Corporate burnout is work-related stress typified by physical, mental or emotional exhaustion. While corporate burnout is not peculiar to a particular time or season and can be felt at any point during the work calendar, End Of Year (EOY) corporate burnout is usually felt towards the end of the year.
At this point, the year is almost over and as an employee work activities requiring major heavy-lifting have slowed down (hopefully) and a mental countdown to close of office has begun. It is easy to become frustrated with work and feel an intense level of physical and mental fatigue. Morale might be low and efficiency may have significantly reduced. Regardless of how you feel however, it is important to manage this stage of burnout properly so as to end the year well. Considering the fact that EOY is when companies typically make strategic plans for the next quarter, which is the beginning of the next year, putting your best foot forward at this point is beneficial to your company and your performance.
EOY burnout is a common phenomenon in the corporate world and as such this article will shed more light on how to manage your end of year work-related stress.
Tips
- Identify your stressors: Stress materializes in several different ways and it is important as an individual to identify your markers. Understanding the signs can help you identify the cause of your stress. At first, you might not know why you are feeling frustrated at work. However, if you dig deeper, you might find that you have been frustrated all year long because your workload is too much or you have not been trained for the level of work assigned to you, and you are tired of the strain. It might also be that you haven't taken your leave all year and you just need to take a break. Whichever the case is, understanding why you are stressed is the key to identifying your stressors and tackling them.
- Communicate the issue effectively: Once you have identified your stressors, communicating this to your line manager in a clear and effective manner is important. Your manager might not be experiencing the same level of burnout that you are and while they might empathize with you, they might not relate with your experience. For this reason, it is important to clearly articulate the reasons why you feel burnout and collaborate together on ways to fix it.
- Seek respite: A lot of times, corporate burnout can be sorted by taking time off. Stepping back from work or whatever your cause of stress is can be an effective way to reduce the feeling of stress.
- Build healthy coping mechanisms for stress: By now you must have identified your stressors and had a chat with your manager. It is easy to fall back into old habits once the feeling of stress has been alleviated. Resist it. Build systems that will help ensure you do not fall back into your old working habits. It might mean you having to implement small coping habits such as taking a walk when work becomes too much, sleeping early instead of working too late into the night, having a stress ball at your work desk to decompress the tension you feel. Little coping mechanisms like these can help improve your work-place stress overall.
Conclusion: It is very easy to feel EOY corporate burnout especially after a long year of working hard. However, implementing tips shared above can help significantly improve the quality of your life and ensure you close out work activities for the year on a high note