<aside> 🗒️ CLIENT: Post-IPO large B2C/B2B SaaS company (501-1000 employees) in online mental health and teletherapy services.

STRATEGY: Thought leadership piece aimed at high-level decision makers and senior HR professionals at large companies

</aside>

Work-related burnout is rapidly on the rise because employees simply aren’t “unplugging” from work. Indeed’s 2021 employee burnout report revealed that 61% of remote workers and 53% of on-site workers find it more difficult to “unplug” from work during off-hours now than before the pandemic, citing reasons like an inability to take time off and blurred boundaries between work and home life. As an employer, it’s up to you to find ways to help them disconnect from work and take the time they need to recharge.

If you don’t want your employees to join the Great Resignation due to stress and burnout, prioritize their wellbeing and advocate for employee wellness by promoting “unplugging” from work. Create policies and expectations that encourage a healthy work-life balance.

Embrace async communications and work

Zoom fatigue and an unrelenting sense of urgency both contribute to employee burnout. You can combat both problems by shifting to asynchronous communications and asynchronous work. With async work, in contrast to the traditional “everyone works 9-to-5” school of thought, everyone works when it’s convenient for them. An important component of async work is async comms — sending and replying to messages without expecting immediate feedback. Transitioning to async wherever possible reduces interruptions to everyone’s workday and productivity and removes artificial urgency.

Here’s what async work can look like under your leadership:

• Establish response time guidelines that allow employees to answer in reasonable time frames, i.e., within 24 hours. These guidelines eliminate the expectation that employees should check emails and messages during their off-hours, helping to reduce the burnout related to feeling “always on.”
• Promote consistent, strong communication. Async comms shouldn’t mean communication happens less — in many cases, it can actually look like more. Regularly connect with employees through messaging apps and email. Encourage open conversations by leaving comments wherever possible to add context. Set regular check-in dates for updates or standups to ensure everyone’s aligned on meeting their goals.
• Cut down on unnecessary meetings. Too many meetings can contribute to employee burnout — in a 2021 survey of 800 remote workers, Voodle found that on days where employees had too many scheduled video meetings or face-to-face interactions, 60% said they had less energy and felt less productive. Consider implementing “no meeting days” to designate certain days for focused work without interruptions.
• Institute flexible hours or flex scheduling so that employees can take care of themselves and their families without worrying about being logged in for work at certain times. Fifty-six percent of respondents to a FlexJobs survey said that having flexibility in their workday is the best way their workplace can support them.

Issue company devices to separate work from home

As “work from home” blurs the lines between “work” and “home,” research from NordVPN Teams revealed that the average employee working from home works an average of 2.5 more hours a day than they did when working in person. That shouldn’t be the norm — instead, support a healthy work-life balance for your employees by helping them separate work from their personal devices. Creating and enforcing boundaries for where work should occur (on company devices) and where fun should occur (on personal devices) can help your employees maintain a healthy separation between their work and personal lives.

Issue company devices, e.g., laptops, tablets, and phones, wherever possible. If employees work on personal devices, they could easily be tempted to overwork. Having company-issued equipment can help employees set boundaries for both physically and mentally disconnecting from work.

If company-issued devices aren’t in your budget, you can still help employees simulate that separation between work and home on their own. Show them how to [create separate Chrome profiles for work Google accounts](https://www.techradar.com/how-to/how-to-use-profiles-in-chrome-to-keep-work-and-home-separate#:~:text=Switching between profiles is incredibly,automatically signed into that account.) or to set up different logins on their computer for work. Discourage employees from installing work-related apps or logging into their work email accounts on personal devices.

Protect employees’ off-hours

Your employees’ downtime can’t be restful if they don’t actually rest — don’t allow work to bleed into off-hours by limiting it to specific work hours. As an employer, this means establishing workplace etiquette and expectations that everyone should respect being “offline” as being off-limits for communications. Consider the following ideas:

• Encourage employees to set working hours on Google Calendar and Slack, keep their calendars updated, and check others’ calendars and statuses before sending messages or emails.
• Managers should lead by example to respect their employees’ boundaries, as employees may feel an undue burden to respond immediately to managers.
• Establish a standard that employees turn their notifications off when on lunches and breaks and when they log off for the day, so that their rest time is uninterrupted.

However you decide to model your company etiquette, add it to your training modules and internal company docs so that everyone is aware of the expectations and uses them to guide their interactions with others.