With more and more employees reporting mental fatigue and burnout, especially since the start of COVID, companies are starting to put actions into place, offering more mental health resources, webinars, and trainings. However, these actions are typically for employees once they’ve already started burning out, which doesn’t necessarily mitigate the burnout.
I propose a more proactive solution: an Employee Burnout Tracker. This tracker would link to project management software, like Jira and Asana, and it would measure employee workloads by measuring assignments given to them and deadlines. If an employee is coming close to being overloaded with work, it proactively informs the employee’s manager, so the manager can start to look for ways to alleviate workload or redistribute assignments, so the employee is supported before they become burned out.
I believe my solution will be valuable for enterprises in helping improve employee experience and retention. If you are a corporate buyer: is this something you’d be interested in for your workforce?
I’d be interested! I work in HR, and this is something we constantly have trouble tackling. I like that it puts the burden on systems instead of people to reach out for help too. We often face the challenge of people wanting to put a brave face or not wanting to cause trouble by reaching out for help. With this kind of solution, it takes the friction away. I totally see this increasing employee experience!
I really like the idea of this, but it’s difficult for smaller and nonprofit organizations to invest in new technology, let alone technology that isn’t core to their mission… Would you be able to provide a kind of low-tech solution, like training for managers or templates around having conversations around burnout? I think there’s value here, but it may just not work for smaller/less corporate businesses.
I second this. In many nonprofits, particularly the smaller ones, you’re not going to have people within people management roles. You’ll have more senior people, who manage others, but it’s more due to their seniority and not people management skills. That means, they may not be particularly interested in people management or resource management conversations– they’re more just trying to keep things afloat. I wonder if this is more a solution for larger enterprises? Hopefully that helps with target market.
I see this as well in industries where you don’t have explicit managers, e.g., medicine. The problem is in those industries, deferring responsibilities often could lead to negative patient outcomes. I do agree that there needs to be a happy medium– overworked doctors aren’t the answer, but neither are overlooked patients.
I’d be interested in seeing some kind of interactive training to assess burnout and help prioritize tposts. Maybe this could be a portion of the program? Assess, prioritize, and triage to-dos?
Thanks for all the great thoughts here. I definitely see this being geared towards more mature, larger enterprises. Perhaps lower-tech solutions for the future, but I’d rather scope small and start with the unique value I see in this automated tracking ability for larger enterprise managers.
I wonder how much of this relies on individual faults though, like managers who don’t care about their employees being overworked. What happens if the manager gets an alert that they have an overworked employee and they do nothing about it? Or worse, they give the employee more work? The thing about technology these days is that it can’t replace individual quirks and faults. You can add as much tech as you want, and it won’t change the way humans relate to each other.
I see this. Especially in “higher burn” industries, it’s not necessarily managers being okay with overburdening staff, but it’s more because of external demands managers need to deal with around delivering high-quality work quickly.
One of the deeper problems here is pipeline management of work and not just individual responsibilities.
I could see tech being a great target market for something like this. We specifically have people managers who are meant to prioritize employee learning and development, so a tool like this could be really beneficial for them. You’ll still want to have them triage the situation, e.g., not automate task rerouting completely, but something like this could help them understand their direct reports and their bandwidth, timelines, etc.
Cool idea. Why not take it one step further? Have the platform not just let the manager know someone is overworked, but proactively shift the task to another team member who has the right skills and more time to take on the task. What do you think?
Not sure about this. I could see it being very off-putting to be on the receiving end of a task that you may not have the time, skills, or context to deliver successfully. I would advocate for keeping humans at the core of this solution and not making it fully automated!
What about something in the middle? Maybe the task is shifted to a queue for another team member and then the manager has to approve the reassignment before it gets published to the new team member? That seems like a time-saver for managers without making it abrupt for team members.
I like that. I hear you all on not wanting this to be an abrupt transition while still saving time for people. I like the idea of automating the work but having the approval still be human-driven.
Great suggestion! I like this idea of semi-automation, where there are recommendations but not immediate actions taken from them.