Balancing Mental Health and Professional Progression

It's a tightrope. There's no two ways about it. Mental health and protecting yourself from burnout or overload is incredibly important, but how can you do it without giving the impression that your career is unimportant? How do you prioritise your children or family life without offending others who are working 14-hours a day?

As leaders, we attend courses and seminars about ensuring that our teams get sufficient support, that they should make sure they switch off during annual leave and shouldn't work long hours. However, when was the last time you saw your senior manager log off at 6pm?

We're not leading by example. It's do as I say, not as I do. Despite the corporate messages and HR guidance, despite the training courses and Ted Talks on mental health, people, particularly those who are hungry for promotion, simply ignore them. "I have to show I'm capable of more", "I have to prove I am better than him/her if I want to get the promotion", "I must not let them think I only do 10/12 hours a day, my manager needs to know how important this is to me, and that I'm willing to sacrifice to get my promotion...." Sound familiar?

The World Health Organisation estimates that 5% of adults suffer from depression and a 2023 HR study indicated that 65% of employees have suffered from burnout. Employers are listening and are providing support. Citigroup offers employees a benefit which gives them access to counselling resources and confidential support on other issues. Other employers provide similar schemes and look to take pressure off working parents by offering emergency child care or support for caring for sick parents.

I participated in a workshop with The Energy Project about five years ago, and it was refreshing, and formalised everything we already know to be true, but constantly choose to ignore. We all know that taking brief breaks throughout the day, ultimately increases productivity and reduces burnout, but how many of us actually do it? We all know that focusing on one thing at a time, is a more time efficient and thorough way to approach an exercise, but how many of us get distracted by instant messages from colleagues or worse, email grazing?

Shortly after that workshop, CoVID-19 hit and professionally and personally I was overwhelmed by the volume of work. Already working a minimum of 12-hours per day, that jumped to easily 14 to 16 hours a day, fuelled by a combination of market events and team members off on sick leave (and the irony was not lost on me, that they were off with mental health issues) meaning that the remaining team had to pick-up the slack. And so the vicious circle continued. More work, more stress, leading to fewer people to do the work..... You know the rest..... everything I learned and agreed with on that workshop went right out the window and I was back to the old routine.

However, CoVID-19 did bring with it the normalisation of Working From Home and completely changed attitudes towards it. Considered by some senior managers previously as a way to shirk work, it had now become a necessity and views shifted. Previous panic (and guilt) when a child wandered in, mid-way through a meeting with a senior manager disappeared and instead it became the norm, with kids and dogs making guest appearances and nobody batting an eye-lid. Why did it change? Because people finally got the message that just because your child is at home, doesn't mean you're not delivering at work. I began working from home one day a week when I had children so that my mother-in-law could look after them whilst I worked from home. However, it always had a certain stigma attached to it and I could always sense that I was being judged by senior managers to be working less when remote - when in fact, I was more productive at home! It was all about perception.

So if perception of remote working can change, how do we change attitudes and expectations around needing to work 60+ hours a week to get promoted? CoVID-19 was the catalyst for change for remote working, but that was a unique set of circumstances that demanded a unique solution. I don't feel that there will be bolt of lightening like that to reduce burnout on those who are career focused at the detriment of their health.

The best we can for our teams do right now is help them set boundaries. Lay clear guidelines about what is acceptable in terms of contact and volume of work and what isn't. What does your Out of Office say? Make sure they don't just use it as a countdown for team members for when you're back in the office - use it to direct to appropriate team members to handle queries in your absence and make sure they understand this is your time off and for those who really need to contact you - if that's not sufficient, if you're worried that there's so much going on you can't fit it all on an OOO, then document it elsewhere (SharePoint, Teams, Word) and share set with those people who may need it. Then don't look at your email after that. Not a peek. Particularly if you're a Senior Manager - don't keep responding to emails whilst you're out of the office, because that sends the message to your teams, that they should be doing that too.

This is the only way we can address this, and it will not happen overnight.

It really is time to lead by example.

https://theenergyproject.com

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/depression#:~:text=An%20estimated%203.8%25%20of%20the,adults%20older%20than%2060%20years.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/employees-are-still-burnt-out-isolveds-2024-hr-trends-survey-finds-65-of-employees-are-suffering-from-burnout-302017336.html

https://citibenefits.com/-/media/Mercer/CitiBenefits/Documents/Citi_Be-Well-Brochure_Updated-070120.pdf?rev=2dab235ec5624380b955cdf6b6355c17