Too much overtime or after-hours work contributes to nearly a third (32%) of the reasons why employees burn out. When because 95% of HR leaders claim employee burnout is “sabotaging workforce retention”, this is a major concern.
Burnout comes at a (literal) price, both for your organization and for the health and well-being of your employees.
A 2018 Gallup report found that employees who feel the effects of burnout are 2.6 times as likely to be actively looking for a new job. Besides the obvious financial burden recruitment places on the company, there are other detrimental cascading effects of high attrition rates. For one, workplace productivity can diminish; the same Gallup study shows that employees who “very often or always” experience burnout are half as likely to discuss hitting performance goals with their manager. Other negative impacts include company culture turning sour and the loss of skilled, valuable employees.
And we haven’t even touched on the health aspect! Looking again at employees who “very often or always” experience burnout, 63% of them are more likely to take a sick day and 23% more likely to visit the emergency room. The mental toll is there, too; they are 13% less confident in their performance. In fact, Harvard Business Review researchers found that the psychological and physical problems of exhausted employees cost an estimated $125 billion to $190 billion annually in healthcare spending.
Complex scheduling environments that rely on their workers round-the-clock may feel up against the wall. After all, exhaustion can so easily seem like “just part of the job” when production deadlines are tight, overtime is necessary, and nearly every 24×7 industry from manufacturing to energy production is experiencing a shortage of talent.
But it doesn’t—and shouldn’t—have to be this way. Burnout is avoidable. Here’s how the right scheduling and absence management solution can help.
Automation Reduces Error
If you rely on manual data entry, you need to keep track of all of your employees’ hours yourself. The problem with that is paper-based scheduling and manually entering data into a spreadsheet increases your risk for mistakes. Messy piles and disorganization mean that sheets containing important employee information can get lost. Think of all the human error risks inherent to non-automated processes, from accidentally writing down or entering in the wrong number to dealing with ineligible penmanship.
To put it simply, there is too much room for error that can in turn cause accidental overages in time worked.
With automated scheduling, managers can be equipped with real-time labor information and employee schedules from the comfort of their mobile devices. And this level of scheduling transparency doesn’t end at the managerial level. Employee Self-Service gives power directly to your shift employees, giving them the freedom to view schedules, request time off, volunteer for shifts, and more—all within necessary compliance constraints based on your pre-set rules to ensure that they do not exceed the appropriate amount of hours they can work.
You have visibility into hours worked, overtime rules, and time off all at your fingertips!
From the start, schedulers can create the most optimal shift schedule that takes into account how many hours employees can (and cannot) work. Reducing employee burnout is an inherent part of automated solutions because the guesswork is done for you. Now, you will no longer unknowingly assign an employee too many hours or schedule a person’s shifts too close together (potentially violating rules depending on your industry).
Proactively Adjust for Change in Demand
Another benefit of analytics-driven scheduling is how it can help you proactively adjust for demand.
Perhaps your employees are currently overworked because everyone is pulling in way too much overtime to make up for the fact that your organization needs to hire more people. Or maybe your shifts are consistently overstaffed, causing folks to put in unnecessary hours? Whatever the trend, automated scheduling can help identify it.
In turn, you are made aware of how to limit superfluous hours.
The Indeavor Solution
We can help you reduce burnout.
Indeavor is our workforce management SaaS solution which offers clients an end-to-end, cloud-based employee scheduling, time & attendance, and absence management system. Indeavor integrates with your human capital management and enterprise resource planning systems to create a robust platform that provides you with real-time employee data.
Learn more or request a demo here.
