Causes of burnout in a working environment?

Meetings and excessive collaboration

What is excessive collaboration?

Excessive collaboration occurs when employees are too frequently involved in meetings, conference calls, and work related issues until they grow overwhelmed leading them to burnout, and unable to focus on their own tasks at hand.

The World Health Organisation has classified burnout as a clinical syndrome and its symptoms include exhaustion, feeling overwhelmed, dissatisfied with one’s work or job, and unproductivity in the workplace. Burnout is ultimately the main factor for physical or mental collapse caused by overwork or stress in the workplace.

Ever heard of the saying, “Too many cooks will spoil the broth”? Same goes in a company’s meeting. Try to decrease the risk of burnout by having fewer meetings and excluding some employees from time to time. By doing so, you’re only allowing key members to attend the meetings and being more productive in the end, rather than bringing in more employees and making the entire meeting room overloaded with unnecessary information thus making the meeting last longer than it should. It’s time consuming to bring in too many employees into a meeting room, but by avoiding doing so, you also allow those employees that were excluded to finish their tasks more efficiently and give them time to breathe. When employees are given time to finish actual work instead of talking about it during meetings, the company will become more productive and will have less risk of burning out. 

Don’t punish your most capable employee by giving them too many tasks to handle. An overload of work will also cause burnout which in return will end up costing you and your company a valuable employee. 

Exhaustion caused by workplace stress is ultimately inevitable, but there are ways to avoid it or prevent it from happening too often in the workplace and ensuring a productive working environment for your employees in an organisation.