This document discusses employee burnout, its causes and negative consequences, and potential solutions. It notes that burnout can result from lack of support, poor training, heavy workloads, and role confusion. This leads to problems like illness, poor performance, and high turnover. The document then proposes a four-part solution: semi-annual workshops on coping skills, quarterly collaboration activities, on-site representatives, and virtual aid stations. The goal is to increase awareness, provide learning opportunities, and help employees manage stress and prevent burnout.

1. Employee Burnout:
Why is it bad and how can we fix it?
LAURA CASEY
EDPY6930-SPRING 2015

2. What is employee burnout?
www.xpats.com

3. http://www.whydev.org/burnout-and-its-causes/

4. Burnout: It’s not just stress
This is a shortened list of negative consequences associated with burnout found in the literature:
• Recurrent illness: headaches, increased susceptibility to disease
• Poor attendance
• Low self-esteem
• Substance abuse
• Depression
• Countertransference towards clients
• Relationship problems (at work and home)
• Job loss and frequent job overturn for companies
• Drug and alcohol overdose
• Suicide

5. What Causes Burnout?
Factors associated with burnout found in the literature include:
• Lack of social support
• Poor job training
• Fewer years of work experience
• Rigidity in work schedule
• Role confusion
• Limited employee autonomy
• Lack of professional resources
• Overloaded caseloads
• Poorly structured caseloads

6. What is the cost?

7. The cost is STEEP
Cost to employer:
• Loss of employees=higher costs for
hire and training
• Potential loss of clients
Cost to employee:
• Loss of job
• Lowered self-esteem
• Mental health consequences
• Relationship and family strains
• Stress and disease
Cost to client:
• Lowered standard of care
• Employee absences could lead to more errors
and gaps in client care
• Loss of trust
• Frustration (specifically important when
working with mentally ill populations)
Cost to community:
• Loss of social workers…less help…less success
in rehabilitation and assistance
• Truancy
• Client failed probation
• Increased client jail time
• Weaker family units

8. Burnout is bad. Now what?
Preventative measures found in the literature and well as intervention plans include:
• Flexible work schedules
• Increasing social support
• Cognitive-behavioral stress management
• Comprehensive job training
• Workshops
• Peer-Collaboration activities
• Use of Employee Assistance Programs

9. Goals
• Increase awareness of employee burnout
• Increase employee knowledge of intervention and prevention
resources
• Provide opportunities for social workers to learn and practice skills

10. Solution
Four components:
1. Semi-annual Workshops
2. Quarterly Peer Collaboration Activity Sessions
3. Local Burnout Assistance Representatives
4. On-site and Virtual Aid Stations

11. Semi-annual Workshops
1. Led by volunteers and organization administration
2. Exercises such as role playing, group discussion, emotion guessing, presentation of coping
skills, stress management skills, and education on the stages of burnout and preventative
measures
3. Employee resources and benefits explained
4. *Rational-Emotive Education:
1. Situation reframing exercises
2. Role playing from negative emotional response/positive emotional response
*Russell (1987)

12. Quarterly Activity Sessions
Cooley and Yovanoff (1996)
*handout

13. Local Burnout Assistance Representatives
Volunteer basis
Duties include:
◦ Organizing workshops and activity sessions
◦ Maintaining on-site and virtual aid stations
◦ Providing assistance and resource referral to employees
◦ Communicating between employees, supervisors and company administrators
◦ Weekly announcements

14. On-site and Virtual Aid Stations
The aid station as a living structure
◦ Weekly announcements
◦ Weekly maintenance
◦ Presence of representative both on-site and online
◦ Do NOT want a disorganized website and table with no access to representatives or resources
Virtual Aid Station Example:
http://burnouthelpnow.weebly.com/

15. Outcomes
If the solution plan is successful then:
•Decreased employee burnout
•Lowered costs to companies
• Increased work productivity
•Increased employee job satisfaction
•Decreased employee turnover
•Higher levels of client care and satisfaction
•Stronger families
•Stronger communities
Goals Reminder!
1. Increase awareness
2. Increase knowledge of skills and
prevention measures
3. Provide opportunities to learn and
practice

16. Thank you!

17. References
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