Seven (7) months into the World Wide COVID-19 pandemic, the idea of returning to on-premise offices looks dim for many companies. Is your company starting to experience a high drop in performance, and your employee engagement is beginning to reach an all-time low? Your company may be experiencing “Work From Home Burnout!” Employees are starting to feel the effects of quarantine, working from home, homeschooling, and this life we call the “New Normal”. Work from Home Burnout” signs can be too dangerous to ignore.
Here are 5 Dangerous Signs of Work From Home Burnout and Tips on How To Avoid It:
1. Lack Of Support
There is nothing worse than feeling like your back is against a wall, and there is nowhere or no one to turn to. Once upon a time, you were in an office surrounded by peers, support staff, and management. Now the new normal has you working either in your home office, spare bedroom, or kitchen counter surrounded by utensils and spices. When an issue or concern happens, you find yourself turning to the paprika asking, “What should I do?”. Lack of support can lead to many dangerous side effects of burnout, letting customers go unsupported, questions go unanswered, & problems are going unsolved.
How To Avoid: Don’t let your team feel unsupported. Engage, Engage, Engage! Engagement with your team is the goal to keep communication and support open while employees are working from home. Having the functionality and support tools at your team’s fingertips keeps questions going unanswered, problems going unsolved, and encourages conversation between team members and supervisors. Group chats with live video streaming, a virtual meeting room where participants can raise hands, ask questions and share screens are the best alternative to the office meeting setting. Encourage your teammates to take advantage of these tools and show your support by using them yourself.
2. Performance Drop
Even some of your best performers can experience a drop in performance. Although in an office setting, this is easier to catch. Working from home performance drops can be the cause of many factors, but the most dangerous reasoning is the high number of new distractions. With open access to the internet, no visual supervision of their screen, and the beginning feeling of burnout settling in, can be a dangerous combination for performance drops with even your best performers.
How To Avoid: Although you can not manage every distraction your work from home employees face, you can help manage the expectations and manage accountability for your employee’s daily duties. Companies everywhere install User Activity Monitoring to the employee’s equipment to monitor daily activities and habits. User Activity Monitoring allows you to monitor computer activity to identify productivity losses and stop insider threats. Many employees may be uncomfortable with the idea of being monitored daily. Still, it is up to the supervisor to explain that is no difference in monitoring in the office vs. using User Activity Monitoring.
3. Cynical Employees
Every company has experience dealing with one employee who cannot find happiness in anything around them. These employees tend to have the ability to drag the people they are surrounded by down with them, causing a wave of cynical employees. Even though now employees are working from home and find themselves physically distanced from these employees, it doesn’t mean you still cannot find your cynical employee. Cynical Employees find their way to make their toxic ways known in text chats and conversations that the employees are having together that you may be unaware of.
How To Avoid: Though you want to encourage your employees’ thoughts and opinions regarding company culture, you want to make sure that it doesn’t cross that step of pure cynicism. Monitoring the chats and areas where employees will have their conversations regarding work is critical in protecting your company and your good employees from the rotten eggs. Using a chat monitoring tool, you can pick up on agents with issues, or having a hard time or changing attitude. Use this tool to engage with your employee and check in with them as they may be on the front side of experiencing Work From Home BurnOut.
4. Isolated Employees
Isolation sets in rather quickly while working from home. The average employee may not realize the isolation that comes with working from home. The feeling of isolation can lead to feeling bored while working, which causes distractions; it can also lead to becoming cynical about their work. All of these side effects will begin to cause significant productivity dips for employees.
How To Avoid: Don’t forget that even though we have sent employees home, the need for human interaction is still there. Supervisors should always be encouraging interactions between their employees even though they may be at a distance. Companies can do this by providing the tools for employees to engage with their teams and upper management staff. Huddling together to get game plans completed or just discussing what they did that weekend is a valuable tool that any company can use to help employees feel less isolated. Also, encouraging employees to get out of there home, go for a walk, a happy hour over video chat just promote engagement. Don’t forget that there is no I in team!
5. Change in Work Habits
Employees are creatures of habit. They clock in usually the same time every day, clock out the same time every day, and take the exact same break times. While working in an office, a change in work habits would be easy to spot; though working from home, this is a more challenging issue. How are you confident that an employee is at their desk when they say they are? How can you notice if an employee is bringing external hard drives and transferring files?
How to Avoid: Installing a great workspace monitoring tool to get an accurate picture of each employee’s performance and intent is a great way to find a change in work habits. Workspace monitoring allows the company to have full direct visual supervision back with the work from home employees. You can use these tools to get your eyes back on your employees without feeling invasive to the employee.
All of these tips on avoiding work from home burnout sound like they can run out quite the tab when trying to recreate the on-premise worksite, but in a work from home environment. Well, I have one last tip for you, do not seek out a single solution for each individual sign of work from home burnout; instead, use a company that is an all-in-one package deal for protecting sensitive data, maintaining regulatory compliance, and improving productivity! Trendzact Agent Interact unifies these technologies to help reduce workspace security threats and productivity losses that you may begin to experience with Work From Home Burnout. Trendzact Agent Interact brings direct visual supervision back to your company, allowing access to an agent’s webcam images, access to huddle rooms, and interactive chats with teammates and colleagues. Trendzact Agent Interact allows reports on employee activities to help find the reasoning behind productivity drops and use coaching tools to help push the employee along the right path. Monitor your employees’ chats and activities that will help find an employee who may be suffering from work from home burnout and help coach and mentor those behaviors.
Work From Home burnout is now a widespread phenomenon that companies during this day and age are widely experiencing. Let Trendzact Agent Interact help bring back the spark your work from home employees once had. Bring back engagement and productivity without having to return to the workplace.
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