers were passionate about their work, but also had intensely mixed feelings
about it — reporting high levels of interest, stress, and frustration.
While they showed desirable behaviours such as high skill acquisition, these
apparent model employees also reported the highest turnover intentions in our
sample — even higher than the un-engaged group.
That means that companies may be at risk of losing some
of their most motivated and hard-working employees not for a lack of
engagement, but because of their simultaneous experiences of high stress and burnout
symptoms.
How to maintain high engagement without
burning out in the process
While most HR efforts have stayed centered around the
question of how to promote employee engagement only, we really need to start
taking a more nuanced approach and ask how to promote engagement while avoiding
burning out employees in the process. Here’s where key differences we found
between the optimally engaged and the engaged-exhausted employees can shed some
light.
Half of the optimally engaged employees reported
having high resources, such as supervisor support, rewards and
recognition, and self-efficacy at work, but low demands such
as low workload, low cumbersome bureaucracy, and low to moderate demands on
concentration and attention. In contrast, such experiences of high resources
and low demands were rare (4%) among the engaged-exhausted employees, the
majority of whom (64%) reported experiencing high demands and high
resources.
This provides managers and supervisors with a hint as
where to start supporting employees for optimal engagement. In order to promote
engagement, it is crucial to provide employees with the resources they need to
do their job well, feel good about their work, and recover from work stressors
experienced through work.
Many HR departments, knowing employees are feeling
stressed, offer wellness programs on combating stress – usually through healthy eating, exercise, or mindfulness.
While we know that chronic stress is not good for employees, company
wellness initiatives are not the primary way to respond to that stress. Our
data suggests that while wellness initiatives can be helpful, a much
bigger lever is the work itself. HR should work with front-line managers
to monitor the level of demands they’re placing on people, as well as the
balance between demands and resources. The higher the work demands, the higher
employees’ need for support, acknowledgement, or opportunities for recovery.
What about stretch goals? Challenge, we’re told, is motivating.
While that can be true, we too often forget that high challenges tend to come
at high cost, and that challenging achievement situations cause not only
anxiety and stress even for the most motivated individuals, but also lead to
states of exhaustion. And the research on stretch goals is mixed –
for a few people, chasing an ambitious goal leads to higher performance than
chasing a moderate goal. For most people, though, a
stretch goal leads us to become demotivated, take foolish risks, or quit.
Managers and HR leaders can help employees by dialing
down the demands they’re placing on people – ensuring that employee goals are
realistic and re-balancing the workloads of employees who, by virtue of being
particularly skilled or productive, have been saddled with too much. They can
also try to increase the resources available to employees; this includes not
only material resources such as time and money, but intangible resources such
as empathy and friendship in the workplace, and letting employees disengage
from work when they’re not working. By avoiding emailing people after hours,
setting a norm that evenings and weekends are work-free, and encouraging a
regular lunch break in the middle of the day, leaders can make sure they’re
sending a consistent message that balance matters.
The data is clear: engagement is key, it’s what we should
strive for as leaders and employees. But what we want is smart engagement
— the kind that leads to enthusiasm, motivation and productivity, without the
burnout. Increased demands on employees need to be balanced with increased
resources — particularly before important deadlines and during other times
of stress.
The content of this blog is for informational purposes only.
The content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice,
diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other
qualified health provider with any question you may have regarding a medical
condition. If you think you may have a medical emergency, call your doctor
immediately. Opt4health does not recommend or endorse any specific tests,
physician, products, procedures, opinions, or other information that may be
mentioned on the Opt4health blog. Reliance on any information provided by
Opt4health, Opt4health employees, other contributors appearing on the blog at
the invitation of Opt4health, or other visitors to the blog is solely at your
own risk.
Opt4health:
Contact: +27823716364
Email: aubrey@opt4health.co.za
Web Site: http://opt4health.co.za
Face Book: https://facebook.com/optforhealth/
Linked In: https://linkedin.com/in/aubrey-huntly-89025a1/
No comments:
Post a Comment