5 Workplace Solutions For Employee Burnout And Well-Being

Moving beyond the norm

By Laura Putnam, Motion Infusion

June marks National Employee Well-being Month. The annual event is designed to raise awareness about the benefits of a healthy workforce, emphasizing the relationship between employee health, employee productivity, and organizational success.

While employee well-being has become standard fare, with 84% of employers with 200 or more employees offering wellness, more can be done. For starters, employers should regularly review their existing wellness programs so they can critically analyze whether the offerings are actually making a meaningful difference. As evidenced by a Rand study, most workplace wellness programs fall short of their intended objectives, with an average of 80 percent of eligible employees opting out.

Moreover, the impact is often minimal, even for those employees who do participate. According to a recent McKinsey Health Institute 2022 Survey of nearly 15,000 workers across 15 countries, a quarter of employees are reporting burnout symptoms - despite an increase in mental health resources offered by their employers. The reason? These programs are solving the wrong problem. The vast majority of organizations target the individual and fail to address the workplace. Meanwhile, according to leading burnout researchers Michael P. Leiter and Christina Maslach, the six leading causes of employee burnout have nothing to do with the individual and everything to do with the workplace itself.

Having worked with hundreds of organizations and over 20,000 CEOs and managers to implement workplace well-being strategies, I continue to encounter company leaders who believe they can improve workplace well-being with check-the-box, individual resources instead of doing the hard work to empower managers to lead well-being, hold top leaders accountable in supporting well-being, and fix the workplace culture itself.

As the McKinsey Health Institute survey spells out, since most employers are failing to employ a systemic approach, most are achieving little in the way of addressing the issue, despite their increased investments in mental health solutions. As their research shows, along with longstanding Gallup research, the key influencers of culture are leaders, especially managers.

Top leader endorsement can create a broader acceptance for well-being on an organizational level, but where the rubber hits the road is on the team level. In fact, according to a 19-country study conducted by ADP Research Institute, the “culture” that employees experience at work (whether in person or remotely) is largely the one that they experience within the context of their team. As such, every team member is looking to their direct supervisor to “give them permission” to actually engage in wellness, tuning into the signals that the boss sends.

What this means is that every manager has an opportunity to serve as either a gatekeeper or multiplier of well-being for team members. Take, for example, time spent on after-hours emailing. The more time a manager spends on sending after-hours email time, the more time their team members will do the same. A Microsoft analytics survey found that for every hour that a manager engages in after-hours email, time roughly translates into an added twenty minutes of after-hours email time for team members.

On the positive side, our research shows that in organizations where managers have learned to become multipliers of well-being, participating managers and their team members reported increased engagement with work, enhanced well-being, and improved productivity.

To help organizations implement well-being strategies that actually work, here are five practical ways they can effectively improve employee well-being:

1. Eliminate cookie-cutter employee benefits perks and programs. Ask the average employee about their company wellness program, and they will likely tell you about a buffet of disconnected, often hard-to-find, activities, challenges, and questionnaires that do little to actually improve their quality of life. The truth is that no amount of cookie-cutter solutions such as a mindfulness app, online yoga class, or health risk assessment can make up for a toxic boss, for example.

2. Identify root causes. The real work begins with taking a hard look at why employees are unwell in the first place. What are the systemic forces that are taking a toll on the workforce? According to a Gallup study derived from a survey of over 7,500 employees, the top drivers of employee burnout, for example, are the workplace itself, including unfair treatment at work, unmanageable workload, and unreasonable time pressure.

3. Recognize that well-being needs to be a collective responsibility. For decades, businesses have perpetuated the “personal responsibility” narrative, placing the onus on the individual to seek help rather than addressing the larger issues at hand. Today, businesses need to understand that employee well-being is a collective responsibility that requires holistic solutions, such as policies that discourage after-hour emails, ensuring that positions are filled to prevent understaffing, or building a culture in which toxic leadership is not tolerated.

4. Managers can be multipliers of well-being. A crucial aspect of the success of any well-being initiative lies in empowering managers to support and lead well-being for their teams, as a recent Deloitte Well-being at Work survey reveals. In our longstanding “Managers on the Move” program, we train managers on how they can lead by example (Do), engage in conversation with team members about well-being, encourage them to take advantage of company resources (Speak) and devise team-based systems and rituals of well-being (Create).

5. Encourage team care, not just self-care. While managers may have little control over what’s happening across the organization, they can carve out an oasis of well-being for their team. Teams can implement rituals, such as a moment of silence or expressions of gratitude at the start of meetings. These kinds of team-care rituals can go a long way in building both friendships as well as psychological safety - a boon to both well-being and performance.

Laura Putnam is a leading voice for well-being at work, an international public speaker, and the author of Workplace Wellness That Works . As CEO of Motion Infusion and creator of the leadership training program “Managers on the Move”, she infuses well-being and vitality into the workplace to help employees, teams, and organizations thrive.

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