Automation How Automation Can Help You Add Simplicity and Reduce Employee Burnout Jeff Hayward May 31, 2021 7 mins read Blog How Automation Can Help You Add Simplicity and Reduce Employee Burnout Traditionally, most workplaces operated during set office hours—often 9 am to 5 pm. But throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, employees are picking up the phone to call customers, answering emails, and solving issues well outside of these traditional time slots. In fact, it’s been estimated that employees working from home during the pandemic in the United Kingdom, Austria, Canada, and the U.S. are working an average of 2.5 hours longer each workday. There are also many situations of increased workload with limited staff resources, meaning your team is trying to accomplish more work with less support. As a result of these situations, employee burnout is occurring at increasing rates. Automated Wrkflows can help reduce burnout by providing simplicity in several areas such as supply chain tracking, list management, proposal development, quality assurance, and much more to seamlessly complement staff efforts. Wrk’s unique automation platform in particular is designed to operate alongside your team effortlessly, with minimal time to launch and a maximum boost in productivity and employee morale. Read on to learn more about how you can protect your business from employee burnout with the help of automation. The Warning Signs of Employee Burnout All employees have days when they are tired from a long day of work. However, burnout is different and there are distinct signs that business leaders need to be aware of. For example, an employee that is burnt out will likely be more irritable and fatigued, and will become frustrated more easily with routine tasks. Other signs might be that employees may not be contributing as many ideas or not communicating with others as they were before, or that their quality of work or output may drop off dramatically. They may even drop the ball on important deadlines or start calling in sick more often. If your team is working remotely, which is the case with about 32% of Canadians and 44% of Americans, it may be even more difficult to tell if they are burning out. However, even those working from home can put up red flags including not being available for video chats, staying silent during meetings, or developing a more negative attitude towards their responsibilities. Burnout not only impacts the productivity of your employees but also your bottom line. It can cost your company a lot. In fact, lack of engagement from burnout costs employers 34% of their staff’s annual salaries, leads to higher staff turnover, and has left U.S. companies down as much as $550 billion per year. Employee burnout not only affects your employees, but your business’ bottom line as well. The good news is that automation can help! Okay, so you’ve identified the issue of burnout among your staff. What do you do to fix the problem? Hiring and training new staff to help spread the load is an option, but it is also costly and time-consuming. In fact, a report from the Society for Human Resource Management estimates the cost of a new hire at more than $4,000 and that it takes 42 days on average to fill an opening. Another potential option is to use crowdsourcing platforms like Upwork or Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to outsource on-demand tasks. But this opens the door for low-quality work, loss of business control, potential security risks, and long turnaround times. By contrast, automation, especially Wrk’s hybrid approach, can support your existing processes while also providing a better work/life balance for your employees. Automated Wrkflows As Supports Automation is a word that might make some employees nervous. Some people may assume it means that it will make them less relevant or valuable, but it’s quite the opposite. Another common misconception of automation is that it is limited to certain functions. However, our Wrkflows are designed to operate alongside your staff and simplify daily tasks across a wide range of departments, from Sales to Customer Support and beyond. For example, Sales Data and List Management Wrkflows automate list building, CRM data entry, and lead scoring so that your team can significantly reduce the time they spend crunching numbers and, instead, spend more time converting leads. In addition, client onboarding processes like building proposals, approving contracts, and setting up client accounts can be very repetitive and time-consuming for your HR team. Our tailored HR-focused Wrkflows can remove this repetition and give your team time to focus on more important, high-level tasks. Marketing is another important function that can demand a lot of staff resources and time, and you can perform routine tasks such as market research and personalized email marketing campaigns with our easy-to-use Wrkflows. From Exhaustion to Empowerment You likely chose your key staff for their individual talents, not for their ability to do repetitive tasks. However, many of the daily tasks that they’re responsible for are repetitive and could be leading to employee burnout. Automation is a way to introduce simplicity and free up your team so they can really shine. Imagine if your staff had more time, energy and resources to develop better relationships with existing and potential clients—not to mention the scope to bring new ideas to the table. Research by economists at the University of Warwick found that happy employees are 12% more productive. And it’s not just tied to salaries and financial bonuses. The study found that companies investing in employee support boost staff happiness and that happier employees take advantage of that by doing more. In short, automation provides your team with a gift that’s priceless—time. With more time, your staff will feel less pressured to complete routine tasks that can be handled by automation, while having more resources to innovate and positively impact your bottom line. And then there are added bonuses: employees who are more engaged are 87% less likely to seek a job elsewhere. Happier employees pass along their positive attitude to customers and help attract other top talent by spreading the word about the supportive work culture. Ultimately, our platform provides simplicity and allows your team to use time to their advantage. With the support automation provides, your team is less likely to experience burnout because they can log off at a more reasonable time and establish their own version of a healthy work-life balance. Save Your Team From Employee Burnout With Automation Employee burnout is real, especially for parents who have to juggle working from home and helping their children learn online. It’s not only a blight on your employees who become less happy and productive when burnout sets in, but that drop in productivity and engagement can erode your company’s bottom line, not to mention morale. The problem of mundane tasks eating up staff resources can be solved with automation. Whether you’re looking to streamline your sales or marketing processes, track your supply chain with ease, or make quality assurance seamless, Wrk can do it all. Check out our various Wrkflows to learn more about how to add simplicity and free up more of your team’s time to help drive success. 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