Can Digital Employee Experience Address Employee Burnout?
Mckinsey Health Institute (MHI) recently published an insightful article about employee burnout, which got me thinking about the intersection of employee burnout and digital employee experience (DEX).
MHI does a great job of illustrating the challenges employers face when addressing burnout— and the mistakes we make.
But where does DEX fit into the equation?
And what can we as employers do better to practically address employee burnout?
I’m happy to report that I have some answers. In this post, I’m going to share how investing in digital employee experience can help you combat a very specific kind of burnout— digital burnout.
I’m also going to provide some practical tips for using DEX to identify and address employee burnout.
What is Employee Burnout?
Burnout expresses itself as chronic physical and emotional exhaustion. Usually, it comes with feelings of cynicism, detachment, and building resentment.
This occupational phenomenon is the result of your employees dealing with constant stress for a long time.
Employee burnout isn’t anything new— but the importance that businesses place on employee wellbeing has (thankfully) surged in recent years. As a result, there’s been some great research carried out on the topic.
Let’s look at what some of the experts have to say…
Mckinsey Health Institute’s research lists a few aspects of our jobs that most commonly contribute to employee burnout. These are:
The feeling of always being on call
Unfair treatment
Unreasonable workload
Low autonomy (or worse!)
Lack of social support
Though by far the biggest contributor to employee burnout is “toxic behavior” in the workplace.
Forrester, on the other hand, outlines in their Employee Experience Index what they believe to be the strongest predictors of burnout. These are:
Lack of recognition
Constant change
Frustration with technology
Let’s drill down into that last point.
Digital Burnout
While technology functions as a powerful tool for productivity and communication, it also carries the potential to drive employee burnout.
Digital burnout is the exhaustion that arises from prolonged exposure to digital devices and platforms, leading to feelings of disconnection, stress, and overwhelm.
This isn’t the only area where investing in DEX can help you overcome employee burnout— but it is the most obvious.
Every single time one of your employees engages with a piece of technology, they have a measurable experience— either a positive experience or a negative one.
String together enough of these moments over time, and you have a digital employee experience.
If your DEX is consistently negative, your employees are much more likely to go through digital burnout.
You might think you’re doing enough to combat employee burnout, but let me tell you why you may be mistaken:
We, as Employers, Are Missing the Mark
MHI’s survey identified a clear disconnect between how employees and employers perceive mental health and well-being.
When it comes to mental health and well-being metrics, there’s a 22% gap between what the average employer rates themselves, and what their employees rate them.
The survey also found that 74% of HR leaders reported mental health as a top priority for their business, and yet:
28% of employees reported burnout symptoms
32% reported moderate distress in the workplace.
70% find it difficult to access the mental health services they have access to through their employer.
Does that sound like a top priority to you?
Investing in Digital Employee Experience to Combat Burnout
Here’s the real problem, in a nutshell:
Traditional mental health solutions are focused on the individual, like more vacation days or better communication tools. But while burnout is experienced on the individual level, the most powerful drivers of burnout are systemic.
The systemic issues that drive employee burnout, like poor resourcing and frustrating technology, are also your low-hanging fruit.
With a little DEX strategy, you can make sweeping systemic changes that reduce employee burnout on a business-wide scale.
One of my favorite frameworks for combatting employee burnout is Gartner’s S.A.N.E framework: Spot, Assess, Neutralize, and Educate.
You can follow this super simple approach to address issues that drive burnout one by one.
Here are a few practical ideas on how DEX can help you address employee burnout:
Removing Digital Friction
The first step to creating a DEX that prevents burnout is to reduce digital friction by streamlining your tech stack.
This means removing any unnecessary technology within your organization, reducing the time it takes for employees to access and use technology, and providing effective training to help employees stay up to speed with new tools.
Creating a More Human-Centered Digital Workplace
Design a digital workplace that puts the employee first.
This means making sure employees can access the technology they need, providing them with helpful training and resources, and creating an environment that encourages collaboration and open communication.
Remember that this kind of cultural change needs to be pushed from the top down. Leadership teams, get on board.
Measuring Qualitative Data
DEX enables you to measure qualitative data such as employee engagement, satisfaction, motivation, stress levels, burnout symptoms, etc.
You can do this through surveys and focus groups or by using analytics tools to track usage patterns and user behavior.
Doubling down on Job Mobility
Sometimes the only way to prevent burnout is to switch up the routine.
If your DEX analytics show that an employee isn’t engaged, consider whether movement within the business might refresh their motivation.
Invest in employees by doubling down on talent redeployment and upskilling, and make sure your employees know those options are available to them.
Encouraging Clear Boundaries
Set clear boundaries for when work ends and personal time begins. Use monitoring tools to support those boundaries.
Encourage your employees to unplug during non-working hours, establish a policy against after-hours emails or text messages, and provide opportunities for self-care such as meditation breaks throughout the day. Labor laws around the world are starting to set the precedence and your settings for contact after hours that you may have in Germany might need to be a global setting.
Just don’t overdo it, and begin to encroach on how and when your employees do their work. Making your employees feel spied on will have the opposite effect.
An Empathetic, Human-Centered Approach, Enabled by DEX
At the beginning of this post, I posed a question about how we address employee burnout.
Where does DEX fit into the equation?
I think now we have our answer.
Digital Employee Experience enables us to measure holistic factors and see what businesses haven’t been able to see before.
DEX helps us clear aside the metrics, and look— really look— at how our employees feel at any given moment.
It’s not good enough to provide your employees with mental well-being tools and say “Here, do the rest yourselves”.
It’s not enough to ensure your employees take the correct number of legally mandated breaks.
Managing burnout is about managing people, and people change. They ebb and flow. If you want to combat burnout, you need to account for that ebb and flow.
And that’s where DEX fits into the equation.