The human service industry regularly encounters high levels of staff turnover, with some providers reporting turnover rates over 70% for direct care staff. When surveyed, HR leaders stated that burnout may account for more than fifty percent of workplace turnover each year.
Considered a workplace crisis, burnout may undermine the quality of care provided to the individuals served and lead to staff turnover which may result in the reallocation of resources away from the individuals served for recruitment and training purposes. As one state reported, constant recruitment and training can cause financial strain upwards of $24 million, annually. Organizations experiencing high rates of burnout may overload work responsibilities for current employees resulting in their subsequent burnout, creating a feedback loop that prevents the organization from fulfilling their overall mission.
Burnout-related turnover is a complex, systemic problem that is highly disruptive to organizational functioning. Preventing and managing burnout may contribute to an organization’s success and efficacy.
QBS is committed to providing our customers with quality behavioral solutions to complex behavioral challenges such as staff burnout. We think of burnout as a symptom of ill-equipped workplace environments and turnover as a result that prevents organizations from carrying out their mission. This is one of the reasons we train our Safety-Care™ Trainers to build resilience-related skills in their staff as they teach our competency-based curriculum. Additionally, we now offer Performance Management Competencies™ (PMC’s). This is a unique self-paced training course to improve new and front-line management performance which can function as a proactive measure for preventing burnout in direct-care staff.
In our series titled: Organizational Resilience, we have developed blog posts related to understanding burnout, identifying reinforcers, and creating a positive workplace culture in the context of the human services workplace environment. The purpose of these posts is to help organizational leaders consider various aspects of the environment that may be contributing to burnout. While there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to handling burnout, there may be some helpful advice and perspectives that can guide organizations on how to view burnout.