What’s the Solution to Burnout for my Team?
I offer leadership coaching that helps you figure out the answer to this question for your specific situation. Reach out to discuss how we could work together!
A few people have reached out to me recently with this question, or a variation of it:
As a manager I see my team struggling with burnout, but I’m not sure how to help. All that’s in my head is “we can try anything you want, but until the existential threat is lifted and people have an outlet, there isn’t really a cure.” Maybe that’s right, maybe not, but it’s not overly helpful. Are there any actual solutions?
Here’s my answer.
Talk to your team
The first questions I’ll ask you back is: Have you talked to your team about this? Have you let them know that you care and asked them what they might need? A big contributing factor to the great resignation wave we’re seeing right now is that workers don’t feel heard and valued. Gallup suggests that the situation “requires managers who care, who engage, and who give workers a sense of purpose, inspiration and motivation to perform”. So that’s where you should start. Have a conversation. Start by asking your direct reports in 1-1s. Have a team brainstorming session around this and be open with your team. Tell them that you can’t make promises right now, but you want to listen and see what you can do. If you’re unsure which questions to ask, here are some ideas. If you’re afraid your team will complain, that’s actually a good thing. It gives you data on which you can build a case for upper management to act.
Apart from finding out what your team needs specifically, Dr Jacinta Jimenez recently published a book outlining the job mismatches that most commonly lead to burnout:
You can get an idea of what you can do just by looking at this graphic - aligning work with personal values, ensuring fairness, giving credit where credit is due, and giving people a sense of control are things I would classify as no brainers. If you’re not ensuring these already for your team, it’s time! I’ll dive a little deeper on biggest factors I’ve seen come up in my work, and what you can do as a manager to work against them.
Push back on high workloads
Burnout is an organisational problem. High workloads with low resources are a major factor. As a manager, you have the power to push back. You can clarify priorities and make sure the important things get done, and the unimportant things get pushed back. You want to make sure you’re driving the biggest impact possible for the business, not working the longest hours possible to look like you’re busy or working hard. Make work about outcomes, not outputs or time spent.
Foster community
Working from home can be really isolating, and with chance encounters in the office falling away, we really need to make time for personal connection, intentionally. That can mean starting meetings with 10 minutes of breakout rooms and a conversation starter (and make sure you spend 5 minutes after to let people share what they talked about), using the Donut Slack extension to setup catch-ups at random, or pushing for a team bonding budget and making space for fun activities - AirBnb experiences are a great way to start if you’re on a low budget. You don’t necessarily need to host happy hours or add more check-in meetings. Just be a facilitator of connections.
At the same time, zoom fatigue is real. I’ve seen people have walk-and-talk calls with voice only to combat it, but while social interaction should be encouraged an intentional, it should also be optional. Let your people manage their capacity for social interaction themselves - preferences vary widely on the spectrum from introversion to extroversion.
Experiment with time off
Taking time off when you feel burnt out is not a new idea, but a lot of people have been skipping vacation given most of us aren’t able to travel due to the pandemic. Some have taken time off but found themselves unable to actually switch off. When you take time off as an individual, the emails and requests still keep coming in because everyone else is still working.
We need more radical solutions. Vox has declared that five-day workweek is dead, Iceland has switched to a 4-day work week, and company-wide vacations are on the rise with Bumble, Hootsuite and LinkedIn leading the way. Another fresh idea is the asynchronous offsite, where everyone takes a day off, does something fun and shares it with their team afterwards. What could you experiment with in your team?
Model the right behaviours
As a manager, you set standards and expectations. If you don’t take time off yourself, boast about working long hours, or send emails after hours and on weekends, you are implicitly asking your team to do the same. On the other hand, if you make it okay to talk about when you’re having a bad day, take time off (and actually disconnect from emails), and put appointments outside of work on your calendar (e.g. exercise, dropping kids off at school, or therapy), you are giving your team permission to do the same. Lead by example and take care of yourself!
Make sure your team has access to support
Most companies have an employee assistance program (EAP) in place - Ginger is a great example. There also are services that sit outside of your company, like EmpowerWork, which offers confidential and free help with work issues. Make sure your team knows about what support is available to them inside and outside your company, and encourage them to seek out therapists, counsellors and coaches for personalised support (my own program is here 😉)
Keep your mind open to new ways of working
According to McKinsey, right now offers a profound opportunity to reimagine how we work. And I’ll leave you with their conclusion:
If leaders don’t accept the fact that they don’t know the shape of the future of hybrid working, their talent will keep walking out the door. But leaders can make a choice. They can continue to believe that they will deliver in the future because they have always delivered in the past. Or they can embrace this singular opportunity for change and work with their people—closely and transparently, with curiosity, respect, and a willingness to learn together instead of mandating—to discover a new and better way to work.
Do you have a question you’d like me to answer, or ideas to add to this post? You can get in touch with me here!
Thanks goes to Steve Rubin and Erin 'Folletto' Casali for adding to and helping me refine this article.
