Employee Burnout and What Companies Can Do to Fix It

By: Suresh Parakoti, Founder and CEO, glasssquid.io

Employee burnout is a very real phenomenon, and it’s proving to be more and more prevalent in the workplace. More often than not, managers tend to see an exhausted and frustrated employee as a personal failure to find the right candidate to join their team; in their mind, the person is unable to handle responsibilities, is incapable of rising above stress, or quite simply, just isn’t cut out for the job.

Every employee—even the high-performing rock star—is susceptible to feeling depleted and unmotivated some of the time. Burnout is driven by many different factors, and many thought leadership articles have shared some of its causes. For example, an article from Fast Company earlier this year listed the following five contributors to burnout:

●      Poor compensation

●      Unreasonable workload

●      Excessive overtime or uncompensated after-hours work

●      Poor management

●      A disconnect from overall corporate strategy

Similarly, the Harvard Business Review shared three more causes:

●      Excessive collaboration

●      Weak time-management disciplines

●      Overloading the most capable workers

Though the causes of employee burnout vary, most sources suggest that it’s less of an individual concern and more of an organizational challenge. This view may seem to absolve the employee of any accountability and put all the responsibility on management, but it has the power to put company leadership in control. In turn, leadership can take the necessary actions to turn things around.

Over the years, many companies have underscored the importance of work-life balance and actually managed to successfully implement it. A high percentage of these have also offered employee benefits that go beyond the usual medical, dental, vision and 401k packages to cultivate an environment that gets employees excited about going to work. These benefits include, but are not limited to:

●      A full-service café.

●      Flexible hours.

●      No dress codes.

●      Shopping discounts.

●      Gym reimbursements.

●      Paid maternity and paternity leave.

Companies not only offer these perks to keep the morale high among current employees, but also highlight them all over their careers page and job listings as a means to attract quality top talent. Some companies have gone above and beyond to ensure that their employees feel seen, attended to, and cared for. Zappos, for instance, offers nap times for employees to rest and rejuvenate when they need to; SAS’s shows their high regard for family with subsidized, on-site childcare centers and college scholarship programs for the children of their employees; Arianna Huffington has even implemented an email-deleting tool that unburdens her Thrive Global employees when they go on vacation.

Many management teams have recognized the reality of employee burnout as well as its implications within their companies. Loss of productivity, for one, has a tangible, quantifiable consequence. Employee turnover is similar. As work, environment and many other company-specific factors vary, so have the solutions and preventative measures for employee burnout that management teams have implemented. The bottom line is that leaders within the company have the ability to empower their employees, increase productive output, and reduce burnout. In doing so, they give their employees the drive to work, which ultimately drives the company’s success.

Suresh Parakoti is the Founder and CEO of glasssquid.io, an online staffing firm that leverages artificial intelligence to connect top talents with employers and hiring managers.

Shaking off Manual HR Tasks with Technology

By Jen Stroud, HR evangelist, ServiceNow

If you’ve been in HR for very long, you may have noticed that your typical work week focuses less on meaningful human interactions than you probably expected when you entered the profession. You likely became part of the industry to be involved with developing people and helping your organization thrive, but perhaps time that could be spent on strategic projects is getting swallowed up in high-touch, low-value tasks—responding to routine questions, checking and rechecking email, and the like.

In a day and age in which a pizza can be ordered using a slick iPhone app, you can’t help but wonder why basic HR requests can’t be processed in the same automated fashion.

If you feel this way, you’re not alone. Recent research backs you up, and the numbers are telling. In an HR study conducted by Engage ESM and ServiceNow, respondents said that they focus just 31 percent of their time on strategic activities. That means that more than two-thirds of a typical work week consists of just trying to keep things moving.

The majority of the respondent workweek consisted of using labor intensive methods—drafting detailed emails, updating complex documents and making phone calls—to complete routine assignments like onboarding new employees, processing requests and fielding employee inquiries. 

These high touch, low value assignments use time that could be spent one on one with employees in a far more meaningful way.

More than 90 percent of the HR managers in the study believed that they could make a greater contribution to high-touch and high-value initiatives such as career development if they could break free from these manual administrative tasks.

Many routine processes are complicated and done manually, which provides minimal visibility to those involved. Just think of the administrative steps required to prepare for an employee’s first day in the office. The overwhelmingly manual nature of these steps in most organizations today as well as the possibility for delay and human error increases with each touchpoint needed to complete the on boarding process—from facilities and security to finance and IT. The result is an overwhelmed HR department, a frustrated hiring manager and a puzzled and discouraged new employee.

