In the last two years, the workplace has changed dramatically. With more companies deploying hybrid and fully remote schedules, employees are starting to work longer hours, face more communication issues and feel less sense of achievement.
As the pandemic continues it’s becoming increasingly clear that remote and hybrid working models are not going anywhere. With this comes an increased responsibility for employers to recognize and directly address key causes of burnout.
According to the American Institute of Stress, the main sources of workplace stress include:
- Workload (46%)
- Co-worker Issues (28%)
- Work-life issues (20%)
- Lack of job security (6%)
While work-life balance can be a common source of stress, employers should recognize the role of workplace contribution to feelings of employee disengagement.
The overwhelming majority of stress stems from a heavy workload. This is good news for employers, as workload can be managed and controlled on a case by case basis. Solutions include hiring additional personnel, re-distributing workloads between teams, and providing automated tools that reduce the amount of time it takes to complete tasks.
Recently the World Health Organization (WHO) recognizes burnout solely as a workplace issue, stating:
“Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.
It is characterized by three dimensions:
- Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion
- Increased mental distance from one’s job
- Feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and reduced professional efficacy
Why should leaders care about employee burnout?
Burnout can be detrimental to your company’s bottom line, which translates into decreased production, low sales, and lower morale. Fortunately SaaS platforms can help prevent this.
Health of employees should always be an employer’s top concern when it comes to burnout. However, there are additional reasons employers should be making burnout prevention a priority.
Not only can burnout cause major health issues for employees, wide-spread burnout within an organization can have major effects on a company’s bottom line. Chances are, if two of your employees are feeling bogged down by stress in your workplace, many more can find themselves in the same situation.
For example, organizations can experience an increase of 50% in voluntary turnover due to burnout. No matter the size of your organization, that’s an expensive rotation of personnel.
In addition, organizations with low employee engagement scores are more likely to experience:
- Lower productivity (18%)
- Lower profitability (16)
- Lower job growth (37%)
- Lower share price over time (65%)
What can leaders do to solve burnout issues?
According to a study by Gallup, leaders should focus on five factors to reduce burnout:
- Unfair treatment at work
- Unmanageable workload
- Lack of role clarity
- Lack of communication and support from manager
- Unreasonable time pressure
In this article, we’ll focus on how SaaS products can solve workload issues, lack of role clarity and lack of communication between team members.
Burnout can be detrimental to your company’s bottom line, which translates into decreased production, low sales, and lower morale. Fortunately SaaS platforms can help prevent this.
SaaS products enable employees to work better without working more, and the result for companies is less employee turnover, better work culture,and increased revenue. This explains why SaaS products are becoming more common for large companies and startups.
Unlike open-source software, SaaS allows users to connect directly to the service provider’s network, without installing or configuring the software.
According to an IWG Global Workforce study, 85% of businesses have experienced greater productivity after allowing their employees to use Saas products that offer flexible working dynamics.
In addition, more than 80% of the participants in the study said they would turn down similar employment offers if it did not offer such benefits.
What is SaaS?
Software as a Service (SaaS) is a cloud computing software model where businesses pay for a subscription rather than installing software on their own server.
The product range of SaaS is wide. However, all SaaS are purpose-built to help improve technology or communication aspects of a workplace, both remotely and in-person offices. Examples of SaaS include Zoom, monday.com and Catsy.
In addition, SaaS products usually include user onboarding and continuous customer support. Updates and bug fixes are normally included in SaaS models, meaning you don’t have to have an IT team on standby for support.
SaaS allows companies to scale easily.
One of the key benefits of SaaS is that it makes it so easy to scale.
By distributing software on a subscription basis, vendors can provide it to the majority of the market.
Compared to open-source software that requires continuous IT support from a third party, SaaS is not only more convenient but more affordable.
SaaS allows users to access unique functions they wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford with a third-party IT team. The range of business services increases overall productivity, hence making it possible to accomplish more and scale fast.
Many organizations are implementing SaaS in order to save money. This is a departure from the traditional standalone software which is costly, difficult to maintain, and may have bugs that make it unstable.
How SaaS can help avoid employee burnout.
