It’s no secret that as we push towards our career goals, some of us spend far too much time focused on our work and not enough time focused on ourselves.

Millenials and job burnout

Alarmingly, in the last few decades, work related stress has become so insidious that without help, can lead to serious illness and even death. This is especially true for those who are in the beginning of their careers, trying to make a name for themselves and prove to their superiors that they are worth this promotion or that corner office.

What are the symptoms and effects of stress and burnout?

Among the many symptoms of burnout, the most prevalent and subtle are the ones we deal with every day and associate with regular work-related stress. According to Psychology Today, the telltale symptoms of burnout syndrome are:

• Chronic fatigue: constantly feeling like you have no energy.
• Insomnia: not being able to fall asleep, or waking up many times in the night, no matter how tired you are.
• Forgetfulness and inability to concentrate: A general sense of not being able to focus and forgetting tasks.
• Physical symptoms and increased illness: anything from chest pains to digestive issues, and since your body and mind are so tired, you find yourself catching colds more often and staying sick longer.
• Psychological symptoms: these generally begin with anxiety and turn into increased depressive tendencies, irritability, and full on anger.

What causes stress?

Let us back track for a moment to the most common causes of job burnout and stress, some of which many of us deal with on a daily basis without even thinking twice about it. According to a Gallup study, the 5 main causes for burnout syndrome are as follows:

1. Being treated unfairly: due to bias, favoritism, and mistrust, among other reasons.
2. Unmanageable workloads: high performance work calls for impossible workloads.
3. Unclear role descriptions: not knowing exactly what is expected from an employee.
4. Lack of managerial communication and support: many people feel like they are not being properly informed and/or supported by their managers.
5. Unrealistic deadlines: impossible workloads with even more impossible turnaround times.

How to reduce stress at work?

There are many ways to relieve stress in modern workplace. One CNBC report offers suggestions of managing stress at work by learning your strengths, understanding your weaknesses, communicating and making sure you have group of supportive colleagues to go to for help when needed, and finding the right managerial support. As you can see, already easy options are great to help us dealing with stress.

Many articles on stress management strategies floating around these days tend to focus on these things to reduce work stress, as well as incorporating relaxation techniques like regular exercise and mindfulness to your daily routine. But, we thought we would take a slightly different approach.

In this series, focused on health and stress management, we’ve delved into the ways in which we have found e-mail and business travel to be significant factors in the tipping point from good stress to burnout leading to sick leave.

Join us in the comings weeks as we look further into how email and business travel truly affect us as workers in the modern era, and how you and/or your company can make use of our telephonic services to help lessen those burdens.

It’s no secret that since the dawn of the American Dream, everyone and their neighbor has been looking for a way to make millions and live a lavish life. Celebrities, people who are born into money, and Silicon Valley moguls who had the right idea at the right time make it all look so easy. There is an ever-growing dialogue of “if you just work hard enough, you can make your dreams come true”.

Stress and Burnout in a Workaholic Society

Don’t get it twisted, of course hard work could lead you to fortune but many people forget to live in the meantime. There are just over 11 million millionaires in the United States. Research shows that people are most likely to become millionaires when nearing retirement, around the age of 59, after having spent their working years saving and investing. But bear in mind that these are people who are earning upwards of $250,000 per year!

For those of us who earn less, often much less, than that, dreams of becoming a millionaire can be very far away. So we often use this line of thinking to justify working 18 hour days to Get Rich. But life isn’t “when we are rich”, it’s right here and right now. And what do we end up with? Stress! Lots and lots of stress!

En route to Burnout City

It’s not uncommon to experience stress at work, and is often caused by workload. With big projects, deadlines, dealing with difficult clients or colleagues, this isn’t necessarily ground-breaking information. But there is a fine line between a normal and unhealthy amount of stress. A study done at Harvard found that time and productivity lost at work due to stress costs American businesses somewhere around $30 billion per year. In Europe, it was even found that stress leads to a loss of 27 productive work days per employee, per year. That’s one whole month lost per person, per year, due to stress!

Those of us who have that big, rich American dream in our sights tend to put in long hours and extra effort, but we’re never sure if it’s enough. We’re often left to our own devices with no praise or compensation for those extra things in the short term. It’s in those situations where we can be at risk for going from stress to burn out.

Left ignored, excessive stress can lead to demotivation, constantly thinking about work, irritability, difficulty making decisions, and (lack of) sleep issues. Moreover, it can cause headaches, nausea, and even weaken our immune systems, leaving us to get sick with colds, flus, etc. more often.

Even more, putting in extra hours and effort doesn’t always lead to job security and guess what? Job insecurity is another major stressor! This type of stress leads to higher rates of illnesses, including diabetes, chronic migraines, hypertension, etc., and up to two weeks taken off of work due to these issues.

Experts on the subject tend to suggest lifestyle changes, such as adding exercise and meditation to your daily routine. But when you’re already feeling bogged down by work, making these kinds of changes as your first step to relieve stress can seem overwhelming.

How can we help?

What if we all took that little step back to telephony? Imagine working from home with a phone number connected to your company’s virtual PBX, so you can be reached just as though you were sitting in the office, without the stress of always having to be there. Contact us for more information about virtual phone numbers worldwide.

E-mails, e-mails, e-mails!

It’s no secret that many of us end up answering emails hours before we arrive at the office, and hours after we leave. This is detrimental to our health as it heightens anxiety and takes time away from our friends and family.

One way to start the process of alleviating stress in your daily life is to look at your emailing habits. How much time do you really lose on emails? The average employee sends and receives more than 120 emails per day. One study shows that people spend up to 12 hours per week in the office and another 5 hours at home reading and responding to emails .

