Avoiding Burnout with the Employee Burnout Survey

The employee burnout survey is a key employee feedback survey that can help reduce the undesirable, yet frequently recurring phenomenon known as employee burnout. 

As a business, you are probably well aware of the need to survey your target market. Although lesser-known and thus less often used, surveying employees to reduce burnout is a valuable method to keep your employees happy and your team intact. 

While your customers are your bread and butter, your employees are the vessels that steer your ship, aka, your business to success. As such, it is key to pay attention to their needs and concerns as you would with your target market. 

Implementing surveys can help achieve these goals, so that your business doesn’t suffer from high burnout rates.

This article explores the employee burnout survey, how it can reduce and avoid employee burnout, keep employees engaged, how to set one up and more.

Defining Employee Burnout 

Employee burnout refers to the state of work-induced or work-related stress that many if not all employees endure from time to time. This condition is marked by a state of either or both physical and mental exhaustion, accompanied by a reduced sense of accomplishment and lack of motivation. 

Although burnout isn’t a medical diagnosis, it takes a visible toll on employees, as it deters them from performing their best and being content in their job.

There are many factors that contribute to employee burnout, most of them occur due to the overall work environment. 

The Causes of Employee Burnout

Employees can deal with many tasks; these can increase if another employee is on PTO, leaves the company or there is a lack of talent available. As such, there are several issues that can go awry or contribute to employee burnout.

Here are several causes of employee burnout:

  1. Lack of support on the job: Often, some kind of support is expected from higher-ups, managers and other employees. When an employee feels that they are lacking support, it can make them feel isolated and depressed, bleeding into their work performance.
  2. Lack of resources: Some jobs require ancillary tasks in addition to employees’ main jobs, yet not all workplaces provide the full resources to complete them. For example, let’s say an employee needs to hire freelancers, but does not have the means. This clearly hampers their ability to carry out their job, leading to burnout.
  3. Unclear job expectations: Often due to a lack of communication or proper input, some employees may discover they have responsibilities or subtasks that were not made clear to them. In turn, the employee suffers, as they won’t meet expectations, at least not as soon as an employer or the employee themselves would aim for.
  4. Toxic employees: Some employees may bully, ignore or treat others in an unkind way. This behavior is unpleasant and can lead to feelings of rejection and loneliness, along with heaps of stress.
  5. Tight deadlines: While most projects have deadlines, there are many occurrences that can delay progress, therefore hampering the meeting of deadlines. As such, it can cause burnout, which further delays job completion.
  6. Little to no work-life balance: When work consumes so much of employees’ time that they can barely fit anything else (doctors’ visits, time with loved ones, etc.), they become overwhelmed. It is perturbing to be overcome with work to the point where employees cannot live a well-balanced life.
  7. Overworking: One of the major causes of employee burnout is overworking. Whether or not employees are meeting deadlines, sometimes, the volume of the work becomes overbearing. This creates exhaustion and a feeling of depletion within employees.

The Many Consequences of Employee Burnout for Your Business

If the damaging effects of employee burnout weren’t incisive enough in the Defining Employee Burnout Section, the following will. 

Employee burnout reached a new high in 2020 and is showing no signs of abating just yet. This is detrimental to businesses and not just at an employee level. This can become an HR nightmare, as burned-out employees tend to leave their job.

The most grave consequence of employee burnout is its effect on employee retention: 42% of workers quit their job due to employee burnout. The statistic grows to almost 50% when it concerns burned-out millennials. 

Here are a few other consequences of employee burnout for businesses:

  1. Unmotivated and indifferent employees, who care little about the success of the company.
  2. Irritable attitudes that create more hostility and toxicity in the workplace
  3. Exhaustion that leads to underperformance
  4. Inclinations towards sarcasm, anger or confrontation
  5. Absenteeism on the job or in job culture activities
  6. Bad reviews on the internet about your work culture and overall company
  7. High turnover requiring more recruiting efforts and the loss of valuable employees 
  8. A bad reputation of your business

Evidently, businesses ought to steer clear of employee burnout and distinguish it at every turn. Surveys can help fulfill this goal.

Understanding the Employee Burnout Survey

The employee burnout survey, as its name suggests, is a type of survey meant to identify and gauge employee burnout, along with any occurrences or sentiments that can contribute to burnout.

Detecting the latter can help prevent employees from developing full-fledged burnout, as the insights this survey provides help employers and HR workers foster positive change.

As for the latter, this survey can help extinguish existing employee burnout, so that it does not become incendiary enough to cause employees to quit.