Can SaaS help employees avoid burnout? The answer to this question is yes. When working long hours in an office, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and burnt out.
As already discussed, the five pain points leaders should focus on to address burnout are all straightforward. These include unfair treatment at work, unmanageable workload, lack of role clarity, lack of communication and support from managers and unreasonable time pressure.
Some SaaS solutions are built to solve a single pinpoint. Take Slack, for example. Slack can resolve the lack of communication in organizations by making it easy for teams to connect over Messenger, offering video calls if necessary.
Other SaaS solutions, which we’ll focus on in this article, have many functions that can resolve more than one pain point for a project, team and/or business. Solutions like monday.com can reduce stress of role clarity. While solutions like PIM can reduce an unmanageable workload an enable teams to meet goals in less time.
Let’s take a closer look.
1. SaaS can help avoid employee burnout by making it more possible for employees to work remotely.
SaaS products make it possible and facilitate employees to work remotely, thus saving companies money while still enabling those employees working remotely to stay productive.
While many business leaders may question whether remote working can save their companies money, it has proven to be a powerful strategy. It helps companies reduce costs such as office space, utilities, office equipment, and cleaning services among others.
A study by global workplace analytics firm Global Workplace. Analytics estimated that remote working saves companies on average $11,000 per employee working half the time each year.
While the trend of remote working is not fully appropriate for all industries with concerns about productivity when supervising managers aren’t on site, the idea of enabling employees to work from anywhere is a very attractive one for many companies.
If SaaS solutions are used to help employees collaborate online and manage data, concerns like the one on productivity in the absence of managers can be overcome.
Apply these two tips to get the most out of Saas-powered remote working via
Remote work reduces employee turnover.
Collaboration Saas can help your employees stay connected, work together and manage their performance. Other productivity management tools that support remote working include time tracking, portfolio management, and personal task management.
Aside from these, SaaS vendors can also accommodate the needs of remote workers by offering flexible billing plans.
Wondering how to manage remote workers? Establish policies.
If remote working is already becoming a norm in your company, it is important to set up policies that will not only protect the privacy of your remote workers but also ensure smooth working.
Many companies already have policies in place that guide employees to work from home comfortably, but they must ensure that these policies remain aligned with their company’s policies.
While remote working can sometimes feel sub-optimal especially in the early days, these policies will help you to fine-tune the entire exercises and with time make sure that your business is running smoothly.
A good remote working policy and benchmark will help your employees work effectively and serve customers better. Having a standardized way to handle remote working is crucial.
2. Insights from SaaS can help avoid employee burnout by improving productivity.
SaaS solutions can provide deep insights into employee work patterns. You can utilize these insights to establish benchmarks to maximize employee productivity and prevent burnout.
Insights from SaaS solutions help companies to increase productivity by helping them to improve their processes.
The data collected from SaaS can be used to create reports that can be easily viewed by multiple people and can be cross-communicated in real-time. Additionally, these solutions can be used to filter data based on tasks across various pipelines and projects.
Another way to improve productivity is by analyzing the effectiveness of different applications across employees. If a company has multiple employees, it’s important to make sure that every employee is using the same applications.
A single Saas platform can provide information that is useful to avoid employee burnout.
3. SaaS can help avoid employee burnout by improving mobile productivity.
With SaaS, employees can access their data from any device whether computers, tablets, and mobile devices to access their work information.
Mobility is a key benefit of cloud technology and the SaaS model is one of the newest ways to make mobility a reality at the workplace. SaaS offers mobility that is far much higher than that of traditional software.
With the proliferation of smartphones, affordable internet and smart devices, employees need not work from one device only as it used to be the case.
Saas enables employees to access their work from multiple devices, giving them the power to shift from one device to another should they get bored on one.
This means that they do not really need to work from one position all day whether at the workplace or when working remotely. This mobility helps employees change working locations when boredom strikes, ensuring they avoid burnout and continue to work when it matters most to help avoid employee burnout.
Why is mobility so important?
Mobility is important to many businesses as employees are increasingly adopting different devices such as smartphones and tablets to access information. Indeed the modern employee does not see a PC as the only suitable device for working.
