Feeling the hot breezes of burnout waft through your organization? It's inevitable in this unsettling situation, no matter how well-balanced we make our personal work habits. We're trying to manage pressures we've never faced before in an environment we never would have dreamed of.
But what does burnout have to do with the Compensation Department? Performance management and engagement are undermined by burnout -- and both are part of our portfolio. It's OUR responsibility to make sure that manager and employee annual goals are aligned with the business strategy, a mountain employees don't really try to scale when they are feeling burnout and their engagement is depleted. Most of us believe burnout comes from overwork and we're ready to say that the Compensation Department has no influence on that situation. But Gallup has recently done research with surprising findings -- findings that put the problem squarely in our laps.
Gallup reports that the World Health Organization (WHO) defines burnout as a "syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed." They define three dimensions of burnout:
- "feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion"
- "increased mental distance from one's job, or feeling of negativism or cynicism related to one's job"
- "reduced professional efficacy" (or, to get to our issue, reduced professional effectiveness)
In other words, burnout diminishes employee desire to do, achieve, grow and learn -- all at the heart of the "efficacy" of our performance management efforts.
Gallup's research teaches us that burnout is NOT exclusively caused by working long hours for far too long -- a situation that the Compensation Department can't influence. But Compensation Departments CAN influence the top five factors that, according to the research, correlate most highly with employee burnout:
- "unfair treatment at work"
- "unmanageable workload"
- "unclear communication from managers"
- "lack of manager support"
- "unreasonable time pressure"
Managers are key, as they always are. But they too are overwhelmed by our demanding work style changes. So what can we really do to help? One aspect of performance management that we rarely think about is its role as a communication vehicle. Annual goals are equivalent to announcements to employees from their managers, and these are announcements the Compensation Department can influence especially for managers.
Other action steps? Choose priorities from the five factors and turn them into targets to be included in annual plans. Work with execs to find out which of the five they would like to collaborate on with their managers. Recognize that you are influencing company results, because it's likely that more employees than usual are feeling burnout right now. When they do, the research shows that they are only half as likely to focus on their performance goals.
Margaret O'Hanlon, CCP brings deep expertise to discussions on employee pay, performance management, career development and communications at the Café. Her firm, re:Think Consulting, provides market pay information and designs base salary structures, incentive plans, career paths and their implementation plans. Earlier, she was a Principal at Willis Towers Watson. A former Board member for the Bay Area Compensation Association (BACA), Margaret coauthored the popular eBook, Everything You Do (in Compensation) Is Communications, a toolkit that all practitioners can find at https://gumroad.com/l/everythingiscommunication.
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