Burnout: The Reason Your Team Is Not Innovating

Lack of innovation is usually associated with the fear of failing or a perfectionist mindset. However, there's a less apparent yet more common reason why teams fail to innovate.

Creativity requires energy, peace of mind, and perspective. Burnout takes all those elements away. Mental exhaustion puts out your creative spark and makes problems look impossible to solve.

Burnout is an emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion state caused by?excessive and prolonged stress. It makes people feel overwhelmed and emotionally drained. Eventually, people feel like they run out of ideas and have nothing more to give.

Around the world, roughly three out of five workers are burned out.?A recent survey from Mental Health America?shows that 75% of workers have experienced burnout – and 40% of those polled said it was a direct result of the coronavirus pandemic.

According to a report by the American Psychological Association cited in?Harvard Business Review,?"More than $500 billion is siphoned off from the U.S. economy because of workplace stress, and 550 million workdays are lost each year due to stress on the job."

Burnout not only reduces productivity but also makes people feel hopeless, cynical, and resentful.

So, how can your team recover their creative juices? Start by focusing on these six factors.

Six Ways To Fight Burnout In Your Organization

1. Eliminate time-wasters.

At Pixar, it's OK for managers to enter a meeting and be surprised. Bosses trust their employees; they don't need to review every presentation before it's shared with senior management.

Unfortunately, in most organizations, the "show" becomes more important than the work. Employees are always busy with one meeting or report after another to prepare for.

Remove time-wasters. What reports or meetings can you eliminate? Trust your team; don't add unnecessary tasks or touchpoints that increase stress.

2. Review priorities regularly.

What looks like laziness is always exhaustion. In the book?Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, the Heath brothers explain how self-control is an exhaustible resource. When people burn out, they can no longer control their emotions and behaviors.

To become an innovative company requires that teams take on new responsibilities. However, most managers fail to eliminate other tasks. They keep adding more and more duties until employees hit the wall.

Don't confuse exhaustion with a lack of interest or cooperation. Are you replacing your team responsibilities or simply adding more?

Revisit your company's priorities regularly. At?Spotify, teams have daily check-ins to review workload, identify what's possible, and eliminate tasks that are not a priority.

3. Encourage people to take a vacation.

America is a no-vacation nation. The U.S.?ranks at the bottom?compared to all wealthy countries when it comes to providing employees any paid leave. Even worse,?nearly one in five American workers?report feeling guilty if they take a day off.

Netflix and Virgin want their employees to take time off so they can be reenergized when they return. Their?unlimited vacation policies?allow people to take as many days off as they wish. And this isn't just a benefit limited to progressive companies. Many traditional organizations,?such as GE, have followed suit.

Freedom makes people more responsible. When employees feel that their companies take care of their well-being, they become more accountable. Organizations that encourage people to go on vacation?show higher levels of happiness and productivity.

4. Limit email waste.

On average, corporate employees receive at least 200 messages a day and spend about two-and-a-half hours reading emails. The continuous interruption makes people feel powerless, without time to do their actual jobs. Even worse, after-hour emails are perceived as more negative or annoying.

Governments have stepped in?to regulate email and allow people to rest.?Volkswagen was one of the first companies to modify email servers?so messages could only be routed before and after regular working hours. Daimler went a step further with its?"Mail on Holiday" policy: Along with the out-of-office message, senders are notified that their messages will be auto-deleted.

Don't just educate people on better email practices. Protect your people's time to work rather than read emails.

5. Less is more.

At Slack, people?know when to log off.?Their CEO doesn't want to see people in the office after 6 p.m. The collaboration app doesn't allow employees to message each other after regular business hours, either. Slack stays true to its "work hard and go home" motto.

Contrary to popular belief, working?fewer?hours makes people more productive.?Shake Shack is expanding its four-day workweek test?after seeing a boost in employee retention and recruitment.

Setting limits allows people to recharge their energy and be more creative and passionate about their job.

6. Pause for fun.

When Cisco Finance was assessing its emotional culture, it realized something was missing. It turned out that joy was the strongest emotion among employees, a key driver for excitement, motivation, and engagement.

"Pause for Fun"?became an explicit core value at Cisco Finance's culture. The company started tracking joy, just like they measured productivity, creativity and other performance indicators. Managers at Cisco Finance started modeling this value by creating humorous videos that showed them pausing for fun.

Pausing for fun re-energizes people. Remind your team to reconnect with the joy of innovating.

Gustavo Razzetti is a workplace culture design consultant, speaker, and author. He is the CEO & founder of Fearless Culture.

This article was originally published in Forbes.