Overwhelmed development team: How to deal with overload and prevent burnout?

Learn a few tips on how to do everything necessary without overwhelming the employees

At first glance, this approach looks efficient: companies start as many projects as possible and get the most out of their employees. 

The more projects, the greater the chance of success. But the pressure to perform and the fragmentation of attention brings the flip side of the coin - employees are overwhelmed and end up getting absolutely nothing done.

Such an approach leads to their exhaustion and demotivation at work. And instead of moving companies forward, this approach drags them down and causes problems such as lower quality of outputs, longer delivery times or security issues.

Recent study made by Asana on 10,000 workers in seven countries found that seven out of ten employees feel overwhelmed by the huge number of projects and activities.

The dizzyingly high numbers were further aggravated by the pandemic and current crisis, which brought additional pressure on speed and innovation.

It's more important than ever to prevent developer burnout and give your employees the support they need.

So what can you do to avoid development team burnout?

1.Understand the problem

The basis of solving any problem is to listen to people, and to do it regularly. You need to have an open conversation with your employees about the issues that are causing them to feel overwhelmed or even burned out.

Here in IT Match we have experience working with talented engineers, designer or QA professionals for more than 10 years. During that time, one of the most effective thing that worked for us was simply to offer correct feedback. Both to our employees and clients.

2. Build strong teamwork

The next important step is to ensure that your team is well-coordinated and functional. Nothing demotivates an employee more than a toxic colleague. Be careful that such people do not appear among your specialists.

How to recognize such a person?

Based on the own experience or experience of clients, there are two basic types of toxic people. Let's call them wolves and lambs for simplicity.

You can easily recognize the first one.There are signs of superiority and arrogance in his behavior. This person is an individualist who will never join a team. He or she visibly harms, intrigues, brings on colleagues and sometimes even psychologically blackmails.

Lambs are just as toxic, but it takes a while to figure it out. At first glance, they look completely innocent. They quickly gain trust in the collective because they are friendly and smiling.

If you stand up against such a passive aggressive person, or maybe you don't share the same opinion with him, he will always find a way to throw you down. He will give you compliments that aren't really compliments. For example, he comments on your appearance whenever you disagree with him.

From the position of a superior, we definitely recommend getting as much information as possible from the environment, talking to the person in question and evaluating whether the behavior is conscious or not. If so, such a person has no place in the company, as correction is basically impossible.

3. Use the services of augmentation agency

One of the simplest things you can do if your dev teams are strained is partner with a staff augmentation company like IT Match.

How it works? Easy.

You bring the idea or project and we bring the right engineers to make the idea come to life. 

In case of problems, we always know how to react flexibly and replace the given person so that there are no delays and the outage is not transferred to other team members.

Our approach is working with the best and your advantage is the peace of mind that your project will be worked on by the smartest people Central Europe has to offer. 

Highly qualified, excited, driven, and motivated to make everything possible towards making your project shine through all of its stages.

It's not only about recruiting as many people as possible to the project quickly. We know how important it is to maintain long-lasting relationships. That is why we make sure that the people we work with feel satisfied and fulfilled.

Due to the fact that our engineers are carefully and precisely selected, they can gradually be given more critical tasks and responsibilities.

Among other things, it is also a gift for your SW engineers – a helping hand you can rely on and thanks to which you can divide the work between more people and relieve the burden on your excellent employees.

If you would like to learn more about how exactly IT Match can help your business to grow, contact us and let’s discuss our future partnership.