Strategies for Helping with Burnout

During COVID-19 workloads and stresses have increased. Burnout cannot be fixed by simple self-help wellness efforts. A recent Harvard Business Review article entitled “Beyond Burned Out,” pointed out that deeper organizational changes are required.

We were all working hard before COVID-19. Now, many of us have the added stress of simultaneously having to work at home while juggling family responsibilities (sometimes with young children at home). And, for many of us in healthcare, the workload has increased due to stresses of handling constant COVID-19 emergencies. In addition, we have lost co-workers who could no longer simultaneously manage both work and family responsibilities.

As pointed out in the article, burnout has six main causes, with these being the top three:

1. Unsustainable workload
2. Perceived lack of control
3. Insufficient rewards for effort

How to beat burnout?

None of these, or the other three causes will be addressed by traditional wellness or self-care strategies. These causes are all organizational issues.

1. **Give employees a more manageable workload. **While all the work does not go away, helping your employees prioritize what is critical and what can be delayed or eliminated can be helpful.
2. Allow employees an ability to discuss mental health at work. Based on a survey, more than half of employees feel that they cannot openly discuss their mental health.
3. Be an empathetic manager to your employees. Besides manageable workloads, having an empathetic manager is a key ingredient to helping reduce burnout.
4. **Have a strong sense of connection to family and friends. **With everyone being socially isolated, this is even more important. Allowing and encouraging employees to develop stronger bonds to people outside of your work environment is important.
5. **Allow employees to share burnout avoidance strategies that work. **According to the chief people officer at Hewlett-Packard, using virtual chat rooms was helpful for employees to share valuable ideas and insights to reduce stress. Employees help each other reduce stress/burnout and feel more satisfied.

1-800 Notify Can Help Give Employees a More Manageable Workload

The #1 cause of staff burn out (unsustainable workload) is an area where 1-800 Notify can help.

How?

**Customer Service / Billing Call Centers: Eliminate Staff taking Phone Payments **Our IVR Autopay by Phone service can offload 30% or more of the daily calls that are from patients or subscribers simply looking to make a payment or check a balance. Reduced workload = reduced burnout.

**Customer Service / Billing Call Centers: Eliminate Staff Manually Calling Patients with Overdue Balances **Our Automated Billing Reminder or Balance Due Reminder service (call or text) can eliminate all those outbound calls and allow staff to reduce their stress/workload.
Reduced workload = reduced burnout.

Front Desk / Call Center Staff:  Eliminate Manually Calling Patients for Appointment Reminders Our Appointment Reminder service can save an hour of staff time for every 20 outbound appointment reminder calls made by staff members. What’s more important is that for staff, we have heard that making these appointment reminder calls are probably their most ‘hated jobs’ of the day. Reduced stress and reduced workload = reduced burnout.

Source: Beyond Burned Out by Jennifer Moss – published on the Harvard Business Review site at https://hbr.org/2021/02/beyond-burned-out