How can you use feedback to identify and address employee burnout?

Practical Steps: 1. Embrace the Gift: Treat feedback as a precious gift, not a critique. It's your compass for growth. 2. Seek Diverse Sources: Collect feedback from all directions - superiors, peers, subordinates, and even clients. Each perspective enriches your understanding. 3. Constructive Action: Don't just collect feedback; act on it. Identify areas for improvement and create a plan for tangible change. 4. Feedback Culture: Nurture a culture where feedback flows freely, fostering growth for all. 5. Gratitude: Show appreciation for those who offer feedback, even if it's tough. Their insights are catalysts for your evolution. Feedback isn't a monologue; it's a dialogue.

Spending time working on the emotional culture of your workplace can help fix and prevent burnout. The emotional culture is made up of the emotions and feelings, including fears, that employees experience in the workplace, and everything that leads to them being expressed or repressed. Having open conversations on how people are feeling, how they want to feel and don't want to feel, and how the team can recognize what people are feeling and identify situations when they have these feelings is important to building a positive emotional culture. When they understand what they want and don't want to feel as a team, they can work together to explore and experiment with rituals, actions and behaviours to support it.

Feedback from peers, direct reports and clients can be a valuable tool for assessing employee burnout. Leaders should proactively seek feedback from employees in order to identify signs of strain and address them swiftly. Listening to employees and developing relationships based on trust helps create an environment conducive to seeking help before burnout takes over. Additionally, providing opportunities for team members to take breaks, short vacations and time off can help foster employee wellbeing. A strong culture of feedback helps create a healthier environment for all team members.

Here are practical steps to not only recognize but also address its causes: 1. Identify Burnout Signs: Begin with identifying the telltale signs - exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced performance. Listen to your team; they often hold the mirror. 2. Diagnose the Root Causes: Unearth the root causes. Is it workload, unclear expectations, or a lack of autonomy? Each cause requires a tailored solution. 3. Feedback is Your North Star: Feedback is your guiding light. Encourage open dialogues to set clear goals, reallocate tasks, and empower your team. 4. Recognition & Reinforcement: Recognize and reward contributions. A culture of appreciation fuels motivation and combats burnout.

One thing I have found helpful is viewing feedback as a two-way mechanism, where managers are also taking feedback onboard to then integrate into sustainable organisational changes. For instance, where are boundaries needed around time, energy, productivity, communication?

To create a culture where employees feel comfortable sharing their feelings openly, it's important to create high levels of psychological safety. If employees have had experiences in the past where they were reprimanded for sharing or didn't feel heard, they may not share openly initially. It take consistency to create these levels of trust.

Two things: how is feedback delivered? Does it account for the employee's communication preferences, for instance DiSC or MBTI? And second, from a coaching perspective: is feedback specific, actionable and future-focused? Does it promote problem-solving, or shift the individual into solutions-seeking and expanded perpsectives?