Beyond Burnout
We are all exhausted, with not much hope of things getting better this year.
What I’m hearing from employees, leaders and noticing in myself is - we are too exhausted to even think about how to get out of this exhaustion cycle.
Self-care isn’t going to save us, no amount of corporate online Zumba and Yoga are going to rebalance us.
We need to completely rethink the way we are all working and we need a two pronged approach to this.
Yes, self-care (please keep doing this), but also we’ve got to find a better way to create the right cultures and support structures in organisational life or we are going to have a mass mental health crisis on our hands.
In the recent HBR Series, Beyond Burnout, Jennifer Moss talks about how burnout in organisational life has 5 main causes:
1. Unsustainable workload
We haven’t adjusted workloads for our teams for example, people in safety roles now have 2 jobs, pre-COVID safety roles and now they have extra COVID workload around safety.
2. Perceived lack of control
Some organizations saw the value of allowing employees more flexibility, but too many did not, and haven’t adjusted for all the extra roles, particularly parents (& mostly women) are playing.
People will give you lots more discretional effort if they can have flexibility in return.
3. Insufficient rewards for effort
We’ve allowed more meetings and unhealthful levels of screen time and we are not talking about the extra tolls this is taking - Zoom burnout is a real thing, it takes more mental and physical effort to do things online, not to mention the sitting down all day - but we aren’t saying thank you or rewarding people, now we are just expecting them to be ‘always on’.
4. Lack of a supportive community
People are missing the supportive chats and many organisations are not replicating this in other ways. Many are also separated from their friends and family contribution to a double-impact lack of support.
5. Lack of fairness & Mismatched values and skills
Talking about fairness and values and capabilities is even more important at this time. The best organisations at the moment are dialling up their focus on values, ethics and all things culture related.
What does seem to make a difference for employees and leaders is focussing on:
Connecting to a sense of purpose and meaning at work, helping people think about the bigger why
Having a manageable workload and being able to talk about it if its too much to your team and ask for flexibility
Having an empathetic line manager with whom you can talk to about all of the above and more
Feeling supported in your organisation to discuss your mental health at work and see that it is genuinely an issue your organisation cares about
And…. having a supportive network of colleagues, family and friends at home or even virtually to help us all feel less isolated.
Please check out the resources from HBR + this great podcast from Brene Brown with Emily and Amelia Nagoski on Burnout, which talks about how really feeling our feelings and allowing ourselves to complete a stress cycle is very important. Also to give our bodies cues and rituals that a peak in stress is over helps us recover quicker and minimise burnout.
I’ve been trying this on a Friday night by putting laptop in drawer, going for a walk, coming back for shower, pouring glass of wine/ or making a cup of tea depending on how healthy I’m being, then taking a moment to sit on my balcony to mark the beginning of the weekend and to tell my body that it can now relax for 48hours. What can you do to let you body know that its ok to relax now?
