82% of Employees Feel Overworked, Are Business Owners Impacted Too?

Competition in the workplace is nothing new. Actually, it is encouraged by most organizations. The fact 93% of employees think they are outworking their peers drives this point home.

According to a four-nation survey by Asana, competition in the workplace is alive and well but so is burnout. Even though competition is good overall, it may also be responsible for driving the high rates of burnout in the workplace.

Small business owners are especially susceptible to burnout because of the long hours they put in. Fifty plus hour work weeks are common, and so are the repercussions.

In the release for the survey, Asana cites the World Health Organization, which says, “Burnout has become so prevalent among modern workers that it’s now classified as an occupational phenomenon.”

The phenomenon is not going away anytime soon as employees now work all hours of the day. This is because digital connectivity makes workers available all the time. Concurrently, the solutions for preventing burnout are also coming from tech companies.

Asana released the result of the survey to coincide with the launch of Workload. According to the company, Workload will prevent burnout by simplifying the fair distribution of work across teams. If it is necessary, it will redistribute it again.

In the press release, Alex Hood, Head of Product at Asana, explained why the company created Workload.

Hood says it will, “Give you a centralized view of your team’s capacity that’s connected to the actual underlying work while factoring in an individual’s unique skills and abilities. With Workload, not only are your most important projects and initiatives completed on time, you never lose sight of your most valuable assets — your team members.”

Small Business Burnout Statistics

By solving the issue of workload between all team members, it is possible to dramatically lower burnout rates. As the survey reveals, workload is a big issue amongst the respondents.

In the survey, 82% of the respondents say they are overworked. And this has resulted in high burnout rates. In the past six months, 80% of tech workers and 74% of marketers say they experienced burnout one or more times.

As the survey points out, this snowballs into other areas of a company, such as employee performance, morale, and employee and customer retention.

In the U.S., 43% of the respondents say staff morale is low because they are overworked. And almost half or 49% have left their company because they felt overwhelmed by the amount of work.

So, it is not surprising the customer experience is also suffering. Almost one in five or 22% say clients are not happy, with 20% of tech workers saying they have lost clients.

The Survey

A total of 6,018 knowledge workers across different industries, job levels, and ages took part in the survey. This includes 2,410 U.S. workers, 2,404 U.K. workers and 1,204 Australia/NZ workers. The survey was conducted in June 2019 by 4media on behalf of Asana.

Image: Depositphotos.com

This article, "82% of Employees Feel Overworked, Are Business Owners Impacted Too?" was first published on Small Business Trends