Of course, e-mail communication has its benefits. But how much easier would your day to day life be if you weren’t constantly refreshing your inbox to reply to Janet in Operations, or writing, rewriting, and editing emails to your boss?

But think about all of the actual work you could get done in that amount of time! More research shows that spending less time in your inbox and replies will lead to less stress. Which is probably why some companies have even banned after hours e-mailing due to the added stress.

Leave Work at Work

It seems like such a no-brainer, leave work at the office, including your e-mails! So many of us have our work e-mails set up to our smartphones, we don’t think twice about it – neither about the time wasted, or the implicated security risks. Accessing work data on unsecure WiFi at a café, or not properly secured WiFi at home, even, can lead to small (or even large) data breaches. But how often do we think about these things when work email on our smartphones just seems natural?

Imagine not being available 24 hours a day via email. But what if we deleted our work e-mail setup on our smartphones and gave ourselves the challenge of only checking e-mails when we are at our computers. This isn’t to say not to check your e-mails at all, sometimes it’s necessary when you have a looming deadline or leading up to important pitch meetings. What if you gave yourself only one hour at home to look at afterhours emails, and other than that you stayed offline? Even more radically, what if one day per week you set an out-of-office email, letting people know you are only available via phone at a few specific times during the day.

Moving from constant and consistent written communication back to the basics of telephony has the potential to change not only your outlook on your work life, but reintegrate some person-to-person connection that gets lost in the digital world.

But What If It’s Important?

You might argue that getting that email from your manager or team lead every morning is important for planning your days. But there are other ways to do this.

Our founder and CEO Hans Lasonder remembers a simpler time, before e-mails started taking over business communication. “Years before I started this company, I worked for a number of multinationals. I distinctly remember that in one of these positions, we had Monday morning call-ins. Monday mornings at 7 am, we were invited to dial into the weekly report with our regional director. In these morning sessions, the director would summarise the last week’s agenda and set us up for the week ahead. This made Monday morning commutes that much better for many of us, dialling into those calls made Monday starts at the office that much easier”.

By making concessions to e-mailing like this, we save time and energy that is otherwise lost in written communication. Often people use e-mails to avoid confrontation and making decisions. Think about how many times you’ve received an e-mail where you didn’t quite understand what the person was communicating. Then, instead of picking up the phone to clarify the issue, playing e-mail tag all day trying to figure it out.

Need an easy fix? Instead of long e-mail chains, what if you took your business back to basics and implemented that weekly conference call Hans reminisced about to make sure everyone is on the same page and can spend their weeks doing meaningful and productive work, instead of chasing down emails.

We can help you with that. Get in touch for a quote for local (conference call-in) numbers for your employees near and far!

We’ve all experienced the technical difficulties when trying to put together a video conference call with more than one other party. So instead, we jump straight to face-to-face meetings to avoid the drama of it all! Unfortunately, Star Trek’s teleportation devices and George Jetson’s flying car don’t exist (yet!) so making cross-country or cross-continent meetings can be a hassle.

Instead, we’ve moved to doing almost everything through email. But we all know the struggles of having important conversations through email chains. Reply? Reply All? Who should I CC:? Or should I use BCC:?

With the almost invasive presence of email in the business sphere, we tend to forget that, sometimes, the better (perhaps even best) option is to have a good, old fashioned conference call.

Closing (international) spaces

Globalization means that many of us have colleagues and/or clients in different cities, and some on different continents. While it is occasionally possible to get together for business meetings with the right amount of notice, it’s not always the case.

Think about emergencies which need to be dealt with ASAP – sometimes quicker than the time it takes to fly from one end of the country to the other, let alone overseas!

Our geo- and toll-free numbers can help you make fast meetings happens. Using our numbers to make conference calls will take the stress away from cross-country and cross-continental emergencies.

Fussing over language barriers

Some issues that can come about when having contact with colleagues and/or clients in different countries are based on language. In an email with someone who doesn’t share your native language, certain turns of phrases can be miscommunicated and taken the wrong way. This can result in emails coming off as rude or condescending when they are not meant to be. Bringing the humanity back to business conversation through real-time conversation helps to eliminate this barrier. It also gives all parties the opportunity to ask questions and clarify anything that may feel unclear.

There are even technologies that are becoming more and more readily available for the real-time translation of conversations! This means that all parties in international meetings could come to the tele-meeting and speak in their own language.

Setting up local numbers for your international colleagues and clients will help you make better use of teleconferencing since everyone can come to the meeting without worrying about hiring translators, for example.

Costs of Business Travel

One unbelievable cost of travel is the damage done to the planet regularly. In case you missed our Series on Sustainability, we went into detail about how it takes the work of 600 adult trees for a whole to offset the carbon emissions from one cross-country flight from New York to LA. Multiply that by the 41 flights that happen per day between these destinations.

Obviously, travel also comes with a number of financial costs Think about all of the expenses put into business travel: flights, meals, hotels. The costs saved avoiding small, unnecessary trips can be monumental for small to medium sized businesses.

While it doesn’t happen too often, any number of issues – from bad weather to mechanical issues, sometimes even a pilot being unfit to fly – can cause an airline to cancel a flight.

Likewise, it’s important to think about the physical costs of travel on those who are going back and forth for meetings. Just look at the results found in a study about people who travel often for work: Extensive business travel can lead to obesity, alcohol dependence, and depression, among other health issues.

It is obvious that going back to the basics of simply using our voices and talking to each other over the phone, rather than having to deal with everything that could go wrong through text or in transit, is a serious option for many small to medium sized businesses.

We can help you with that. Contact us for a quote for local numbers for your employees near and far!