The future of the workforce is, unfortunately, tired and stressed.

A recent Gallup study found that about two-thirds of full-time workers experience burnout at work, with 23% of respondents reporting feeling burnt out very often or always. Another study found that millennials experience burnout at higher rates than previous generations, suggesting that burnout is both on the rise and may impact certain positions in the workplace more than others.

While burnout is certainly not exclusive to millennials and other young workers further down the corporate ladder, these team members do have less control over their careers and day-to-day work than those from other generations.

The employees who have little say over their workloads, their company cultures, and the company’s boundaries don’t have the corporate power to address their own burnout. Instead, it’s in the hands of management and leaders like yourself.

And like it or not, burnout throughout the company is management’s responsibility.

A year-long survey by Blind revealed the top sources of employee burnout at tech companies, and they all boil down to poor leadership and management. Of the answers, 22.9% directly cited poor leadership as a main source or burnout.

But other top factors, like work overload, toxic culture, and lack of career control, are all ultimately caused by poor leadership as well.

Image source

So while it’s easy for SMB leaders to look at burnt out employees and think that they got themselves into the situation, it’s more likely that the problem is a systemic part of your company’s culture. That means it’s up to management – the leaders who drive your culture and set the example – to address.

---

---

Employee Burnout Prevention

Below are a few important culture changes to implement that will help address current employee burnout and prevent it in the future.

1. Cultivate Open Communication

First things first – employees need to feel comfortable talking about problems in that middle space between work issues and personal problems. Topics like burnout and stress feel very personal, which can make employees feel nervous about bringing them up in the workplace. They can feel isolated, leading to feelings of imposter syndrome and further burnout.

But as noted above, almost everyone in the modern workplace has experienced burnout before, and it’s not a personal problem employees will be able to overcome alone. Opening up lines of communication around mental health in the workplace will help your workers see that.

It’s crucial that they feel safe discussing these topics at work, both with other employees as well as with managers and executives.

Short-term, initiating the difficult conversation with someone exhibiting signs of burnout is an important first step. Talking to them about their stress might uncover opportunities to lessen it, and it also gives them the chance to discuss their current emotions, which is often a solution unto itself for reducing anxieties.

Long-term, shifting your company culture to address the current stigma around stress and other mental health issues will be important in fostering conversations about burnout. Openness and transparency around stress, emotions, and company culture should all be encouraged.

It requires a bigger commitment to addressing mental health in the workplace, but it will be worth it for your overall employee satisfaction, as well as efficiency. The CDC reports that patients with depression miss an average of 4.8 workdays and suffer 11.5 days of reduced productivity over a three-month period. It’s easy to see how prolonged burnout can lead to that.

2. Set Boundaries Around Workloads

Making sure employees feel comfortable talking about and addressing burnout is a first step in moving away from a burnout-fueled company culture. However, in order to prevent it in the first place, leaders need to make more drastic shifts to the way the company is run.

For example, you might want to consider creating guidelines around employee workloads to help prevent burnout caused by overwork.

This has two benefits. First, it helps leaders and managers to have set boundaries that they need to stay within when planning projects and assignments. Second, it helps send a message to your SMB’s employees that they don’t need to be as busy as possible all the time in order to impress the bosses. They’ll know that you value wellness and balance as well as work performance, reducing self-imposed pressure.

Some examples of guidelines and boundaries that can reduce workplace stress include:

• Discouraging checking work email accounts outside of work, or adding the account to mobile devices
• Limiting how many large-scale projects any employee is part of at any given time
• Creating rules for meetings to reduce excessive planning and inefficient execution
• Providing incentives for using paid time off, as 52% of Americans have unused vacation days due to reasons like workloads being too heavy

It can also be helpful to relax other guidelines that may be contributing to stress and burnout. For example, offering flexible work arrangements or remote work arrangements can lead to increased productivity, less stress, and better work-life balance.

3. Implement Clear Systems

Finally, be sure to develop clear systems for your company, both around everyday work tasks as well as burnout- and wellness-related procedures. As found in the Blind study mentioned previously, employees cite unclear direction as a major cause of stress.

