How Getting Organized in the Workplace Can Help Reduce Burnout

Understanding Burnout

Burnout (also stylized as burn-out and burn out) started to gain recognition as real problem in the workplace in the 1970s.

Since then, it has become a nearly everyday term in the modern workplace. Most describe burnout as feelings of exhaustion, overwhelming work stress, and/or an inability to cope or perform.

Chances are you’ve heard a co-worker mention feeling burnt out, or perhaps you’ve even used it to describe yourself. What you may not have known though, is that burnout isn’t just business lingo for being tired — it is a real condition afflicting millions of workers around the world.

In fact, in 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) included burnout in the 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases.

According to the WHO, “Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions:

• feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;

• increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job; and

• reduced professional efficacy.”

Understanding what burnout actually is, recognizing what causes it, and knowing how it can affect a worker’s mental and physical health is key to any employee wellness program and ensuring your colleagues and coworkers are happy, healthy, and by extension — productive.

What Contributes to Burnout?

Unsurprisingly, it can be incredibly difficult to pin down an answer to the question “What Causes Burnout.” Mental health in a very complex thing, often influenced by thousands of factors that are rarely the same for any two individuals.

As such, mental health experts tend to take a more conservative approach, choosing to focus on what contributes to burnout, rather than attempting to identify a single common cause.

Online articles and resources on burnout (of which there are hundreds) often cite a few major contributing factors, including:

• Overload — workload and time

• Pressure

• Role conflict and ambiguity

• Lack of support from managers, feedback, fairness and equity, participation in decision making

• Values disconnect

• A “broken” psychological contract between an employer and employee

Most of these commonalities are not overly surprising, chances are if you’ve ever felt burnout, you can speak to how one or more of these factors was contributing to your situation.

Some of these might be easier to “fix” than others – and some might be so deeply rooted that it feels like weeding a garden by hand — always playing catch-up.

However, there are a few hidden factors contributing to burnout that can be handled at the corporate, office, and individual level. The lowest-hanging fruit can be something as simple as workplace hygiene.

Workplace Hygiene and Impact on Burnout

Despite the word choice here, we’re not talking about packing a toothbrush, comb, and 14 different hair products to work. Rather, we’re talking specifically about the hygiene of your workplace — in other words: clutter and organization.

If factors such as stress level and being overwhelmed can contribute to burnout, then it stands to reason that stressors centred on your physical workspace are likely contributing to burnout as well

A messy workplace increases anxiety and can have a negative impact on employee morale. When morale levels are down, employee productivity will inevitably decline, too. Maintaining a clean working environment has not only been shown to keep employees positively engaged, but it also creates a sense of workplace pride. -Source

When describing the impact of clutter and disorganization, experts turn to words and phrases like “suffocating,” “out of control,” and “overwhelming.”

It makes sense too, try to think back to the last time you were looking for something at work, whether it was your favourite pen, a sticky note you wrote 6 months ago, or an important file that has been lost in the depths of your hard drive.

These minor inconveniences can build up over time, and reach a boiling point where you just want to lash out, scream, cry, or call it a day and go home. At the time, such a reaction might seem melodramatic or over-the-top, but the reality is that seemingly small things like disorganization have a real impact on mental health, especially if the issues go unaddressed for long periods.

When it comes to mental health, no action is too small to have an impact. By simply focussing on better organization, studies have shown that employees can reduce stress, sleep better, increase productivity, and even factor into a healthier diet.

Just like burnout can be a built up over time, the benefits of fighting it can spread across the organization too. Whether you are simply tidying up your own space, or helping to provide your colleagues with an overall more inviting workspace, every action you take toward reducing burnout can have a ripple effect.

Where to Start?

The hardest part of any self-improvement (or workplace improvement) effort is figuring out where to start. It might seem simple to take out the trash, un-clutter your desk, and call it a job well done, but for some individuals who are dealing with mental health issues (burnout or otherwise), even the simplest tasks can seem monumental.

That’s why experts agree that it’s important to make wellbeing part of your organization’s culture.

Seeing colleagues and coworkers embrace mental health initiatives, offer a helping hand, and strive toward improving their mental health can have a momentum effect, encouraging others to get on board and do what they can.

Whether burnout is affecting just you and your small team, or is costing your business thousands (if not millions!) of dollars in lost productivity, medical expenses, and employee turnover, it’s never too soon to start.

We mentioned throughout this article that mental health is an extremely complex issue with hundreds of contributing factors. It’s important to remember that no one solution is going to improve every employee’s health 100% overnight.

However, that doesn’t mean you can’t get the ball rolling, no matter how big or small your initiative. Simply providing your team with the tools to more efficiently connect and collaborate (like Stormboard, maybe?) can go a long way in reducing paper clutter, improving working relationships, and giving your employees a chance to work asynchronously or on a schedule best suited for their mental health.

Work-life balance is going to remain a trending topic across the business world for as long as we have people that care about mental health. So whatever it is, whether you are looking to tidy up by reducing your over-reliance on sticky notes, or improving cross-department collaboration, solutions like Stormboard can make a little effort go a long way.

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