Highly Engaged but Burned Out
A study conducted at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence reveals that many employees who are highly engaged in their workplace are as well exhausted and ready to leave their organisations.
Traditionally high levels of engagement are associated with greater productivity, quality of work, as well as increased job satisfaction and employee retention. Thus, getting the highest levels of engagement possible is one of the top goals of enthusiastic HR professionals and company management.Despite all the efforts, according to Gallup only 32% of employees in the U.S. and 13% of employees worldwide are engaged, meaning ‘involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace’.
But what some of the companies fail to notice in their pursuit of the ‘HR Holy Grail of engagement’ is that highly engaged employees are also more likely to experience high levels of stress and burnout at the workplace.
A recent survey conducted by the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence in collaboration with the Faas Foundation studied the levels of engagement and burnout in over 1,000 U.S. employees according to their engagement-burnout profiles. Researchers divided employees into several groups:
- “apathetic” — low engagement-low burnout (2,4%)
- “burned-out” — low engagement-high burnout (1,8%)
- “moderately engaged-exhausted” — moderate enagagement-moderate burnout (35,5% )
- “highly engaged-exhausted” — high engagement-high burnout (18,8%)
- “engaged” — high engagement-low burnout (41,1%)
Engaged-exhausted workers demonstrated high levels of skill acquisition, but also reported the highest turnover intentions — even higher than the unengaged group.
“Engagement is very beneficial to workers and organisations when burnout symptoms are low, but engagement coupled with high burnout symptoms can lead to undesired outcomes including increased intentions to leave an organisation. So managers need to look carefully at high levels of engagement and help those employees who may be headed for burnout, or they risk higher turnover levels and other undesirable outcomes,” said co-author Dr Jochen Menges from the University of Cambridge.
64% of the highly engaged-exhausted employees reported having high demands at the workplace, such as large workload, high levels of bureaucracy, and high demands on concentration and attention. Simultaneously the level of resources for this group was reported to be low, that is no or not sufficient supervisor support, rewards and recognition.
In contrast, 49,2% of the employees in the engaged group reported having high resources, such as supervisor support, rewards and recognition, and self-efficacy at work, but low demands.For 31,3% individuals in this group job had high demands and high resources.
Most strikingly, 100% of the apathetic individuals belonged to the ‘poor job’ profile (low demands–low resources ).
This data provides HR professionals and managers with new insights on how to start supporting employees for optimal engagement. Although wellness initiatives, yoga classes, bean bags and movie nights can be helpful in fostering healthy and supportive work environment, a much bigger influence has the company’s approach to work itself. In order to foster healthy levels of engagement, it is also crucial to strike a balance between demands placed on people and resources given to them. The higher the work demands, the higher is the need for support and acknowledgement, as well opportunities for recovery.
We hope you liked this story. If you find it useful — don’t be shy and give us a round of applause 👏👏👏👏👏.
Also subscribe to our weekly newsletter on all things we find inspiring and fun >>> here