This lack of organization and clarity within your company creates additional work for your employees.

For example, systems and processes for the most common tasks team members complete can reduce decision fatigue and time spent “figuring things out.” Lack of systems can also lead to conflict between employees and increased risk of mistakes, which can cause great stress regardless of how overworked someone is. And additionally, if your company’s management is not skilled in systems and project management, it becomes much easier to unknowingly overload employees due to common occurrences like scope creep.

However, creating processes and systems that team members can easily follow for their most frequent and important work reduces the amount of friction involved in the task. This both reduces the amount of time it takes, which reduces workloads, as well as the amount of confusion or questioning involved in a task, which reduces stress.

Slowly Shift Culture

Ultimately, all of these changes come down to creating a workplace more open about stress and more organized around workloads. By shifting your company culture to one that discourages overwork and encourages systems and open communication, you can slowly address the roots of employee burnout and prevent it in the future. This will always be preferable to addressing burnout itself as your team members experience it.

Photo via Shutterstock

---

Articles published in strategy+business do not necessarily represent the views of the member firms of the PwC network. Reviews and mentions of publications, products, or services do not constitute endorsement or recommendation for purchase.

strategy+business is published by certain member firms of the PwC network.

© PwC. All rights reserved. PwC refers to the PwC network and/or one or more of its member firms, each of which is a separate legal entity. Please see www.pwc.com/structure for further details. Mentions of Strategy& refer to the global team of practical strategists that is integrated within the PwC network of firms. For more about Strategy&, see www.strategyand.pwc.com. No reproduction is permitted in whole or part without written permission of PwC. “strategy+business” is a trademark of PwC.

There are now more ways to grow your business network than ever, which makes it that much harder to capitalize on each connection. Affinity’s Alliances is a relationship management solution which uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to get the most out of your professional network.

Affinity says Alliances will expand your business professional network while identifying the connections which are most likely ready for a warm introduction. The company uses a patent-pending relationship strength algorithm to give users insights into the best candidate for making referrals or introductions.

If you are a small business owner with limited human resources, this is a technology which can optimize the contacts in your network. This is particularly important for owners with eCommerce doing business with suppliers and customers around the world.

In a press release Affinity co-founder Ray Zhou says Alliances can help professionals source, raise capital, and close deals by unlocking the power of business networks.

Zhou explains how the technology makes this possible. He goes on to say, “Unlike traditional networks, Alliances captures not only who your colleagues and peers know, but how well they know them, so you always know who’s in the best position to introduce you to a new contact or organization. With Alliances you can stop cross-checking social networks, your CRM system and other platforms hoping to stumble upon the right person to make an introduction.”

The Technology

Before Alliances was developed, Affinity was using its technology to bring the team within an organization together by leveraging each other’s relationship graph.

Alliances uses machine learning algorithms and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to connect and analyze external contacts such as advisors, partners, investors or mentors. It then taps into their networks and accesses their connections to identify which one of them have the strongest relationships.

Based on the tenor of the conversations in emails, the number of meetings, and other factors it will automatically show the connections with the strongest relationships to targeted prospects. You can then make a well-informed decision to identify opportunities for referrals and introductions.

Features of Affinity Alliances

Affinity analyzes relationship data in your peer-to-peer communications to identify the best possible contact in your network within two degrees. The machine learning and NLP technology is used to identify the strength of these relationships.

If you have a potential prospect, you can look up every relevant contact so your allies can provide a warm introduction. Alliances has real-time networking data which includes the latest emails correspondence and meetings.

You can also use your allies to find prospects using Affinity’s CRM. The search parameter can find prospects based on industry, job title, location, and other criteria. Alliances will then display the results of relevant prospects which can be connected with your allies in the real-time network.

Alliances is now available for all existing Affinity customers.

Image: Affinity

---

Representation matters. That’s more than just a hypothesis; it’s the value proposition on which Karen Okonkwo and Joshua Kissi based their new business.

