Here’s a vexing paradox. On the one hand, companies are offering more wellness and well-being options than ever before, including mindfulness and yoga classes, nap rooms, and fitness facilities. On the other hand, employee burnout has risen to such a level that the World Health Organization now considers it a workplace hazard.
What Happens When Teams Fight Burnout Together
Many organizations pay lip service to the notion that focusing on well-being helps people to operate at their best. But few take the necessary steps to help employees truly manage their energy — physically, emotionally, and mentally — especially during intense work periods. EY and The Energy Project ran an experiment with a 40-person team to test whether prioritizing rest and renewal as a group would help everyone feel better and get more work done in less time. The experiment involved developing a collective resilience plan that focused on five behaviors and having employees support each other to follow through on those behaviors. The results? The team reported having more energy and feeling less burned out at the end of the busy season. And five months later, at a part of the year when accounting teams industrywide often lose multiple team members to exhaustion and burnout, this team’s retention stood at 97.5%.