What do you do if your marketing operations colleague is on the verge of burnout?

Seek permission to have a chat around your observation. Have genuine empathy, compassion. However, rather than giving suggestion, it may be better to have a reflective conversation so that the colleague can introspect better.

Here the best tip when a coworker in marketing operations is about to burn out, it's important to be empathetic and supportive. Promote candid dialogue about stressors and workload. Assist in setting priorities for work and think about assigning duties. Provide tools for managing stress and promote taking pauses as necessary.

Self care is where it all begins. In order to be productive, we must have an inward practice to connect with our Soul before looking out there for the answers. Sometimes we need a reminder to go within and we are spiritual beings having a human experience here in our Earth suit. This is how we grow and expand into the best version of ourselves! We are all connected and connected to all that is. We are not separate ??

Acknowledgement and verbally validating someone can go a long way. Many times we try to convince ourselves we are ok and just keep going, but that near burnout moment being recognized by someone else can really make someone pause and re-evaluate before you get all the way there!

It's important to have a genuine connection with colleagues to recognize signs of burnout. Working in a remote and/or asynchronous environment can be especially difficult, so nothing beats having real face-to-face check-ins (video counts, too). Depending on the size of the organization, climate surveys, and town halls can also assess for this, but it's easy to identify if your department is going through a particularly busy period or if you know colleagues are dueling (or triple) hatting in a start-up environment.

Affirming words carry weight. There is slim chance you abandon your workload, but a conversation or kind word takes moments. Overwhelm can sometimes be a result of being too much in our head and being a sounding board can be the bridge that someone needs to do things better.

I think it's important to cultivate a culture of support and empowerment. Everyone on the team should feel safe raising their hand and asking for support. It could be that the person needs a second pair of eyes or a different approach they aren't seeing because they're in the thick of things. Sometimes having another person to talk through challenges can create solutions without needing to cross-load tasks and responsibilities.

I 100% agree with encouraging breaks. Some ways to do this in a remote team are to encourage the use of Pomodoro timers, blocking time on their calendar to get something to eat or go for a walk. Depending on the organization, it could even be helpful to encourage them to take a longer break during the day... go sign up for that pilates class you didn't feel like you could take a couple of hours to go do. Every person should be encouraged to identify and optimize their work/break schedule for EFFICIENCY and EFFECTIVENESS, not to time.