Kansas Ag Connection - Avoid Employee Burnout, K-State Animal Scientist Recommends

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Avoid Employee Burnout, K-State Animal Scientist Recommends
Kansas Ag Connection - 03/08/2010

Winter in Kansas can mean rest, rejuvenation, and relaxation -- unless you're in agriculture. In that case, winter can mean exhaustion, cold, endless mud and broken equipment.

If livestock owners and managers are exhausted, Kansas State University animal scientist Chris Reinhardt encourages them to consider how their employees feel.

"If work hours have been abnormally taxing to all involved, consider providing your employees some extra time off," said Reinhardt, who is a feedlot specialist with Kansas State University Research and Extension. "This may be especially essential if the hectic schedule of spring planting time will not allow for extra breaks."

Reinhardt suggested that if the workload does not allow for additional time off, livestock owners and managers might consider deferring or outsourcing some jobs.

"On the one hand you can't afford to increase short-term cost outlays by outsourcing equipment repair or maintenance. But burnout, frustration and dissatisfaction are inevitable if we don't actively prepare for and prevent it. And the natural product of that burnout is turnover," he said. "The costly part may be that the turnover could happen when we can least afford to be short-handed: calving time, spring planting, harvest, weaning, the fall run."

He likened workplace burnout to "a huge boulder rolling downhill, gathering steam, directly towards your place of business at the bottom of the hill. The boulder has inertia, which could be defined as its 'unwillingness to change direction' and the 'unwillingness' is increasing. The only way to intervene is to invest energy and resources to stop or turn the boulder away from your workplace."

The longer a manager waits, the more resources he or she will need to turn the boulder, Reinhardt said.

"Your intentionality overcomes inertia. Things will stay on the same course until you decide to actively change their course. Keeping your workplace satisfying and rewarding in order to keep your good people engaged and working hard will require that you are an active participant in determining the course your work environment is headed."