What's causing the great resignation and how the proactive mental wellness approach can reduce it?
People are your greatest asset! Empty desks don't work.Are you aware that stress, burnout and lack of mental wellness are one of the fundamental reasons what's causing the Great Resignation?
Let's take a look at why is mental health important in the Great Resignation context.
Before another year ends, let's focus on the discovery of how to reduce great resignation by stress reduction, burnout prevention and mental wellness improvement of everyone in your team.
The still ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has allowed employees to rethink their careers, work conditions, and long-term goals. People are looking inwards and rethinking what work means to them, how they are valued at workplaces and how they can have a more stress-free lifestyle option. No one desires to burn out.
LACK OF INNER MOTIVATION AND FREEDOM BECAME OBVIOUS WHEN PEOPLE WORKED FROM HOME
As workplaces attempted to bring their staff back to offices in person, people don't want to let go of the freedom to work from home that they experienced. Many employees, particularly in younger cohorts, are seeking to gain better ways to integrate their work-life and reduce their stress levels and burnout risk. To them, resignation from their current workplace seems the only option.
As a Fortune article 'What’s fueling ‘The Great Resignation’ among younger generations?' accurately stated, "Employee dissatisfaction presents a serious risk to business, and some employers do recognize this and are trying to be as proactive—or as quickly reactive—as possible."
This article also pointed out that "Small businesses, in particular, according to Adobe, are experiencing the brunt of this trend as one in three small and midsize enterprise managers has said his or her firm has suffered from employee burnout and/or attrition in the past year."
ARE YOU AWARE OF THE BURNOUT SITUATION?
In one of our newsletters from earlier this year, we wrote that the Mental Health America (MHA) latest 'Work Health Survey' pointed out that "Most employees are experiencing the early signs of burnout. Nearly 83% of respondents felt emotionally drained from their work, with over 40% stating they strongly agreed with this statement." (see the left side of the graph below).
The same MHA survey results also clearly demonstrated that out of all the employees who strongly felt emotionally drained by their work 99% somewhat agreed or strongly agreed that their workplace stress affects their mental health (see the right side of the graph above). If you see that your work burns you out and you traditionally lack practical intrapersonal education to handle pressures, you easily prefer to leave. Resignation is better than suffering.
WHAT LEADS TO BURNOUT?
We have demonstrated in several blog posts that what leads to burnout is stress. Let us point out again that stress is the inner reactivity that you experience when you face different external pressures that you fail to deal with in your mind.
If you want to prevent people from burning out and resigning, you need to deliver them efficient tools to deal with their stress.
A few years ago the APA published a study pointing out that employees who burn out are 2.6 times as likely to be actively seeking a different job. In that sense, the great resignation wave has produced no surprise. It is the outcome of the situation where mental wellness has not been seen as important enough to invest in.
We hope that you are not like most workplaces and have the willingness to invest in mental wellness proactively. It will allow you to keep and nurture your top talents because burnout predominantly affects top performers.
HOW TO PREVENT EMPLOYEE BURNOUT?
Stress reduction has the power to reduce burnout risk. Mental wellness training is, in essence, a reduction of your own inner reactivity to different external stressors. Stress and burnout risk reduction comes down to learning how to respond awarely, instead of being innerly reactive.
Learning intrapersonal skills will have the power to free you from reacting unconsciously to different stressors. Intrapersonal skills will grant you the power to stay innerly calm and focused on what you do.
In case you aren't 100% sure of your current stress level, please then allow yourself to experience a free stress test.
HOW GOOD ARE MY STRESS REDUCTION SKILLS?
To discover this, you can alternatively ask the following 5 stress-related questions:
- Am I always fit to succeed in managing stressful situations?
- Do I notice what triggers my inner reactivity? Is there a pattern and am I aware of such patterns?
- What kind of stress level starts to affect my mental wellness and physical fitness?
- Is my motivation based on positive stress that gets me fueled first and burns me out later? Or do I know how to discover long-lasting and sustainable inner motivation that is based upon the meaningful work that I perform?
- Do I possess the appropriate intrapersonal skills to notice the warning signs of burnout? Do I have an effective strategy in place for preventing burnout when I spot the burnout signs?
Please enable everyone in your team to ask those key questions. The answers will reveal how much inner freedom and actual self-leadership skills your people have.
And if the answers to those 5 stress and burnout questions are not confirming your ability to cope with stress, and spot the warning signs of burnout, you should take immediate action.
INTRAPERSONAL SKILLS ALLOW YOU TO PERFORM WELL
Until your employees lack practical intrapersonal skills, stress will influence you and slowly lead your key experts and top performers towards burnout. Why should I start now?
The particular trouble with work stress and employee burnout is that it builds slowly. Too slowly to be noticed without intrapersonal education.
As the above-mentioned MHA’s survey pointed out, "Nearly 1 in 4 employees experienced the more severe signs of burnout, including reduced professional efficacy and cynicism towards coworkers and their jobs." What should be more shocking is that it also demonstrated that 23% of employees stated that they don’t care what happens to their colleagues or clients. Not caring at all also means, that they rather leave than stay.
The good news is you can educate them. For this purpose, we have developed a high-quality online training 'Performing Under Pressure', which will allow you and your team to learn easily more about stress reduction and burnout prevention. And best of all, what you learned is applicable right away!
Once you and your team know how to easily spot the warning signs of stress and burnout will be able to avoid pitfalls for you, your staff, and your customers. Stress reduction and burnout prevention formulate a win-win deal for all of them.
Improving mental sharpness and mental wellness represents an excellent investment that has demonstrated tenfold ROI.
MENTAL WELLNESS TRAINING IS THE IMPORTANT COMPONENT TO OVERCOME THE GREAT RESIGNATION
As a BBC story 'The Great Resignation: How employers drove workers to quit' put it, "Foremost, workers are taking decisions to leave based on how their employers treated them – or didn’t treat them – during the pandemic. Ultimately, workers stayed at companies that offered support, and darted from those that didn’t." Wellness Orbit online training is an efficient way for you to support your people's mental wellbeing and get their brains fit for work.
It’s become compulsory for employers to make serious investments in their employees’ mental wellbeing. As Ross Seychell, Chief People Officer at Personio stated in the BBC article about the Great Resignation “When there’s a lot of people moving, that costs companies in terms of turnover and lost productivity. It takes six to nine months to onboard someone to be fully effective. Companies that lose a lot of their workforce are going to struggle with this over the next 12 to 16 months, and maybe much longer. Companies that don’t invest in their people will fall behind.”
So, do not fall behind. Here your investment for a full day e-training per person is never higher than £47 ($60 or 50€). We see that mental wellness should be a win-win deal and thus have made our digital solutions effective, easy to use and benefit providing for you and your staff.
CONCLUSION – STRESS REDUCTION IS THE KEY TO STOPPING THE GREAT RESIGNATION!
Stress reduction represents the most cost-efficient method of preventing burnout and stoping the great resignation trend (Click the video below).
When applied, practical intrapersonal skills will not merely reduce stress and prevent burnout but also bring along excellent ROI. It will do so by improving employee engagement and productivity.
When your mind is well, you and your talented team can dedicate themselves to doing meaningful work that offers satisfaction.
This blog post is by Kaur Lass