You can prevent employee burnout. Here are the 5 ways to do that.

Karthik Kamalakannan
Sudo vs Root
Published in
3 min readOct 30, 2016

As a CEO, you’ve been here. Your everyday work is overwhelming and as a CEO, you’re probably lonely at your job. Not a lot of help.

Burnout has become common in today’s workplace, and this is a serious issue that many CEOs ignore, since they also experience burnout.

A recent study by Stress.org analyzed the major causes of workplace stress:

But, workplace burnout is not something that’s curable. Here are 5 tips on reducing workplace stress for your people:

1. Listen to them

Listening is the most important characteristics of a leader. According to Forbes, “Employees want to be led by those who genuinely care about who they are and what they represent to the team and organization at-large.”

But, doing this everyday as a CXO or a manager might make it way too difficult for anyone. When a person is burning out, she/he can easily be spotted. The moment the burnout happens, you need to figure out a way to spend time with them and see what’s happening.

A small 30 minute meeting over a cup of healthy juice would do just fine.

2. Let them express themselves

Let’s admit it. The moment you realize that you do not have your say in the company, you’ve lost the interest in working for that company. Imagine this as if someone tied a thick black cloth around your ears, and let you watch the mistakes, rather than to point it out and fix things.

Asking people the right questions will bring out the best in them. Ask them specific questions, consult an expert to come up with questions, and the rest is going to be amazing.

3. Provide them a anytime-anywhere platform

People fear being judged. This is one of the biggest reason why a lot of things in this world is still not fixed, and it won’t be unless someone comes out of the herd and talks about it.

But, things completely changed when Wikileaks came into picture. People were not afraid of expressing themselves anymore, and they were not afraid of pointing out things that were wrong.

Providing people a platform which they can use anytime anywhere to share their thoughts freely to the top management is going to make a huge difference. Platforms like UnderstandBetter and Impraise can help you do that.

4. Give them the appreciation they need

EVERY single person wants to feel needed at work. Appreciating people for the work they have done, in front of their team members is going to uplift their morale.

Nearly 70% of people believe that an appreciation by their direct reporting manager/leader would make them super happy and loyal to the company they’re working for.

5. Spend time with them

Time, if the single most valuable thing in the world. While CEOs are always trying to get that little extra time for themselves, it is important to schedule their week, with “Talking to my team” on your calendar.

While having a regular one-on-one with your people is important, spending time with them over lunch or dinner or coffee is another.

There’s one extra tip which might go a long way: Giving your people half-day off before their birthday would be amazing.

Improving workplace happiness and reducing workspace stress is managable with regular schedules. But, you can also use modern tools that puts your employee engagement on autopilot.

--

--

Sudo vs Root
Sudo vs Root

Published in Sudo vs Root

Thoughts directly from the minds and hearts of the engineers at Skcript, via Medium.

Karthik Kamalakannan
Karthik Kamalakannan

Written by Karthik Kamalakannan

Co-founder & CEO of @SkcriptHQ. Building Hellonext.co. I write about building a bootstrapped SaaS business.