April 14, 2021
1 Thought
Nobody hears the word "burnout" and thinks "that's a good thing".
Burnout is the kind of fire that got out of control.
What was once warm and brought light is now harmful and brings death.
Burnout is a medically classified disease that describes the critical condition of a soul near to spiritual death. (Share this on Twitter)
When we hear that someone is dealing with burnout, everyone immediately has a softened heart and wants to support the hurting person.
"Take time for yourself."
"Do what you need to do."
"Don't worry about work–we've got this."
The problem with this is that we're prescribing self-care as the solution to what extensive research reveals is an organizational issue.
Christina Maslach of the University of California, Berkeley, Susan E. Jackson of Rutgers, and Michael Leiter of Deakin University have identified six main causes for burnout:
Unsustainable workload
Perceived lack of control
Insufficient rewards for effort
Lack of a supportive community
Lack of fairness
Mismatched values and skills
Even a brief glance at this list shows us no amount of sabbaticals, vacations, yoga, or journaling will prevent the factors that cause burnout. While those things are helpful and self-care really is essential to one's health, preventing burnout is a team sport that needs to be tackled not by an individual, but by the whole team.
Here are three things to start doing to beat burnout as a team:
Stop measuring performance by hours worked: Measuring progress by the number of hours someone works was useful when jobs were simple and repetitive. If you're working in a factory line, the more hours worked obviously leads to better productivity. However, that's not the case today. More often than not, our jobs involve far more creativity and people-interaction. No person is simple and few jobs are as repetitive as they once were. Therefore, measuring by hours worked ought to be on the table for evaluation. What would happen if you measured performance by project completion, profit goal, or personal development in a client? Give flexibility in hours so that people can create better margin for themselves.
Make coaching an essential leadership skill: The kind of networking and connectivity we have to people different from us is at an all-time high. This means our workspaces are incredibly diverse in perspectives, experiences, values, and skills. To best utilize that, offer training on coaching skills–learn how to draw out from someone what solution is best for what they face instead of mandating to them what you think would be best. Chances are, they have a better idea, and if not that, they at least have an idea that they can apply in the way they work better than what would make sense to you.
Normalize licensed counseling: Everyone, I repeat, everyone would benefit from a safe and professional trained voice that can help us walk through hurts, harms, and struggles that we've faced in the past or are currently dealing with. If you can, put money towards enabling people to see licensed counselors. Even if you can't, you can still give recommendations for who to see and create space in people's schedules to see people during the day.
1 Resource
Jennifer Moss on burnout in Millennials:
"Millennials have the highest levels of burnout, we found. Much of this is due to having less autonomy at work, lower seniority, and greater financial stressors and feelings of loneliness. The last was the biggest factor leading to burnout, according to our research. As one Millennial put it: 'The pandemic has had a tremendous impact on my well-being — I’ve had mental health challenges, and I’ve hit major roadblocks with that. My physical health has changed because I can’t exercise like I used to. It’s affected me economically. I feel as though my career has been set back yet again.'
So, yes, burnout is severe today, but the seeds were planted before Covid-19 hit — even then, many workers were already experiencing high levels of it. The pandemic was simply an accelerant.”
Source: "Beyond Burned Out", Harvard Business Review
1 Question
What would you gain from a midday energy refreshment?