Big harvest, few workers

What a recipe for burnout! Too much to bring in and not enough people to do the work. You know, burnout is when you have 50 pounds of flour you’re trying to stuff into a five-pound sack.

It’s also something that creates overwhelming experiences, and that makes the work harder for people. The exposure to others' pain and discomfort in the process is a form of trauma for us, one that is cumulative. This “secondary” traumatization compounds the issue of burnout.

In the management of quality, the surges in work followed by the decline are called “over-” and “under-” burdens, big increases and decreases in workload. They increase the risk of errors and defects.

How do we level our work so that we can harvest as much as possible? Well, in the past, in agriculture, people in rural communities would gather and share resources. They come together to plant, and to harvest. The people of the community knew they needed each other, and they helped out without demanding profit-driven fees. Families came together to feed the crews and the crews that harvested shared in the harvest.

Even when people didn’t particularly care for each other, they still helped out. This is collaboration over competition, a key element in all things trauma-informed and in resilience.