Burnout: How to manage a team through this mess
For people managers, understanding why burnout is so common right now is important to help our teams deal with it. If you missed our blog post on why pretty much everyone is feeling burned out right now, check it out here.
When people managers get feedback that their teams are experiencing burnout, my response is “well of course you are!” There has probably never been a more challenging time to manage people than right now. It’s not just official managers who are feeling this stress right now. A friend (who is also a biology professor) expressed the frustration she feels over having to help her students navigate all the stress of the past few months:
“I’m a scientist, not a therapist! They don’t train you for feelings in hard science!”
As people leaders, we are used to being responsible for the culture at work, managing workloads and priorities and promoting a positive atmosphere in general. All of those things are 100 times harder right now than they were a year ago and yet, we still need to try to make it better.
Some thoughts on how to do that:
Don’t take it personally. You didn’t release COVID 19 into the world and your team knows that this isn’t your fault. If your team can be honest about their feelings of emotional exhaustion and burnout, that means they trust you and you’ve created a safe space to do that. It does not mean that they think you are a horrible manager, it means that they think you can help. Getting defensive or interpreting this feedback to mean that you are failing as a manager isn’t helping anyone, so just stop.
Listen and make safe space for conversations. There are several different ways to do this: dedicated listening sessions, informal virtual happy hours, or even making space at the beginning of meetings for participants to air out how they are feeling before they dive into the agenda. Giving that space and making time for it (even if it pushes out other agenda items) is really important. For many who are working today, the only human contact they get, outside of the people in their house, are work meetings.
When the next bad thing happens, talk to your team about it. A senior leader that I work with sent an email to her team when Jacob Blake was shot in the back 7 times in Wisconsin. , She expressed her sadness and frustration that the violence against people of color continues to happen every damn day. Don’t pretend the thing didn’t happen or that people aren’t thinking about it, that makes it unsafe to talk about at work.
Model work/life balance behavior. Take vacations, turn on your out of office notice, don’t check your email or messages while you’re away. Don’t send emails late at night if they aren’t absolute emergencies and encourage everyone else to follow your lead. If you tell your team it’s ok for them to prioritize their personal lives, but you don’t actually do it, they won’t believe that it is safe for them to do so.
Say “Thank you”. Working remotely means that we are missing out on the non-verbal cues or informal conversations that let us know people appreciate our work. Giving a presentation you worked hard on for weeks on a video call when all participants are muted with cameras off feels very different from delivering it to a live audience in a conference room. Presenters often have no idea how their messages were received and if their work is helpful and valuable. We all need to hear that the work we are doing is meaningful. A simple ‘thank you’ or ‘great job’ can make a positive impact on someone’s day.
Ask your team for what changes they need to be successful. Maybe your team wants all meetings to have clear agendas, maybe they want fewer meetings or more meetings. Maybe they want to be able to reduce their time to 75% so that they can help their kids be successful at school. If you ask people what they need, they will tell you. Maybe you can’t deliver on everything, but you probably can deliver on some things.
As always, we’d love to hear from you! How do you help your teams manage burnout these days?