While most companies have invested heavily in HR technology, there continues to be gaps that lead to challenging outcomes. HR is still far too tactical, and employees lack a modern employee experience—an HR portal that allows them to manage all HR needs. Perhaps because of this, the study also found that a substantial 74 percent of HR departments plan to restructure within the next year. The next 12 months will be a time of progress for HR as more organizations explore how technology and service management can help transform the employee experience and how work gets done and is tracked in HR. Consider these results:

·      

•      The study found that streamlining technology is a priority for 63 percent of respondents
  
•        Eighty-three percent believe that their department could add more value to their organization by employing a higher level of technology
  
•        Ninety-one percent said that technology is the key to improving HR responsiveness, which keeps business moving and employees satisfied

What would you do with the time you could save by putting the right technology to work for you? The survey’s respondents unanimously agreed that they could make strategic contributions to their organizations. A well-run HR department is absolutely critical to the success of any organization and HR budgets are increasing year over year, a trend that is expected to continue.

As organizations continue to increase HR budgets and HR budgets continue to make technology a priority, these investments will help HR shed unnecessarily manual tasks and focus on projects that are high value. 

4 Things Executives Should Know About Intelligent Assistants at Work

By Rob May, CEO and co-founder of Talla

We are in the early stages of the cognitive revolution at work. Over the next five years, every knowledge worker will begin adopting intelligent digital assistants to help do their job more effectively and efficiently. In just over the last year or so, we’ve seen the possibilities explode. The two technologies that recently made this possible are the advances in machine learning and natural language processing, which enable a good experience with bots and the rapid adoption of conversational interfaces as the main method of communication within the workplace—the perfect home for those bots.

The ecosystem of products is developing rapidly, and the first ‘generation’ of assistants available currently automate various tasks. The major focus has been on creating reports, scheduling meetings,  and managing project reminders so far. These are no doubt useful, and we’ll see continued development of those types of assistants across every vertical within businesses, from HR, to sales, to customer support. A second useful case that is developing are bots that lighten your cognitive load. These extend and amplify employee cognitive capacity by freeing knowledge workers from remembering certain things, intelligently managing workflows or storing vast amounts of information, and retrieving it when needed. At Talla, we work on both of these for HR teams, so we think a lot about the considerations executives should make in adopting the new technology. Here are a few things to know:

You need to be on the right chat platform 

Some organizations will lag behind in getting started with intelligent assistants, not because they wouldn’t save them timeand free the team to focus on more strategic work, but because they’re lacking the platforms with the right bot integrations. Today, I believe all teams should be evaluating the various chat platforms that bots will live in and deciding what’s best for their teams. Slack, Hipchat, Cisco’s Spark, and Skype are some major players. While companies that build bots will wisely go multi-platform over time, the reality is that not every interface will be optimized for bot and human interactions. Simply put, if the Slack App Store, for instance, has all the best bots, but your team is tied to email—and only email—you’ll be behind.

The best bots will learn from your interactions

In a typical buying decision for a SaaS app, you look at what it can do for you today. But, the value of intelligent assistants is better assessed by determining both what it can do today (typically base-level automation) and the additional value added over time as it better knows your organization. If an intelligent HR assistant knows 15 things about our insurance policies on day 1 and 250 things by day 30, it’s value has increased significantly as an internal resource for the team. Intelligent assistants will grow, learn, and improve much like human employees, so when you judge them, think about the long term, not just how they perform on day 1.

Consider security and privacy when choosing your bots 

Can a bot be socially engineered the way a human can? How do bots know what information they can disclose and to whom? These are all problems that will be solved in the next couple of years, but for now, most companies building digital assistants aren’t thinking about them. Look for companies with mature founding teams who have built other companies in the enterprise software space and understand the importance of these issues. They will be the first to adopt high security and data access standards and will lead the way for the other bot companies.

Don’t be fooled by A.I. buzzwords

Does an intelligent assistant use deep learning, neural networks, probabilistic programming, bayesian reinforcement learning? It doesn’t really matter. Many of the early A.I. companies building digital assistants have taken a “technology first” approach, but as long as the product works for you, the underlying machine learning models shouldn’t matter. Algorithmic innovations in A.I. get open-sourced pretty quickly, so any useful advances should be adopted by every digital assistant company in less than a year. Buy the best product for your needs and don’t let a buzzword-filled sales pitch drive you into the wrong decision.

Advances in A.I. are enabling a new breed of application that can extend and amplify the cognitive capacity of all your employees. These digital assistants will revolutionize all areas of work, but the largest gains will be seen in human resources and related fields. The best way to prepare your organization for the cognitive revolution is to start dabbling in these new technologies so that you can understand and appreciate their use cases. I hope this guide can be your first step in that direction.