Are You Putting Too Much Pressure on Your Employees?

As an employer, it’s important that you motivate your employees to work hard in order to get the best out of them. However, you should be careful of pushing them too hard. Apply too much pressure and you may start to see negative results as employees become exhausted and demoralized.

There are a few telltale signs that you are likely applying too much pressure on employees. They include:

A high employee turnover
Employees constantly working overtime
Regular outbursts due to stress
Employees taking time off sick due to burnout
A lack of teamwork due to everyone being overworked
Reduced quality of work and increased negative feedback from customers

Once you start to notice these signs, it’s important to address the issue and find ways of reducing pressure – doing so could be important for the health of your employees and the overall health of your business. Below are just a few ways to do this.

Determine when to hire more staff

If all of your staff are struggling to keep up with the workload, it may be a sign that you need to hire help. An extra employee may be needed to pick up the slack. It could be worth identifying tasks that are taking up a lot of time and creating a role solely dedicated to carrying out this task such as answering the phone in an office or handling pot wash in a restaurant.

Know when to delegate and when to outsource

Some tasks may be better off outsourced rather than delegating them to staff. For example, instead of asking employees to handle IT issues, it could make more sense to outsource a managed services provider. What is a managed services provider? This is a company that can handle all of your IT needs such as solving problems and maintaining infrastructure. It’s often cheaper and more efficient to outsource tasks like this.

Work with your team to solve problems

Employees may become resentful if they feel they are being left to deal with problems alone. While it’s important that employees are able to do some of their own problem-solving, you shouldn’t let them fend for themselves when disaster strikes. Make an effort to help solve problems if you can see that employees are struggling. It’s in your best interest to not just help them but help your business, plus you will be able to more easily solve problems through collaboration.

Regularly check in with your employees

While some employees are likely to be vocal about their struggles, others may silently get on with it and let the problem build-up. This is why it’s so important to check in with each of your employees to make sure that they are coping well. While you may be able to use software to monitor an employee’s progress, it’s also worth scheduling one-on-one meetings to see if employees’ have any concerns. Encourage employees to be candid about their issues by showing that you want to help and that you are not interested in punishing employees for poor performance.

Provide regular positive feedback

Rewarding employees is the best way to motivate them to work hard. The simplest way to reward employees is to regularly offer positive feedback. You should try to offer positive feedback to each employee every day if you can. This will make your employees feel valued and will spur them to keep working hard to please you – fail to offer regular praise and employees may not see the point of working hard.