End-of-year burnout can appear out of nowhere. One week your employee is reaching targets and completing all their tasks with ease, then next week no amount of coffee can keep them from yawning at their desk, menial tasks seem impossible to complete on time, and feelings of anxiety, stress and negative thoughts start to creep in.
End-of-year burnout can affect anyone and is known to be socially contagious. If someone in your team is feeling it, it can easily spread through the workplace affecting morale, culture, and results.
In this blog, we have a few tips to help you support and help your team fight off end-of-year burnout.
Knowing the signs
Firstly, to help your team you need to know how to detect the signs of end-of-year burnout, this is the general idea of burnout but in a festive font.
Like stress, end-of-year burnout manifests itself differently depending on the person, it can affect someone mentally, physically, and emotionally. You may notice a lack of interest or motivation, exhaustion, anxiety, irritability, negative mindset, appetite changes etc.
Encourage leave
Keep on track of leave calendars and if a staff member hasn’t taken any personal leave in a while, encourage them to take a long weekend or a half working week even though we are nearing Christmas and New Year's breaks.
Even just having a 3-day weekend or a Wednesday off can be a huge breath of fresh air and the perfect time for your employees to have some time to themselves, this will enable them to push through the last few weeks of the year.
Resources
As someone responsible for employees, you play a vital role in providing support, guidance, and resources to help prevent or treat end-of-year burnout.
Employee Assistance Programmes are resources that can provide support for employees who are facing end-of-year burnout. Tools and resources can be incredibly valuable to helping those in your team, these can range from counselling, stress management strategies, goal-setting workshops, and mental health support.
By promoting EAP services and encouraging employees to seek assistance when needed, your workplace can foster a healthier more resilient workplace.
Showing appreciation
Most workplaces say thank you to their employees with an end-of-year Christmas party, while this is a time-honoured tradition and is a place for staff to be appreciated while having fun it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be showing appreciation often in Q4 of the year.
Even small positive reinforcements of a job well done like sharing kind words 1:1 about their great work from the year or sending out a team/companywide email celebrating a recent win can be incredibly uplifting.
Positive reinforcement in the last few months of the year will be appreciated 10x more.
Keep morale high!
End-of-year burnout can be a real test of your reliance and ability to keep a positive mindset. But remember as a leader in your workplace, it’s your responsibility to keep morale high and mindsets positive even when your team and even you are feeling the burn of the holiday pressure. Try to use positive language, offer support to anyone who needs it and try to have a bit of holiday spirit.