What COMPANIES Can Do to Decrease EMPLOYEE BURNOUT - Pt 2
Corporate wellness is a huge topic—vastly too big to be tackled in the span of 5 tips and 1 blog post. Hell, you’ll probably see a lot more from me on this topic. But, for now, I wanted to continue the conversation that I started previously. Why? Because there are absolutely so many things that companies can do to decrease employee burnout without hiring a ton more people.
1
Set realistic deadlines for projects
“I don’t know how they expect me to finish all this by then!” I remember vividly a client coming into a session and saying exactly this. In fact, derivvariations of this statement have been echoing during my 1-on-1 and group coaching sessions for years now. Hell, I’ve said similar things in my day job.
Because it’s a common feeling. Too much work, not enough time. Too long of a to-do list and not enough bandwidth or work hours to get things done. Unfortunately, the corporate culture has become more and more people-please-y and less and less trusting of their employees. I remember the pre-COVID world of all these old school companies being so averse to remote work because they didn’t feel they could trust their employees to get the work done. But, if there’s anything good that’s come from COVID, it’s been the acceptance of remote work. But I digress…
The important takeaway here is this: if you have too much work and not enough employees (and you’re not able to hire more employees), you should not be pushing your employees to do more in less time. You should be extending the deadlines to accomodate the workforce that you have. You must make sure you're setting realistic deadlines over which they should get their work done. Don't people-please and tell a client that you can get the work done in the next two weeks if, realistically, your team would have to burn the candle at both ends and work 80 hour weeks to do that. Make sure you're setting realistic deadlines to your clients and with your employees or you are going to burn them out. There’s not ifs, ands, or buts about it. You’re going to burn them out if you don’t.
2
Leverage social support
A common thing I have felt - and have heard from clients - is that they “feel alone” in their burnout. They feel like they’re the only one that is struggling and when we’re alone, we’re isolated.
High-achievers also struggle most profoundly because we often have difficulty asking for help. Because we pride ourselves so much on our capabilities, asking for help or needing support from our colleagues often undermines our very sense of identity in our work and in our life. But like it or not, we do need that social support to help us feel better about our burnout. And it’s not just my personal opinion…science is on my side! When I did a little research to see if there was a relationship between social support and burnout, the first things that came back were a number of scientific studies. I’ve detailed all of them here.
To summarize what I’ve found in the research:
Burnout is absolutely correlated with a perceived lack of social support.
There are gender and profession-differences between the levels of burnout experienced.
Marital status also impacts the level of perceived support and therefore burnout.
In a nutshell, social support is crucial to helping your people overcome burnout. If you're a primarily remote company, this is even more important. This may take the form of community-building activities like game nights, happy hours, coffee hours, etc. All of these things can be done virtually. In fact, get your employees involved. Send out a company wide survey and ask your employees what they would like to see the company do that would help them build community, connect with their peers, and get more social support.
3
Remove roadblocks
What is getting in the way of your employees being able to do their work? Is it a resource issue? A policy issue? An equipment issue? Whatever it is, address it and do your best to make your employee experience more seamless.
Sometimes in corporate structures our processes are just straight up frustrating. For example, I had a person on my team who was simply trying to log her work time and was running into issues. She reached out to the parties involved, but wasn’t able to. We have overtime limits on our employees to try to preent them from overworking themselves and she was running up against those limits during a particularly demanding period of time and was getting frustrated by the lack of support when she was just trying to log her work hours. Since then, we’ve streamlined this process to make it less of a hurdle for employees to overcome, as well as institute and shared best practices so employees can be more proactive about asking for overtime when it might be needed.
This might also mean making the policies and information that an employee needs to use their job accessible. We have a wiki for our company that includes common resources that instructors might need as well as commonly asked questions and policy clarifications. We encourage self-sufficiency and promote going to this resource before contacting a manager because - for the most part - everything they need is in the wiki, allowing them to do their job in the most efficient manager possible without having to wait for the lag time of a returned email or phone call.
Of course, I always understand why policies exist, but making it easy for an employee to do their job is always going to help decrease overwhelm and therefore burnout.
4
Be compassionate & empathetic
In part 1 of this blog post, I had a tip around showing employees support and included this quote:
“Compassion at work shouldn’t be a luxury; it’s important to develop policies that give people the time off and support they need so we don’t have to rely on the kindness of our bosses.”
I want to riff off of this again because I’ve realized something in my now 2 months as a manager with my 24 person team… compassion and empathy are crucial.
I’ve only been a manager for 2 months now, and the number of conversations I’ve had with people on my team that have included the words “I just didn’t feel comfortable talking to my last manager about this” have been too numerous to count. And it’s not just something that happens in my company. Hell, it’s not just a corporate thing. I can remember feeling this exact same way in several positions I had in the academic environment.
The bottom line is this - managers need to be more human. We need to be more empathetic. I’m not saying don’t enforce policies and don’t hold people accountable to their work and to doing their job. But what I am saying is that we are not robots and we cannot comparmentalize what’s happening in our personal lives from our professional lives all of the time.
A big part of being a manager is managing the human element because the people on your team…they are humans! And if we don’t empathize and have compassion for their personal struggles, those struggles will bleed into their work. So, yes, keep it professional, but also have empathy and compassion. If you don’t, you’ll be forcing your people to shoulder their personal struggles in secret and that will lead to burnout!
5
Give them a damn break
I’m going to keep this short and sweet—if your people have been hustling and working hard for you for an extended period of time, give them a break. Whether that means a “wellness Friday” as I’ve heard it called in some companies—allowing employees to leave in the early afternoon on Fridays—or giving them a Monday off for all the hard work and over time they’ve put in, do it.
Not all time off has to be scheduled vacations. We need to normalize rewarding our employees with a break when they’ve gone above and beyond for us.
We need to normalize giving our people a damn break. Whether it’s a mental health day, an afternoon off or a spur of the moment 3-day weekend, let’s make this a more common practice when our people have been pushing themselves!
BONUS Tip…
Hire A Corporate Wellness Consultant for Outside Help!
Alright—I’ll admit that this is a shameless plug, but sometimes outside help can see what we can’t see. I’ve worked with organizations that brought me in and asked me not only to do burnout training, but also to meet with their different teams to give them direct support with what they need AND get feedback for leadership. I heard straight from their employees what their concerns were and relayed that information straight to the leadership team where we were able to discuss what they could do to fix it!
