The disruption of normal work routines has increased employee stress levels, says FlowState80 COO Jared Whitaker.
Worrying new research shows that employee burnout is on the rise, with 73 percent of professionals being reported as burnt out. This is largely due to job security concerns, coupled with unmanageable workloads and no separation between work and life.
A survey from global employee engagement platform Glint found that at the end of 2020: “Employees are both mentally and emotionally exhausted, and they’ll be finishing the calendar year with very little left to give.” And very little has changed since then.
The remote work environment and the disruption of normal work routines has increased the stress levels of employees. More importantly, having to manage day-to-day issues while working from home – and not focusing entirely on the work – could be a major challenge.
Working from home used to be a company policy that represented flexibility, but now professionals are being forced to work from home without any flexibility. This is certainly affecting their mental health as well as their productivity.
Mental health
Employers need to better support their workers because poor mental health has a significant effect on performance, productivity and communication. It is also becoming a concern as more employees are forced to remain isolated away from loved ones and support systems.
Burnout has enormous effects on productivity, not only on the quantity of output but also on the quality of the work produced. Managers need to figure out how to lead their teams through this transformation and focus on performance outcomes while also supporting employee engagement and wellbeing.
While burnout and employee engagement often go hand in hand, employees can overcome external challenges and still be productive when management learns how to engage them. Good managers can significantly improve their team’s performance, boost team engagement and prevent burnout.
Inefficiencies
Ineffective project management systems are by far one of the biggest reasons for increased stress and low productivity with only 40 to 50 percent of tasks being completed on time. These could include actions from meetings, project activities or team activities.
Typically, nobody really knows the status or who is part of the project or what it’s about, the risks and challenges. With no formal system for project tracking and management, it is nearly impossible to find information on a project.
To get any sort of view normally requires a huge manual effort, calling to get updates and the consolidation of multiple information sources in different formats, which invariably leads to inaccuracies.
Project management often lacks alignment with the company’s requirements to achieve its goals. The crucial hurdles that normally require attention include a single source for all project and program information in a standard format.
Solution
Businesses need a solution that will enable a single, consolidated and real-time view of programs and the delivery status on all their sub-projects with standardised reporting. Additionally, these solutions need to empower project managers.
They ultimately require a single, easy-to-use solution for updating project status, managing tasks and timelines, controlling risks and issues, tracking financials and benefits, and running projects and meetings. The solution also needs to alleviate the administrative burden that project managers experience like manually generating the monthly stakeholder reports.
It will change the way they work as a team, they will be able to see what projects or enhancements they are assigned, and they will get a better view of what they are working on at any time. By linking projects, meetings and execution boards, business stakeholders and product owners have a single place for reviewing where projects and their delivery is at any point in time.
Accessible from anywhere, these solutions provide team leaders with a single portal for project management, from status and resourcing to budgets and schedules. Project progress can be visualised in real-time, changing the future of the way in which teams have traditionally worked. It’s now totally flexible, adaptable and also offers standardised, real-time reporting.
Real-time, dynamic dashboards give stakeholders just what they need, when and how they need it. Standardised reporting layouts mean that all projects are reported on in the same way making it much easier for stakeholders to compare apples with apples. Customisable templates make different reporting views easy to generate, saving project managers hours of manual effort.
All project meetings are now run on one system. The online agendas give meetings structure, ensuring everyone is better prepared. Actions are assigned, decisions are made and everyone can clearly see their responsibilities. This results in an increase in accountability and responsibility to the team as it’s no longer the project manager who is solely responsible for managing updates.
By the time members leave the meeting, minutes are saved and sent to people's inboxes which means no one needs to take time out of their diary to document minutes. Customisable boards give teams a flexible and visual solution for managing team execution.
Team members can manage their tasks, actions and decisions from anywhere, at any time, providing their feedback and updates in real-time so there is complete transparency on progress and accountability on delivery.
