Preventing burnout with Vitamin-A conversations

Understaffing creates extra workload for the remaining employees. A restaurant can still close for a day, but sending children home from schools and daycare is already difficult. For a healthcare institution, a day without care for residents is not an option at all. The reduced freedom and worse schedules are a breeding ground for mental health issues that can cause employees to stay home on average twice as long as employees who were absent for other reasons.

With overstrain and burnout, employees experience more stress than they can handle. An important difference is that stress-related complaints with overstrain often arise in a short period of time. Usually these complaints quickly disappear when the stress is removed. Overstrain can develop into burnout when complaints persist for too long. With burnout, the complaints are the result of prolonged excessive stress. These complaints therefore usually last longer.

In the Job Demands-Resources model, the characteristics of every job are divided into:

• job demands: what does the work ask of you?
• job resources: what gives you energy at work, what motivates you?

The model assumes that excessive job demands lead to stress and fatigue, while having resources contributes to higher motivation and productivity. The challenge is to balance these and keep them balanced.

With job crafting, the employee answers the question: which of the mentioned activities and tasks give me energy and which do not? The approach is to adjust the tasks that the employee finds difficult and gets no pleasure from, and to put the employee more in their strength by further tapping into energy sources.

Example questions

When inventorying activities that cost (a lot of) energy, the following questions can be used:

• Which tasks cost a lot of energy? How could you perform this task in a different, simpler way so it requires less energy?
• Which tasks could you tackle more efficiently? For example, by using a different working method or organizing time differently?
• What are the possibilities to delegate or swap energy-draining tasks with a colleague?

The answers to the following questions provide insight into activities that give energy:

• Which parts of your work would you like to do much more because they are a source of energy?
• What activities have you done when you go home whistling?
• Which tasks do you look forward to doing again?

Overstrain is the precursor to burnout. Prevent long-term absence through job crafting – it can give employees more breathing room and relaxation in their work. But to be fair, due to the record-tight labor market, job crafting is not always the remedy for burnout. However, Vitamin A conversations (A = Attention) in which the manager pays attention to the difficult situation and is willing to think along and act to alleviate it, always helps.

Want to know the costs of your current staff turnover and how you can reduce it, for example by preventing burnout? Also read our blog 'Preventing staff turnover: 10 tips and calculate it yourself!'.