Are your workers feeling overwhelmed?

Workers are burning at both ends, according to two recent surveys. In Australia, 76% are dissatisfied with some aspect of work, be it unreasonable expectations leading to burnout (37%), slow responses to resolving issues or risks (36%) or pressure to cut corners (33%), according to research by workplace operations firm SafetyCulture.

Professionals in Australia are living through a confidence crisis, according to research by LinkedIn, with 67% saying they are overwhelmed by the pace of change and 63% searching for more guidance and support than ever before.

Understanding the connection between dissatisfaction and productivity, along with how to effectively measure employee engagement, are important considerations for HR, according to an Australian academic.

Linking engagement to productivity

A disgruntled employee who may be feeling overwhelmed or stressed won’t necessarily be unproductive. On the other hand, there is a positive relationship between job satisfaction and productivity, said Joseph Carpini, a senior lecturer at the University of Western Australia Business School.

“Satisfied employees tend to perform better; and when you are productive, you feel good about your work, right? It works both ways.”

The relationship between affect and performance is not linear, Carpini said, but shaped like an upside-down U, with an optimal performance somewhere between misery and elation.

“The same thing is true for negative affect,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that just because you experience negative emotions, that all of a sudden you’re a poor performer.”

Using employee engagement surveys effectively

“There’s nothing as detrimental as an employee engagement survey asking, ‘Please tell us what’s going on in the workplace and how your experience is.’ Then you go and do it, and … you get a whole lot of crickets [or awkward silence],” said Carpini.

“If your response is cool, then that creates a cycle of distrust.”

Workers who have revealed their feelings in surveys past – and been let down – won’t bother completing them again, he said. Knowing this, some organisations have found other ways to measure employee engagement or distress levels.

Micro well-being surveys can be as short as two or three questions and pop up on a regular schedule or randomly.

“They are kind of micro-interventions, to get very dynamic assessments of what’s going on and how are people feeling,” Carpini said.

Also an option are spontaneous team meetings like the ones that blossomed during of the pandemic.

“It can be [a video call] or in-person or whatever, just to see how everyone’s going – that’s a pretty good indicator,” he said.

AI-power analytics of worker sentiment

Deeper assessment can run in the background, where AI-powered analytics capture worker sentiment based on language used in Microsoft apps, Teams chats and the content of emails.

“It’s essentially capturing the affective tone people are taking when communicating with each other,” he said.

“It’s something we’ve known you can do from a research perspective, but the scale to which it’s being used now is much larger. Every message you send on Teams, every email you send from your work account, that’s proprietarily the organisation’s,” he said.

“Of course, there are questions around privacy, around ethics and around how reliable that information is.”

Networks, social environment for support

Workers (and their managers) should also know that they contribute to their organisations in more ways than they may realise, Carpini said.

That can include “being a good person, making suggestions, being innovative, helping other people at work – those are important things that we know help lubricate the social environment,” he said. “Imagine if none of your colleagues ever wanted to help you do anything.”

If workers are feeling overwhelmed, and looking for more support, it might be more a reflection of their perceived capacity to absorb more.

“That speaks to the importance of creating professional development opportunities for people, having those networks, with opportunities for people to develop their skills, or be part of a network of people who are also interested in developing skills in that space,” he said.