How To Gauge Remote Worker Burnout Via Digital Experience Monitoring

3 key steps

While advancements over the past decade in mobile and digital technology rendered the boundary between office life and home life increasingly tenuous, it's safe to say that the rapid shift to remote working because of the pandemic has made the difference moot. But despite the growing chorus of voices from both employers and employees extolling the virtues of working from home, many companies are now worried about employee burnout. And with good reason.
 

When it comes to remote working and employee burnout, the statistics tell the story. Absent external validation cues and the conventional norms of office culture, many employees feel the need to be available on-demand, working longer hours than ever before as a result. Not surprisingly, over two-thirds of employees report experiencing symptoms of burnout while working from home over the past year. As one employee recently described it, "It used to be that working remotely was a perk. These days it's about survival."

But while the shift to remote work has made employees more susceptible to burnout, it has also made it more difficult for employers to measure and mitigate the problem. How can employers recognize potential employee burnout and identify which employees are at risk, when they are not physically present to recognize the signs?

Responding to Burnout: The Organizational Challenge

Employee burnout is anything but homogenous. It can manifest in various ways, including anxiety, exhaustion, stress, fatigue, feelings of being overwhelmed and weariness that can lead to lagging productivity, unnecessary overtime, increased irritability and an inability to meet deadlines. The signs and impact of burnout are also unique to the individual employee, but the risk that burnout poses for organizations makes it anything but an individual problem. In fact, according to the American Psychological Association (APA), companies without systems to support the well-being of their employees have higher turnover, lower productivity, and face the burden of higher healthcare costs.

Given the organizational threat that burnout poses, it's clear that the responsibility for identifying and responding to burnout lies with management. And yet, even under the best of circumstances, adequately responding to burnout may prove difficult. Without a clear, data-driven strategy, the systems and practices management put in place to handle burnout may prove insufficient, ultimately relying too heavily on a set of ever-shifting, subjective criteria.

Using Experience Monitoring Data to Proactively Address Burnout

Remote work has raised the stakes for employee burnout. Outside of the physical office setting, managers lose the proximity to employees that makes it easier to spot the physical signs of burnout, along with the visibility that IT teams can glean from corporate networks, company-owned devices, and on-premise applications. As a result, more companies are turning to digital experience monitoring (DEM) tools to analyze data from remote worker networks, applications and devices to gain critical insights into employee behavior and sentiment.

The following three steps outline how digital experience monitoring can play an integral role in helping managers identify and respond to burnout in an age of remote work.

1. Feedback Loops
Feedback loops provide a critical outlet for employees and managers to communicate directly, share recommendations and express concerns. While companies concerned about burnout should periodically survey employees to measure their satisfaction with remote work, experience monitoring can enhance these efforts by providing objective verification of worker habits. In a world, where an endless stream of emails and video conferences have supplanted face-to-face interaction, digital experience monitoring gives managers the data they need to  corroborate employee feedback loops, adding a layer of transparency to an otherwise opaque process.

2. Application Usage
From Microsoft Outlook to Teams, every company has critical applications that employees use daily. Notably, these applications can do more than bolster collaboration. They can guide productivity measurement. Using digital experience monitoring technology, companies can analyze usage and engagement in aggregate to determine appropriate baselines for time spent on specific tasks. Armed with a shared set of data-driven criteria, managers can use these baselines as a threshold to help identify employees who may be struggling instead of relying on subjective experience or anecdotal evidence.

3. Policy Controls
With 65% of remote workers admitting to working longer hours than ever before, it's clear that many employees are struggling to find a sustainable balance when it comes to maintaining their workload. In response, digital experience monitoring allows managers to translate application usage data into a set of standardized policy controls that automatically flag when employees regularly work overtime or access business-critical applications during off-hours. In this regard, universal policy controls help shift responsibility from the individual to the organizational level, helping encourage proactive and early intervention from managers while relieving workers of the insecurity that they are not doing enough.

Digital Experience Monitoring: Responsiveness through Visibility

With workers set to remain remote for the foreseeable future, it's becoming increasingly clear that working from home is now a core part of our new normal. For employers, responding to employee burnout before it impacts the customer experience or broader company culture is more crucial than ever before. Ultimately, however, responding to burnout requires visibility into the employee experience. Specifically, the visibility that digital experience monitoring provides - allowing companies to enhance the benefits a distributed workforce offers while minimizing the potential downside risks. 

Erik Helms is the SVP of International Sales at NetMotion. He has led the international growth and expansion efforts at NetMotion since 2016. Erik has over 20 years of enterprise B2B sales, leadership and software industry experience. Visit www.netmotionsoftware.com Connect  Erik Helms Follow @NetMotion