Prevention of professional burnout of employees

Very often there are people who have been working at the enterprise for several years, occupying high positions, but at one moment have lost all interest in their work. This leads, as a rule, to their dismissal of their own free will. This problem can be called professional burnout of employees, the cause of which is prolonged stress.

Identification of professional burnout of employees

Stress can be work (arising due to working conditions or place of work), professional (formed due to the specifics of the activity) or organizational (related to the characteristics of the enterprise where the employee works). HR-specialists should deal with the identification and elimination of professional burnout of employees.

In well-coordinated teams in such situations, they know exactly what to do. The HR specialist must find out the reason for what is happening. Why a recently cheerful, successful person became gloomy, passive and mediocre. Conducted conversations with such an employee and even with the rest of the team often cannot shed light on the current situation. Then the HR manager may resort to other methods, such as testing.

Cottle circle test

For example, to a projective test, which includes a drawing of three circles expressing the idea of ​​time. One circle should designate the past, the second – the future, and the third – the present. At the same time, they can be of different sizes, connected in various ways with each other, thereby expressing the relationship between times. This composition should be drawn by the person taking the test to identify problems and their subsequent elimination.

This testing allows a person to relax and show, with the help of an illustration, in what period of time a traumatic situation occurred.

First option

If in the figure the “past” and “present” are closely connected, and the “future” is removed and has a small size compared to the first, this means that the employee does not understand where to move on in his work activity. As a rule, these results are found in employees who have achieved their goals, which they have been striving for for a very long time.

Second option

The second variant of the test result: the “past” is torn off from the “present” and “future”, which means the isolation of the first, the desire to completely erase this stage from one's memory. So, the traumatic situation happened precisely in the “past”.

Third option

The third option, when the “present” is torn off from the “future” and “past”, means that a person has lost the meaning of the current state. Perhaps he has a desire to change something in the present and thinks about the meaning of the past.

Fourth option

There are also images in which none of the times is tied to each other, which indicates a lack of desire to be tied to anything. Such an employee has a high degree of anxiety, as he is afraid of disappointment as a result of this attachment.

Fifth option

Very rare in the case of professional burnout of employees is the option in which the figure shows all three times of equal size, interconnected. Such a result speaks of a harmoniously developed person who has no problems with the idea of ​​himself and the events taking place with him.

Assessment of the significance of events

After the period of time in which the traumatic situation occurred is determined, it is necessary to find out its internal content. This can be done using the next stage of testing, in which the employee must highlight the most important moments of his life and determine them by time (indicating the date) and by strength of significance (rating them on a scale from +5 to +1 – positive and from -5 to -1 – negative).

If an employee highlights the bright events of his life in the past and present, estimating them with high marks, but does not accurately designate a single event in the future, then this indicates that the person does not see any prospects and does not strive for anything.

Events can be different:

• achievements in labor activity;
• realization of oneself as a person;
• family joys.

In such situations, the manager of the personnel department needs to restore the lost reference points of the employee. For example, by transferring him to another department, where all the duties will become something new and interesting.

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Prevention of professional burnout of employees

In addition to changing the workplace, when eliminating and preventing professional burnout of employees, unscheduled vacations, advanced training through additional training, and a change of scenery (for example, a trip on a business trip) can help.

The main task of an HR specialist in this case is to restore the good spirits, good mood and desire of the employee to work. It is also worth remembering that, like any other problem, employee burnout is easier to prevent than to deal with. Therefore, of course, each enterprise should take appropriate preventive measures.