Workplace Burnout: Causes, Prevention, and the Role of a Healthy Work Environment

Hello everyone, How are you doing? I trust you are having a great time out there.

We all know how easy it is to get so involved in our work that we end up burning ourselves out. Whether we love what we do or not, if we're not careful, we'd hate it with passion, despite having to do it every day. How do we avoid workplace burnout? What are the things to do to make sure we still have something to look forward to about work?”

A work environment can be very interesting with people's emotions changing every now and then. Burnout can occur from a wide range of activities, such as accumulated stress and a pile of documents to work on, showing up late for work, lack of job satisfaction, toxic working environment, and a whole range of other things. The list goes on and on.

In my perspective, workplace burnout could be individually inflicted or by toxic working environments, maybe from members of staff or management of an organization.

The Individual

When we talk about the subject of personally or individually inflicted work burnout, this could either be done ignorantly or with negligence.

This type of burnout may occur from a person's inability to effectively carry out tasks due to their laziness and procrastination.

One of the ways to effectively deal with this is to set goals for yourself with respect to work and get tasks done before deadlines. It is also important for an employee to maintain a cordial relationship with other members of staff to create an enabling working condition or environment for themselves. This could involve building collaboration skills, being able to communicate your ideas effectively, focusing on your most important task, and also taking time to improve oneself by taking courses and finding more effective and quick ways of getting things done, as well as finding quality time to rest, could be part of an individual's way of avoiding work burnout.

The organization

An organization's working environment could cause members of staff to have work burnout for several reasons, some of which could be unpleased bosses who go about with their problems looking for every single opportunity to unleash on their members of staff, just to mention a few.

An organization can only grow as much as its workforce. It is part of the duty of an organization's management to create a conducive environment for its members of staff by paying allowances as at when due, creating time for members of staff to air their honest opinions, giving bonuses, and providing seasonal incentives. These could be ways by which an organization motivates its members of staff to avoid work burnout.

Sometimes last year, during my farm practical year, I had the opportunity to be part of a bunch of people my school sent to a farm for some training on soilless farming. Surprisingly, the organization is a work-oriented organization, but even at that, they had gaming facilities, sporting facilities, and a recreational center where people on the farm could exercise or do some recreational activities, and I think this was a way of improving productivity and also generating interest for young people to be on the farm.

They even had music equipment, and at some point we had a music competition during the course of the training, and I can tell you I stayed on our farm for three months, and there was no dull moment, so this is also a way that organizations can include some extracurricular activities just to improve workers productivity.

Just recently I learned that they occasionally send some members of staff for training at Lagos School of Business and are also sponsoring some of her staff on their MSc and PhD programs. and I can tell you for free that these staff will give their all to make sure the organization expands.

Thank you so much for stopping by.