Karen and Joshua met through a friend, connecting easily as entrepreneurs and first-generation African immigrants. At the time, Karen ran a blog — among other things — and often lamented about how stock photography was stale and homogenous. Joshua, on the other hand, was a photographer and Creative Director. Wouldn’t it be great, they surmised, to create a stock photography site that offers more diverse images and changes the status quo? They both loved the idea but were at capacity, so they tabled it as a “coulda-woulda-shoulda.”

The tragic stories of two black men – Alton Sterling and Philando Castile – became an “aha” moment for Karen and Joshua: the only way to combat the devastating effects of systemic racism and racial profiling is to change the narrative around ethnic representation. And, thus, TONL was born.

We spoke to Karen and Joshua about how they’re revolutionizing the stock photography market with added color and perspective. Here’s what they had to say:

Q: How did you go about bringing this vision to life?

Karen Okonkwo (KO): We started by surveying as many people as we could — industry people, friends, whomever — to see if the idea was even viable. The general consensus was that the current stock photography wasn’t relatable. So once we had some real data to back this up, we went full throttle and gave ourselves a year to launch. We worked and planned like crazy, but it was hard since we lived on different coasts. Everything went down to the wire, but we pulled it off in the end.

Q: What’s been the response to TONL?

KO: It’s been received really well. We’re still in our infancy, of course, but we have a growing client list that includes Fortune 500 companies as well as smaller mom-and-pop operations. Above all else, we have a passionate community. We love seeing people get so excited about our work.

TONL Founders, Joshua Kissi and Karen Okonkwo

Q: What are your goals for TONL?

Joshua Kissi (JK): We want to bring a new standard to stock photography, to change the narrative for people of all categories. People and companies often talk about the importance of diversity, but they don’t always back it up with their actions. We want TONL to be a global image resource, and we hope to grow it as much as possible while still maintaining our authenticity. That means capturing as many different categories, perspectives, and nationalities as we can. Does that involve launching in multiple countries? Who knows. But these are some of the things we think about.

Source: TONL

Q: TONL’s growth has been fun to watch. Was this a factor in choosing Salesforce Essentials and CRM?

KO: Sales was definitely top of mind. We have East Coast and West Coast sales reps, so it was important to have a central place for them to track opportunities. I use Salesforce in my “other life” in medical sales, so I knew how it worked. Salesforce Essentials had just come out around the time we launched, and it seemed like a perfect fit for us since it’s designed to help small businesses grow. It had everything we needed, so it was an easy decision for us.

Q: Why is it so important to celebrate diversity?

JK: There’s no downside to diversity. On an individual level, it empowers people to be themselves. On a business level, it helps companies tap into new markets and reach new audiences. The greatest contribution we can make through our platform of diverse stock photography is giving people a true sense of belonging. That’s what drives us.

Source: TONL

Q: The “Narratives” section of TONL’s website is fascinating. Why did you choose to include narratives from the models in your photos?

KO: We added the narratives to tell a different story than what’s oftentimes (falsely) portrayed in the media about certain ethnic groups. Black victims, more often than not, get reduced to criminals, which leads to racial profiling. We wanted to do something different and shed a brighter light on people from all kinds of ethnic backgrounds in order to show the world that they, too, are just normal people — real people with real personalities. We wanted to give them a voice and let them be themselves.

Q: Is there one TONL image that outsells the rest?

KO: Yes, this one’s our bestseller:

Source: TONL

Q: You’re both entrepreneurs with successful launches under your belts. What advice do you have for someone thinking about starting a business?

KO: My advice is simple: know your “why.” Ideas come and go, but you have to know the reason you’ll get up to work on even your lowest days. If you’re working with someone else, your why’s have to be aligned. If one person views the startup as a business and the other person sees it as a passion project, you’ve got a situation where two people are working together with different why’s. The why – not the what – is most important.

Source: TONL

Check out TONL’s website to see how entrepreneurs Karen Okonkwo and Joshua Kissi are disrupting the stock photography market and affecting change.

Then download The Impact of Quality and Values Driven Business Report to gain insights from more than 1,500 business professionals on workplace equality and values driven leadership trends.

Republished by permission. Original here.

Photo via Salesforce

More in: Dreamforce, Salesforce, Sponsored

---