Advertisement
Weekly Wrap: How Empathy Can Help Ease Employee Job Burnout
Get articles like this
in your inbox
The longest running and most trusted source of information serving talent acquisition professionals.
Advertisement
Related Articles
As a long-time member of the workforce, I understand first-hand how easy it is to get burned out on your job.
In fact, the problem of job burnout has been growing as employees have had to deal with the pressure to do more (usually with less) during the Great Recession and its aftermath. Anyone involved in talent management these days knows that this is a big reason why employee engagement scores are so terrible, and, why we’re really at a tipping point where that could either start to improve and get better, or, go the other way and get a whole lot worse.
That’s why this story from Northern California’s Contra Costa Times (I found it in the San Jose Mercury News) on a new worker burnout prevention strategy grabbed my attention.
It’s about a project that Eve Ekman, a social welfare researcher at UC Berkeley, offered to the San Mateo County probation department that would cultivate empathy to help ease job burnout for the staff and probation officers. According to the story:
Ekman is among a vanguard of researchers taking decades of studies on job burnout in a new direction.
Instead of looking only at external factors causing burnout, such as heavy workloads, inadequate resources and difficult work relationships, they’re focusing how workers can develop empathy to spark and sustain enthusiasm for their work. In doing so, they increase their effectiveness, even in daunting work conditions.
Emotional exhaustion, lack of meaning and sense of effectiveness on the job can occur when a worker feels overwhelmed with demands that he or she can’t meet. If the strain worsens, workers may shut down emotionally to cope, viewing clients impersonally — a state called “depersonalization.” That in turn cuts off a flow of critical information between caregiver and client…
Cultivating empathy — the ability to understand the experience of another — is key to heading off burnout, and that takes simple cognitive shifts, Ekman explained. A critical step is developing curiosity toward a patient, inmate or client, she said.”
It’s an interesting story, and notion, because it gets to the root of what seems to bother a lot of workers who feel disengaged and burned out — that no one really understands what they are going through, and therefore, no one really cares.
You don’t need a UC Berkeley researcher to tell you that, of course, because any half-awake manager probably knows it already. Understanding the challenges and difficulties employees are going through is key to helping them deal with those issues. The question is, can this program that is being used in the probation and justice system be refocused so that it can be applied to a little more common work environment?
That’s the next step here, but you don’t need to wait for that to start trying to offer a little more empathy to YOUR workers and employees, because you can do that and see some positive impact right now.
Of course, there’s more than using empathy to combat job burnout in the news this week. Here are other HR and workplace-related items you may have missed. This is TLNT’s weekly round-up of news, trends, and insights from the world of HR and talent management. I do it so you don’t have to.