Startup employee retention: Help your employees feel less overwhelmed

As an expansion stage company you need to get the most out of your employees in order to succeed, but are your management teams rewarding employees for overworking?

According to a study by the New York-based Families and Work Institute, overworked employees are more likely to exhibit anxiety, make mistakes on the job, harbor angry feelings toward their employers for expecting them to be on the job for long hours, and resent co-workers who don’t pull what they think is their share of the load.

The study also found that nearly half of employees who feel overworked also reported they were in poor health, and nearly one-quarter (21 percent) of those overworked experience symptoms of clinical depression, compared to 8 percent of those who are not overworked. I came across a great article on HR Executives Online which outlines tips on how managers can help their employees feel less overworked, and at the same time see them finish their tasks in a given day. Part of your startup employee retention strategy should involve making sure your employees are not overworked.

In order to help your employees feel less overwhelmed on the job:

1. Offer training for time-management principles. Everyone can use a refresher in time management skills!
2. Insist employees use their vacation time. Ending the year without using a vacation day, or only taking a few, is not something to reward. Taking time off from work will enable your employees to come to work refreshed.
3. Permit flexible work hours when appropriate.
4. Discourage the practice of eating at desks and working through lunch.
5. Encourage non-interrupt zones during the day so your employees can better focus on their tasks.
6. Help your employees become more effective.

In order to be efficient, you must first be effective.

In order to encourage efficiency and effectiveness, managers can:

1. Implement clearly stated goals with built-in deadlines.
2. Insist employees make a daily “to do” list.
3. Make certain employees alert them or IT if their equipment is not working properly.
4. Supply the necessary materials for job completion.
5. Train employees on software packages that enable more efficient work.

For more information on how to more effectively manage your teams for high efficiency, check out the Scrum Alliance and the Lean Enterprise Institute.

Also, for more great ideas targeted at senior managers of expansion stage technology companies, please sign up, if you haven’t already, for our weekly newsletter “Viewing Value“