They are comfortable getting their work done from whichever device, and you want to ensure this is possible. After all, what is important is to get the work accomplished, right?
The fact that SaaS products can be accessed on multiple devices makes it easier for your employees to access work from anywhere and at any time.
4. SaaS can help avoid employee burnout by improving visibility.
Saas provides visibility into your company’s work processes. This is especially important when it comes to eliminating burnout. The use of software that provides visibility into the work processes of remote employees, for example, can make a huge difference.
Today’s businesses require cross-business visibility and a wide range of turnkey integrations, and Saas plays a huge role here. The right Saas products provide a holistic view of work processes that dramatically improve efficiency and transparency.
Its flexible design allows users to assign roles and activities to different team members and monitor the progress of the process. Once teams have been assigned activities, managers can see how the tasks are being accomplished and assign new tasks at the right time.
This visibility is essential for maintaining a high level of productivity, which is often correlated with having clear and specific goals for each member.
Visibility saves resources
Visibility is crucial in ensuring that the business isn’t spending valuable resources on projects that don’t achieve its goals. It also helps to increase the level of security and protection for sensitive data. As a result, a SaaS management approach enhances security by providing visibility into all of the work processes. You are able to gain a comprehensive view of user behavior and can make better decisions in order to avoid employee burnout.
5. SaaS can help avoid employee burnout by promoting co-worker collaboration and communication.
SaaS solutions can improve the way employees communicate with co-workers . They can enable instant communication to one another. Through Saas, employee engagement is more efficient thus translating to less burnout from communication related activities.
So instead of employees having to keep communicating with their colleagues through phones or long emails, a simple Saas solution is enough to provide instant communication with instant responses.
These are some of the critical ways Saas introduces efficiency into your company’s collaboration and communication to help avoid employee burnout.
Streamlining tasks
Employees can work more effectively by organizing work into visual boards, for example. Using a SaaS solution, you can add due dates, description, assets, and checklists.
You can assign specific tasks to team members and keep track of the progress of a project. With this efficient communication and collaboration, your entire company can remain on top of tasks and focus on the most important priorities.
Document sharing
Many SaaS solutions can make it easier to collaborate and share documents. You can set up sharing of huge files and chat informally while at it. Teams of all sizes can easily share documents of all sizes and help your organization improve the speed of document sharing which is very critical in the modern workplace.
Communication transparency
Saas products like Slack lets teams create chat groups and engage in transparent, open communication. With such a product, communicating becomes more of a fun activity than a heavy responsibility. Remember that this communication can happen from any device.
Companies are increasingly realizing the value of a SaaS solution to boost employee engagement. While a great deal of effort is put into ensuring employees feel confident and part of the team, they also need a good amount of autonomy and flexibility.
Cloud-based solutions allow companies to meet these needs and offer a better, more personalized collaborative experience to their employees.
6. SaaS can help avoid employee burnout by speeding up content management.
Solution as a software products like Catsy’s PIM software simplifies theentire process of content management from one central place, thus offering a huge break to employees as they no longer need to manage content manually which can be very tiring.
SaaS improves content management in three ways. First, it offers improved speed to market. It also reduces friction through out-of-the-box templates and easy layout changes.
Secondly, it streamlines the marketing and content process by reducing manual work. Thirdly, it allows fast turnaround for assets and campaigns. As a result, it improves user experience and increases conversion rates.
This way, there’s no need for a separate server or the hassle of managing updates. You simply pay a subscription fee to the vendor and they handle content management and updates.
Many SaaS platforms like Catsy are now ecommerce platforms themselves, making it easier to simply connect to the platform and let it speed up your content management tasks.
As a result, your employees need not worry about how long it will take, for example for content updates to reflect on the user side, as this is already automated. In other words instead of managing content manually, which is very slow, Saas makes it fast and often instant.
More revenue, not workload
At Catsy, we care about increasing your Revenue, not Workload. This means that your employees should do more work in less time, and publish more accurate, more enhanced content, making them better at their jobs and allowing them to produce better results.
