Preventing Employee Burnout: Workload Management Strategies in the Age of AI
In the past few years, we've gotten used to doing more with less. Luckily, AI tools can help us automate some tasks and provide more efficient ways to do others. Even with that assistance, companies risk employee burnout if they don't implement effective workload management strategies.
Identifying Employee Overwork: Defining Signs and Symptoms
It's all too common to complain about being overworked, and it is normal to put more effort in on certain days, for a big project, or when you're trying to hit multiple deadlines. The problem arises when this kind of hard work is sustained for too long.
The Cleveland Clinic defines overwork as working beyond one's limits to the point that a worker experiences physical and/or mental harm, which can lead to burnout. It also indicates that overwork is subjective. It can mean that a worker has too many tasks or a psychological overinvestment in work.
Employers can really only address part of that, which is task overload. This means taking a good look at your overall operations and determining whether deadlines are being missed, requests are slipping through the cracks, or emails are being ignored.
Your project management tools will hold the key data to solve this problem, as they can usually provide analytics about how many tasks are overdue and which projects are behind schedule.
The problem may not be employees slacking; they're just being asked to do too many things at once and balls are getting dropped. Upper management may also have unrealistic expectations around just how much can get done with AI and other tech tools.
8 Signs of an Overworked Employee
Overworked employees exhibit a combination of the following behaviors or symptoms.
- Fatigue
- Decreased performance
- Absenteeism
- Increased Irritability
- Physical symptoms (headaches, etc.)
- Cognitive impairment
- Job dissatisfaction
- Poor work/life balance
American employees face the greatest risk of overwork among the 38 countries that make up the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In the best-case scenario, it leads to burnout and employee disengagement. Worst-case scenario, it can lead to severe health issues.
Smart employers want to avoid both. While the solution is to proactively avoid overloading employees, a robust health insurance program should be in place should they develop any physical symptoms.
Managing Workload Expectations: Why AI Isn't a Silver Bullet
Nearly every worker has heard a variation of this question from a manager sometime in the past year: "Can't you just do that with AI?" It's a frustrating question to hear because in many cases, the answer is no. AI has not achieved singularity (where it can do a job as well as a human), but it is being sold to executives as if it has.
If upper management wants a job done with AI, they have to invest in appropriate employee training and let go of any preconceptions that AI can do everything. A Chinese academic study of burnout as a side effect of workplace digitalization found that organizational support, such as training, was vital to mitigating role overload and burnout.
Outsized AI expectations lead to overwork as upper management loads up task lists with things they think AI can assist with before checking that it's possible. Proper training can keep them from doing that, but the reality on the ground is that managers have to push back against unrealistic requests to keep their projects aligned with priorities and company KPIs.
When you pair overexpectations of AI with the fact that many jobs and roles have disappeared from some industries in the past few years, you have a perfect recipe for overwork for remaining employees.
Detecting Burnout Risk: How Prodoscore's Workforce Analytics Can Help
There are a few ways to determine whether your people have too much on their plates with Prodoscore.
1. High Sustained Prodoscores
Prodoscore uses an algorithm to provide every employee, department and org with a score that's used to understand and visualize trends over time. The score is a value between 1 and 100 that represents an individual's engagement across your entire tech stack.
The calculation is based on objective activity patterns in business applications, helping leaders identify healthy productivity and areas of underperformance over time. When a score remains high (i.e., above 75) for an extended period, you may be looking at burnout risk for that employee.
Typically, an employee's Prodoscore will spike before deadlines, during major crunch times like the end of the month, or during the usually busier middle of the week. If that score looks the same from day to day, they may be taking on too much. It's time to address how you can help lighten the load.
2. Significant Deviations from Routine
When an employee starts working earlier in the day and ends later into the evening, or shows volatile activity patterns, it can signal burnout. Consistently working outside of core business hours is a quick indicator that an employee may be overworked.
The Top 5 Factors Driving Employee Burnout (Beyond Workload)
While overwork does contribute to burnout, it isn't the only factor. Gallup found that overwork was second behind the most important risk: unfair treatment. While there's an argument to be made that too much work is unfair treatment, it's just one aspect. Unfair treatment can include being passed over for a promotion, being given fewer perks than other staff or departments, having a bonus reduced, or anything that puts the employee on a "less than" footing.
Gallup's top five burnout risk factors were:
- Unfair treatment at work
- Unmanageable workload
- Unclear communication from managers
- Lack of manager support
- Unreasonable time pressure
The solution, in all cases, is better management. Sometimes, the employee is the problem, but Gallup's findings suggest that in most cases, bad management is the problem. This can be helped with management training, clear human resources policies, the right tech solutions (e.g. project management solutions to get ahead of rush requests), and workforce analytics solutions like Prodoscore that empower managers with actionable data about their teams.
Every business wants to do more with less, but it needs to be done strategically to reduce burnout and attrition risk. Retooling your workflows to evenly distribute workloads across teams, even if it means management taking on extra work, can go a long way towards improving employee engagement and preventing serious health outcomes for your staff.
Want to properly diagnose overworked employees at your business? A doctor can't do their job without the tools. Prodoscore is an all-in-one employee productivity monitoring solution and workforce analytics tool that provides the data you want without making your employees feel surveilled. Contact us today for a demonstration of how we can help you root out burnout risk and other potential issues at your business.
