Employee burnout is an issue that has plagued the behavioral health and human services industry for many years. Professionals in these fields often incur high stress levels due to the demands of their jobs. This issue is often exacerbated by labor shortages in the behavioral health field. However, there are still plenty of steps that employers can take to better identify and address employee burnout signs.

Recognizing these signs early can help leaders intervene promptly and prevent employee turnover. Find out how to recognize the most common signs of employee burnout and the best ways to prevent it in the first place.

Understanding Employee Burnout

According to the World Health Organization, employee burnout is ​​a syndrome stemming from chronic workplace stress that isn’t being managed properly. Working long hours can be one cause of burnout along with other workplace stressors, such as unmanageably high workloads, lack of recognition, and not enough social connections.

Burnout is especially common in high-stress fields like behavioral health and human services, and it contributes significantly to these industries’ high rates of employee turnover. Employees in these fields already have mentally, and often physically, demanding roles and schedules that may require shifts longer than the standard eight hours. 

Labor shortages and recruiting continue to be a challenge in the field, with only 14% of behavioral health organizations reporting that they can fill key roles quickly. 

In addition, the demand for behavioral health services has continued to grow during the pandemic and beyond, with many agencies and providers struggling to keep up. This creates high workloads for staff that may already be experiencing some level of burnout and increases the risk for new or worsening burnout.

Common Employee Burnout Signs

Learning to recognize the symptoms of burnout can help employers take action to better support team members. Let’s explore the most common employee burnout signs.

Physical and Emotional Exhaustion

One of the most common and externally noticeable signs of employee burnout is exhaustion. The person may start to appear more tired throughout the work day or experience physical symptoms similar to a cold. This is a dangerous symptom in behavioral healthcare and human services, as employees must be properly alert while working with patients and providing care.

Decreased Productivity or Work Quality

Employees who experience burnout often have lower motivation and productivity, which often stems from becoming disengaged with work. Burned-out employees may begin missing deadlines, making more mistakes, producing a lower quality of work, or reducing their work output. 

Higher Absenteeism

Absenteeism is another common employee burnout sign. Absenteeism can include frequently showing up late, leaving early, or calling out sick more frequently. This is a serious issue in behavioral health as unexpected tardiness or absences often lead to last-minute appointment cancellations, disruptions in patient care, and a poor patient experience. 

Cynicism and Irritability

Employees who feel burned out and unappreciated may become more irritable or adopt a cynical attitude towards their job or employer. This is a symptom that’s most noticeable when interacting directly with the employee. 

Isolation

Employees experiencing burnout often begin to isolate. Employers may observe that the person has become withdrawn from their coworkers and isn’t participating as actively in meetings or group discussions. This also extends to an employee’s personal life and their relationships outside of work. 

How to Prevent Employee Burnout

Employee burnout has always been a challenge, but the issue has increased in recent years due to the pandemic and the strain that it put on the healthcare system. In fact, an Indeed study found that 67% of workers felt that burnout had worsened during the pandemic.

Still, employers play a key role in preventing job burnout and can minimize its impact. Here are several key strategies to stop burnout before it starts—or at least before it progresses.

Distribute Hours and Caseloads Effectively

In the behavioral health industry, it’s not uncommon for employees to frequently work extra hours or juggle large caseloads due to understaffing and high patient demand. However, employers should aim to distribute the required hours and workload effectively to avoid overloading or burning out individual employees. 

ContinuumCloud’s Position Control feature can help businesses get a clearer view of their organization and staffing needs. Employers can view and prioritize openings to fill the most in-demand roles more efficiently and track their labor budget to see where there is overtime occurring or room in the budget to add more help. 

ContinuumCloud’s EHR also provides helpful clinical care management tools to track provider caseloads and better distribute work among providers so that no single person is overloaded.

Encourage Rest

Encouraging and prioritizing self-care, work-life balance, and employee well-being can also help prevent burnout from setting in. Burnout often goes hand-in-hand with exhaustion, so taking time to rest and prioritizing wellness can help employees better manage their job stress and fight off burnout. 

It’s important to create a company culture where employees feel comfortable taking a vacation or a mental health day when they need it.

In fields like behavioral healthcare, employees may be hesitant to take time off due to concerns about how their absence will impact coworkers and patients. If the facility is already understaffed, employees may worry that they’re increasing the burden when they take a vacation or sick day, or they may feel guilty if patient appointments are disrupted. 

However, employers who prioritize employee wellness and account for PTO ahead of time can avoid burnout and more disruptive absenteeism later on.

Facilitate Peer Recognition

Encouraging stronger team-building and peer-to-peer employee recognition is one way to build a positive work environment and to address some common symptoms of employee burnout. 

ContinuumCloud’s HCM platform includes an employee recognition feature called Shout Outs that facilitates peer-to-peer recognition. This feature allows employees to publicly recognize their team members when they go above and beyond to help each other or their patients. 

Many employees experiencing burnout feel unappreciated or disconnected from their teams. But building a culture of frequent peer recognition can strengthen team connection and show employees that their hard work is not going unnoticed. 

Help Frontline Managers Recognize the Warning Signs of Employee Burnout

Recognizing employee burnout signs early allows managers to better support employees in the early stages of the problem. Properly intervening at the outset can prevent team members from reaching more serious levels of burnout, which may lead to serious performance issues or the employee quitting. Consider holding regular training sessions and refreshers on employee burnout signs to prevent these issues from worsening.

Ensuring managers know what signs to look for when interacting with employees is crucial. But it’s also critical that they know how to identify employee burnout signs within their team’s data. Signs such as increased absenteeism or lower productivity may be gradual and harder to notice in person, but they stand out in time and attendance logs or business intelligence reporting. 

ContinuumCloud’s HCM platform includes a useful business intelligence dashboard that provides busy managers with a quick view of key team statistics and data to help them identify patterns or information that they may have missed.

Have Conversations About Burnout

Being open about the topic of burnout can help employees better understand its symptoms and how to prevent it for themselves. Burnout is an isolating experience for many people and those actively experiencing it may not feel comfortable talking to their coworkers or manager about it. 

Ongoing discussions, wellness programs, and other resources can make burnout easier to talk about. It can also help employees better understand the causes of burnout and common symptoms so they can reach out for help early on rather than allowing their stress or exhaustion to develop into compassion fatigue.

Conduct Employee Surveys 

Keeping tabs on how employees are feeling about their work is another excellent strategy for monitoring employee stress levels and evaluating the risk of burnout. Consider asking more general questions about burnout and then digging into specific symptoms of burnout. 

For example, burned-out employees often feel a sense of cynicism about their jobs, so questions measuring the employees’ attitudes towards their jobs, how they feel about the outlook of the company, and how they feel about coming to work each morning can help uncover employee burnout signs.

Prevent Employee Burnout With ContinuumCloud’s HCM Platform

Leaders and front-line managers must understand how to identify and address burnout to improve outcomes for behavioral health and human service workers. One resource that can help is a strong unified HCM system. ContinuumCloud’s HCM platform can streamline processes such as check-ins, time-off requests, employee recognition, and more to aid employers and employees in the fight against burnout.

Contact us to learn more about how we can help your organization recognize employee burnout signs and promote a happier, healthier team.