When it comes to product information management, for example, you can use the Catsy PIM Software to easily eliminate gaps, meet different distributor content requirements, validate specs to ensure accuracy, as well as export or import large catalogs error-free.
7. SaaS can help avoid employee burnout by improving digital asset management and security.
Saas products like Catsy’s DAM are built to offer efficient digital asset management, ensuring security along the way. This takes a huge burden off employees because they don’t have to keep worrying about data asset management or security.
Example: Without a DAM, marketers have to utilize photoshop to resize images one by one before publishing to a channel. Channels like Shopify, for example, have different photo size requirements than Amazon.
The more channels and products a company has, the more image versions of a product they’ll have. With a DAM, marketers store the master version of an asset and can bulk export it in any custom size. This saves hours upon hours of time that could have been wasted resizing one by one in Photoshop.
This is why businesses are turning to Saas as a way to improve Digital Asset Management and Security. With a cloud-based service, businesses have the ability to manage their assets with ease.
Whether your team is large or small, a SaaS solution can help secure and manage assets while maintaining brand consistency.
Here are some of the advantages of SaaS when it comes to general Digital Asset Management and security.
Minimal costs
With these tools, you don’t need to worry about the costs of a dedicated team to manage or ensure security of your data assets. Instead, you can leverage the power of cloud-based storage to host data. In addition, these solutions can accommodate future growth.
This means that your company can easily adapt to changing market demands without making drastic changes to your data assets.
Scalability
The key to finding a scalable data asset management solution is to choose a Saas platform that can scale to accommodate the needs of your growing organization and digital asset library.
In fact a product like Catsy’s DAM allows organizations to start small and add features as they need them. Moreover, it is highly customizable to fit the needs of different businesses.
8. SaaS can help avoid employee burnout by enhancing communication with workflows.
Workflow solutions automates your workflow processes, thus freeing up your employees so they can focus on growing the business.
Simply start with a customizable workflow template, incorporate automated checklists already created by Catsy, assign tasks to team members then relax back and monitor the progress from your inbox.
This is particularly beneficial for businesses, because there will always be several workflows into any activity within a company’s operations. This means that managers in particular need to stay on top of different tasks that have unique processes.
With such a Workflow solution, you will speed up your product introductions, streamline updates, and approve before publishing. If you use Asana, you can choose to receive workflow notifications from Catsy directly in your Asana projects.
No more repetitive work
In addition to the benefits of automation, Workflow automation solutions will also free up your employees from repetitive work. Take the example of the insurance claims process. This procedure involves several steps, and is often 100% driven manually by people. The same number of employees can handle the same number of claims in half the time or less if you choose to automate the steps.
You can increase your capacity with the same number of employees while reducing risk and enhancing employee morale. This helps employees avoid burnout.
Reduces need for supervision
Supervision is great, but not everyone likes round the clock human supervision. Too much supervision puts so much pressure on employees and this can easily lead to burnout.
So when your workflows are automated, the need for supervision is significantly reduced or eliminated altogether in certain instances.
Workflow automation brings clarity into employee responsibilities, thus freeing up managers who in turn lift some pressure off employees’ shoulders. When managers are freed, they can spend their precious work time focusing on the items that matter and make the company more revenue.
Key to avoid employee burnout: empower them.
Leaders can help their employees avoid burnout by giving them the tools they need to be more successful at their job.
Whether it’s an important project or a simple update to a spreadsheet, your employees will suffer burnout if the tasks are too tedious and overwhelming. If work is preventing employees from spending time with their families, friends and can’t relax, it’s time to look to automated solutions. Promoting a healthy work-life balance will always benefit your company.
The more empowered your staff is, the more productive they will be. To achieve this, you must provide the right tools. Brand manufactures, distributors and retailers should consider a PIM and DAM SaaS to empower marketers, logistics, engineering and sales teams to work harder with less stress.
Catsy PIM and DAM simplify the way brands manage and publish product content across online, retail and distribution channels. Brands operate out of a single source of truth to drive revenue using a three step strategy: normalize data, tailor for channels, speed products to market.
Start by exploring Catsy SaaS solutions. See Catsy in action by scheduling a live demo.