As such, this survey is a kind of employee feedback survey, as it gathers employee commentary, critique and the like — but specifically themed around employee burnout. 

This kind of survey can be explicitly configured around the theme of employee burnout, that is, introducing respondents to this topic, with questions that specifically mention this topic. Or, it can be set up more implicitly, with the topic and term reframed, thus not mentioned directly.

The latter is useful when you aim to be more discreet, as some employees may feel uncomfortable with plainly disclosing their feelings of discomfort and burnout from work.

How to Set Up an Employee Burnout Survey

You can set up an employee burnout survey by either of the two main methods described in the previous section. To understand your employees better and minimize burnout, it is useful to regularly conduct these surveys.

You can begin with the first method (explicitly mentioning employee burnout) and then deploy these surveys more secretly using the second method (not mentioning the term) — or the other way around, or with any cadence and frequency you choose.

Since both of these survey methods are based on employee burnout, you’ll find that some questions can be applied to both or used interchangeably. 

How to Set up an Explicit Employee Burnout Survey

Your survey should have a callout that specifically states that the survey is themed on/ measures employee burnout. This way, employees will understand this outright.

Here are the key questions to include in this employee burnout survey method:

  1. Have you ever experienced burnout in this job? 
    1. Answers: [Yes, No]
    2. If yes, add an open-ended question to probe further and allow employees to describe their burnout experiences.
  2. What is/are the most stressful aspect(s) of your position/ working at [company name]?
    1. Answer examples: [Time management, work overload, other ideas to maintain objectives, difficulty maintaining my objectives, issues with another worker, etc.]
    2. Use skip logic to transfer any answer to an open-ended question that asks to elaborate on this.
  3. What could we do to help you diminish employee burnout?
    1. Answer examples: [Lessen the workload, create more collaborations, offer more mentorship, other]
    2. Add an open-ended answer option to understand exactly what employees need.
  4.  Have you ever taken a sick day due to employee burnout?
    1. Answers: [Yes, No]
    2. If yes, use skip logic to route employees to multiple-choice, multiple selection questions to tick off all reasons as to why they did so.
    3. Add an option for an open-ended answer at this step.
  5. How many days have you worked during after-hours or off days because you could not finish during work hours?
    1. Answers: Never
    2. 1-3 days
    3. 4-6 days
    4. Over 6 days

How to Set up an Implicit Employee Burnout Survey

If you want to discover the presence of employee burnout in a stealthy manner, avoid using the term throughout the survey. 

Even if the survey is anonymous, employees still may feel uncomfortable divulging their feelings in relation to employee burnout for fear of losing their jobs or being frowned upon by their managers. 

Here are the key questions to include in this burnout survey method:

  1. Have you ever come upon any stress in this job? 
    1. Answers: [Yes, No]
    2. If yes, add an open-ended question to probe further and allow employees to describe their experiences via the keyword “stress” as opposed to burnout.
  2. How often do you experience stress on the job?
    1. Answers: Seldom
    2. Every now and then
    3. Once a month
    4. Several times a month
    5. Several times a week
    6. Allow employees to elaborate on how they experience stress and its frequency in an open-ended question following this one.
  3. What is/are the most stressful aspect(s) of your position/ working at [company name]?
    1. Answer examples: [Time management, work overload, other ideas to maintain objectives, difficulty maintaining my objectives, issues with another worker, etc.]
    2. Use skip logic to transfer any answer to an open-ended question that asks to elaborate on this.
  4. What could we do to help you feel happier at work?
    1. Use an open-ended answer option to understand exactly what employees need, as this question is too broad.
  5. How many days have you worked during after-hours or off days because you could not finish during work hours?
    1. Answers: Never
    2. 1-3 days
    3. 4-6 days
    4. Over 6 days

Improving All Work-Related Issues

Like all work-related issues, employee burnout is a work in progress. Even when you’ve reined in employee burnout (you would know this via survey campaigns) it can creep back up again.

This is because the workplace — or work hours — if your team works remotely, is a living environment. Personalities may clash, new assignments may come unexpectedly (especially if you produce work for clients) workloads may waver and there is nothing that can fully suppress surprises, be they good or bad.

Therefore, you need to evaluate your employees on a regular basis to ensure that they are satisfied at work, feel appreciated and aren’t affected by burnout, let alone overwhelmed by it. The most effective and insights-driven way to accomplish this is by deploying employee burnout surveys on a powerful online survey platform.