The World Health Organization warns that burnout isn't just everyday work stress. Rather, "burnout" refers to the impact of chronic stress in the workplace, including fatigue, reduced productivity, and ultimately employee turnover. Nearly 80% of U.S. workers are stressed, and 3 out of 5 workers show signs of burnout. Psychologists warn this trend is likely to continue rising.
As employers struggle to recruit and retain workers in an extremely tight labor market, more tools are needed to prevent burnout from occurring. Transportation analysis and workforce commuting data can help empower your business to predict the transportation-related stressors that contribute to burnout. This can allow you to get ahead of the trend—boosting employee morale, improving workplace efficiency, and ultimately improving worker retention and recruitment.
An Overlooked Problem: Employee Commutes Contribute to Burnout
Organizations, business leaders, and HR professionals usually focus on common burnout factors such as excessive workloads, micromanagement, and skills misalignment. But what happens before and after employees arrive at the workplace—specifically, their work commute and transportation options—is an overlooked yet critical factor contributing to the growing rates of burnout among American workers.
Time Pressure and Commuting
The average American worker spends an hour getting to and from work, with some geographic regions (e.g., Los Angeles and New York City) seeing much longer commute times.
Extended commutes negatively affect employee sleep, raise the risks of depression and other mood disorders, and even increase your team's overall health risks. Long commutes also reduce your workers' time for hobbies, family, and recreation, leading to employee work-life imbalance and fatigue.
Financial Burdens Related to Employee Transportation
Commuting costs—gas, tolls, and parking or public transport fees being some of the biggest—create financial stress for your workforce, especially if a business doesn't adequately compensate for these expenses. One estimate found that it costs many commuters nearly 20% of their income just to get to work, significantly higher than pre-pandemic costs.
Physical and Emotional Fatigue
Navigating long periods in traffic or on crowded public transport contributes to your team's overall physical fatigue, but don't ignore the emotional impacts: Traffic delays and public transportation disruptions can cause workplace anxiety about arriving late or missing deadlines. Many of the most common commuting challenges are also outside your employee's control, which can lead to feelings of helplessness or frustration that may spill over into the workplace.
Combined, it's no wonder that long commutes and poor transportation options to get to and from work are directly linked with low job satisfaction and other signs of burnout. If left unsolved, these also contribute to higher employee turnover rates.
Start By Understanding Employees’ Commutes
Many businesses already track key metrics, such as employee satisfaction, via annual workforce surveys. But do you know where and how your team's commuting experiences influence their workplace satisfaction, burnout risks, and overall productivity? With real-time commuter data and the right tools, you can leverage employee commuting information to identify potential stress points in transportation for your employees—enabling you to address these issues proactively before your workers burn out.
For instance, you'll need to identify whether your team is affected by common workplace transportation stress points like:
- Living far from the office or place of business
- Living in a transit desert (millions of Americans don't have reliable access to public transit)
- Having no access to a personal vehicle
SHARE Solutions Offer Valuable Insights
The best decisions start with having the facts you need to make an informed choice, but collecting and analyzing employee addresses (if shared) and analyzing geographic clustering and commuting distances is cumbersome, especially if you manage a large workforce or multiple business locations. SHARE Mobility's new Commuter Analysis tool is a complete solution for intelligently collecting and analyzing your employees' transportation needs.
Commuter Analysis lets you:
- Get a clear, high-level overview of overall transportation dynamics in your area
- Upload anonymous employee data to get straightforward insights
- Identify and analyze commuting patterns, average travel times, proximity to public transit, vehicle needs, and other common commuting stress points
Businesses across the country are now relying on SHARE's Commuter Analysis to better understand the commuting challenges facing their employees. The platform can even deliver additional benefits; for instance, you can use demographic data to pinpoint optimal hiring regions based on demographic trends.
Implement Solutions to Ease Commuting Challenges
Once you have analyzed data for stress indicators related to your team's commutes and current transportation options, put these valuable insights into practice by optimizing everything from employee benefits to shift scheduling.
Offer Flexible Work Arrangements
Examine peak traffic times and routes to understand delays and frustration points for your employees. For example, you may want to assess commutes for employees working non-standard hours, such as night shifts, when public transport may be limited in your area. To address these problems, you could offer hybrid work options or staggered schedules to reduce peak-time commuting. Flexible work schedules and hybrid work options are linked with reduced burnout rates, higher workplace satisfaction, and improved team culture.
Transportation-Focused Employee Benefits Package
Your transportation and commuting analysis may reveal that the financial burden of commuting, including gas, parking, tolls, or transit fares, is negatively impacting your employees. In these cases, you may wish to provide transportation benefits like transit passes, carpool incentives, or reimbursements for commuting costs, which more and more organizations are doing today.
Workplace Shuttles and Shared Mobility Programs
Using SHARE's Commuter Analysis, you can also pinpoint regions where your employees face particularly long or stressful commutes. Look for routes prone to frequent transportation delays or disruptions, such as unreliable public transit schedules or chronic traffic. Many businesses address these problems by offering shared mobility programs (i.e., ride share programs) or arranging corporate shuttle services from major residential areas to the workplace.
Harness SHARE's Travel Data to Prevent Employee Burnout
Don't let the unexpected impact of commuting on your employees lead to chronic workplace stress and burnout. All of SHARE Mobility's innovative ridesharing solutions and employee commuter solutions for businesses are driven by real-time data, and our new Commuter Analysis tool broadens that with even more actionable insights. Book a call with our team today to learn how to better understand your employees' commutes and use this transportation data to prevent workforce burnout.
