The Impact of Overworking Employees: How to Avoid It

Workplace stress and unhappiness can profoundly affect your business. Many business owners care deeply about our businesses, but sometimes caring too much means you may have very high standards of excellence. And you may tend to compound the demands during periods of high growth. Overworking was found to be the largest risk factor for occupational disease, equating to roughly 1/3rd of work-related diseases. This is due to the fact that working long hours can cause chronic stress. People who are overworking may not have enough time for crucial activities such as sleeping, exercising, and eating healthily.

Employees who experience burnout are more likely to leave their business, and the business then must expend resources to find new recruits and train them. Let’s go through all the impacts of overworking employees and how to avoid it.

Impacts of Overworking Employees

Reduced focus

If your team members can’t focus on their job, their work will suffer, impacting your business productivity overall. Overly long days in the office can affect client relationships, meaning work has to be redone, which eats into profit margins, or you end up losing valuable work altogether.

Physical health

According to research from the World Health Organization (WHO), people working 55 or more hours each week face an estimated 35% higher risk of a stroke and a 17% higher risk of dying from heart disease. This is compared to those who work a more typical 35 to 40 hours per week. The highest health concerns from overwork were noted amongst middle-aged men.

Decreased work performance

Poor productivity is bad for business. Overtired and overworked employees simply won’t perform to their usual standards. Therefore, top-performing staff can plummet due to regular overtime and burnout, handing off low-quality work to clients and other team members. 

Increased Turnover

Employees may not be fully aware of why they’re feeling unhappy at work, but they are sure to start looking for a new job. Many businesses are currently offering more flexible hours and appealing work cultures to attract new talent. The chances of losing staff are higher than ever when they’re overworked. An ‘overwork culture’ is not only counterproductive, but it could also be costly. Turnover is expensive regardless of the type of position an employee holds.

Avoid Overworking Employees

Set Realistic Expectations

Without realizing it, employers sometimes don’t ensure employees understand our expectations for the project before sending them off to complete a task. Due to misinformation, employees will fail to do what’s expected of them and then may have to do extra work to make up for it as the result. This is one of the ways managers sometimes unknowingly overwork their employees. Before sending your employees to work on a project, ensure that your employees fully understand what’s needed of them.

Encourage a Healthy Work-Life Balance

An unhealthy work-life balance can significantly affect the overall well-being of your employees. In a study by Statista, 72% of respondents consider work-life balance as a crucial job selection factor.

Build a Care Culture

If your employees can’t take care of themselves, they won’t be able to contribute properly to your business. Building and promoting a self-care mindset in your employees improves the way they handle day-to-day business. When your employees take good care of themselves, they’ll be able to focus while working. This way, they can do more with less and without needing to stress or overwork.

You can also promote a caring culture by assessing and rewarding workers who take good care of themselves. Encourage workers to choose the quality of work over the quantity. Finally, its also important to always be willing to give breaks to employees deserving of one. An indicator that you’re overworking your employees is when they can’t seem to balance their work and personal life. Encourage your employees to take breaks and relax.

Adopting New Software

Best-of-breed employee scheduling software will help you to track your time and attendance and give you that balanced schedule your workforce needs. Many businesses fall victim to poor scheduling, which can ultimately lead to employees being overworked.  

Integrating employee scheduling software will allow a business to operate by using parameters to control how their employees can be scheduled. Our Schedule Xpress platform gives you the opportunity to define the hours an employee is permitted to work by: 

• Restricting the amount of hours employees can work per week. 
• Giving the opportunity to add qualifications per employee/site/service so that no one is left out of their depth.  
• Allows employees to input when they’re available and healthy enough to work. 
• Reduce any human error that may result in overscheduling.  

Many managers are grateful for the benefits that employee scheduling software provides. And as an indispensable tracking tool, it gives you the clarity you need to create a schedule that is fair and suits everybody.  

So, if you’d like to find out how Celayix can ease your overscheduling and overworking worries, get in touch today!