Burnout Makes The Workplace Unsafe
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about burnout. It seems like a topic of conversation that has been in the air more than ever in the last two years.
The number of requests that we receive here at Create Forward for trainings and coaching focused on burnout has exploded over the last two years.
According to the World Health Organization, burnout is a syndrome resulting from a failure to manage workplace chronic stress.
The reasons we’re all burnt out are fairly obvious. Since 2020 we’ve lived, worked, and taken care of families as a global pandemic raged on and we’ve yet to even tally the full impact of COVID on our relationships, communities, and even our long-term mental and physical health. We’re tired and we have every right to be.
A quick Google search for information about burnout will produce endless articles that focus on workplace burnout, how to identify it, and how to prevent it. Most of the tips and tools focus on individual responses to burnout. But a 2019 National Academy of Medicine study found that burnout is a systemic issue requiring structural changes to policy and practice.
Burnout is systemic unmanaged chronic stress in the workplace.
When I talk about burnout as systemic unmanaged chronic stress, it changes the conversation. We understand the mental and physical effects of chronic stress.
There are countless studies that point to the ways chronic stress increases hypertension, diabetes, chronic pain, compromised immune systems, anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation. Yet why is it that more often than not when chronic stress becomes pervasive in an organization leaders fail to take action?
A workplace defined by unmanaged chronic stress is an unsafe work environment.
There are habits and behaviors that contribute to the spread of chronic stress that probably seem insignificant or just inconvenient at best, but produce an environment in which you never truly leave work.
Imagine a remote first workplace in which employees communicate and collaborate primarily via email and Slack. While management says that the work day ends at 5 pm, managers and senior leaders regularly send emails late into the night. While they say it’s okay if you can’t get to this until the morning, you figure out very quickly that waiting until morning means starting the day with a full inbox to tackle including vital information that you need for the morning’s meetings. So in order to keep up with the workload, you continue to respond to emails late into the night when you could be getting to bed early, engaging in a restorative activity, or spending time with your loved ones. Activities that, if you had time for them, might reduce your stress levels and improve your mental health. Instead, you’re thinking about work.
Reducing and eliminating chronic stress requires structural change in the workplace.
Leaders must be the first to model an approach to managing chronic stress that others can follow.
Here are a few questions you can ask yourself in order to identify the ways your culture might be contributing to chronic stress:
What are the unspoken agreements or expectations that might be influencing how we work together? Do they improve our relationships or increase chronic stress?
How can we create shared intentional agreements about the way we work that prevent people from feeling obligated to perform work tasks during their after-work hours when they could be resting, spending time with their loved ones, or engaged in personal pursuits that enrich their lives?
Here is a list of practices that organizations have taken on to manage chronic stress:
Create shared metrics for reducing chronic stress and celebrate things like “everyone logged out at 6 pm for four weeks straight!”
Limiting the number of meetings in a day
Create an agreement that we don’t send emails after work hours. Doesn’t mean you can’t draft the email and schedule it to go out in the morning, but if you collectively agree to end the day then do it.
Once per quarter, assess and right size workload to align with capacity both individually and collectively.
Create buffers of time between meetings so that people have time to transition, pause, and breathe.
Allow staff to be off-camera during video conference meetings. Not being on camera is a vital way that people save energy. Better yet not every meeting needs to be video!
Fund health savings accounts to cover out-of-pocket costs for culturally competent mental health providers.
Designate a weekly “no meetings” day and/or shorten the work week.
When I was experiencing burnout last year, the number one most valuable thing I did was shorten my work day and my work week. I was able to get more done in a much shorter amount of time because I had more mental energy.
I also found that using the Pomodoro method reduced chronic pain because working in short sprints with 5-min breaks in between meant I was getting up from my desk more often.
Are you interested in taking a structural approach to addressing burnout in your organization? Schedule a discovery session with us to learn more about trainings and coaching to create systemic change to end chronic stress.