Structural and cultural supports are the backbone of preventing burnout. Is your team ready?

I’ve had the privilege of meeting many incredible people over the past six months while promoting my book, To The Top.?Just?this past?week I spoke in person at Cadence and over Zoom for New Relic, and even more recently I was in Boston speaking to a?few?audiences?with?dozens of our clients, which was so much fun. (I loved being back in my hometown!)

No matter what part of the country I am in or who is listening to me talk, I find myself fielding questions about what it takes to create a more gender-equal corporate world. People want specifics. They ask me about pace, structure, teamwork, and balance. Often, someone will share a story about feeling overwhelmed and overtaxed, sometimes to the point where they considered leaving their job.?

When I hear these stories, I feel compelled to revisit the ways managers and companies can bolster their commitment to preventing burnout for everyone, but especially for women who frequently face the double jeopardy of corporate expectations and family obligations—both of which are still mired in gender-based stereotypes and cultural norms that make it extra hard for women to get the backing anyone would need to succeed at the highest levels. I know that burnout may feel like a buzzword—and that some people think we’ve exhausted the topic. I am not one of those people.??

You all know that I love to work. And that I love what I do. But, even for those of us living our professional dream, we still must constantly recalibrate how to stay mentally, emotionally, and physically whole. Regardless of where we get the work done—at an office, home, or a combination of the two—the pressures and expectations of achieving our self-imposed goals can be unrelenting.?For women, who often are overtaxed even before they walk in the corporate door, strategies for how to recognize the signs of burnout are even more pressing.?

So, as summer starts to slide to the rearview mirror and we begin to anticipate fall’s inevitable whirl of activity, I want to share a few reminders about how companies can create systems to prevent burnout.?

During Covid, I started weekly 30-minute Zooms with my team that were focused solely on people’s mental health. They were intended to be a connection session, time with each other when we could talk about life—aside from work. I viewed this practice as a preventative tool to help establish psychological safety on our team. We implemented a scale to indicate how each person was feeling: green, yellow, red.?(Traffic lights can come in handy in more ways than one.) I found that the more I shared, honestly, about my own challenges of managing through the pandemic, the more open others became. When you’re struggling, it helps to hear how other people are managing, what solutions they’re finding, and to vent about whatever seems most daunting that day, even if it seems silly or trivial.?Sometimes being able to laugh about a seemingly small frustration with a trusted colleague can have a hugely positive impact on your mental outlook.

Post-pandemic, the practice remains a crucial tool for building community and preventing burnout. On our team, if someone is in the yellow, perhaps they just need some quick advice, a distraction, a laugh, or to hear a colleague say, “I’ve been there, and you’ve totally got this.” Other times, when someone is in the red, they need their team members to quickly take things off their plate to help lower the cortisol level before it skyrockets.

I can never talk about burnout without bringing in one of my favorite professors, Adam Grant , from my alma mater, 美国宾夕法尼亚大学 - 沃顿商学院 . Grant’s preferred model for implementing structural and cultural change is?demand-control-suppor t. As he explains it:?

• Demand: Make structural changes that lighten the load on the person doing the job or redistribute tasks.
• When you can’t eliminate demands, you can at least give people the autonomy and skills they need to handle them.
• Support: Create cultures that make it easy to request and receive help.

Putting systems like this in place is critical to creating an aware, thoughtful work culture. It’s also a prudent business move. Burnout is expensive for everyone. Estimates put healthcare costs associated with burnout at?$125 billion to $190 billion annually.?It also accounts for significant employee turnover and underperformance.?

In thinking about this issue, I did a bit of research, which turned up a 2017 Harvard Business Review article,?Employee Burnout Is a Problem with the Company, Not the Person . That headline would never be written today.?Thanks to the work of people like Grant and others, the corporate world has definitely come a long way in a very short period. It’s now widely accepted that burnout is largely a result of unrealistic corporate pressures and expectations.?As the article’s author, Eric Garton , a partner at 贝恩公司 , wrote, “Executives need to own their role in creating the workplace stress that leads to burnout—heavy workloads, job insecurity, and frustrating work routines that include too many meetings and far too little time for creative work.” Just six years after that was written, companies are starting to pick up the mantle of responsibility. They know more and they do more. It feels good to be able to call out this kind of progress. Together, we must make sure it continues.??

#tothetop