If there are employees who have more resources than they need to get their work done and earn a living, I’m not familiar with them. In an age of cost-cutting, when many employees are asked to do more with far less, quick burnout is common.
The solution may be a burnout coach, a resource I never heard of until now.
“‘Burnout coaches’ and ‘burnout recovery specialists’ are increasingly popping up across Canada, the U.S., the UK, Australia, and Europe. Rarely are they licensed therapists or psychologists—instead they are usually people who…have obtained certification from the International Coaching Federation and have spent a great deal of time researching workplace burnout and its causes,” according to Amanda Stephenson, writing for the Associated Press.
The burnout coach provides lessons in how employees can better pace themselves and manage stress.
The Need for Manager Buy-In
To make recommendations from burnout coaches work, managers would have to be on board with the recovery process. An employee can aim to pace themselves and not get upset, but if a manager is on their back to do ever more in ever shorter periods of time, it will be to no avail.
Burnout coaches would need sessions solely with the employee and then would need at least one session with the employee’s manager and another session with the two of them together. The burnout coach would need to first find out from the employee what brought them to the point of burnout. They then would have to learn from the employee’s manager what the requirements of the employee’s job are.
From there, the three of them—burnout coach, employee, and manager—would need to work together to devise a strategy to manage the employee’s stress and enable the employee to pace themselves in their work.
More Advance Notice of Assignments, No More “ASAP” Emergencies
Sometimes the manager needs to better plan the workload, providing more advance notice of assignments. Giving advance notice allows an employee to pace themselves and avoids the hysteria of “ASAP” directives from the boss that result in an employee feeling compelled to work at night and on the weekends.
Fair Distribution of Work and Human Resources
The manager also could see if the workload and human resources in the department are being distributed fairly.
For example, does one employee have help from a junior employee while another employee does not? Does one employee have more work assigned to them than the others in the department, so that the one employee who does NOT have a junior employee has a higher level of work that needs to be completed?
Biases sometimes can impact who gets the human resources and the busy-work assignments. From my own observation, women employees often are expected to do a greater amount of busy/in-the-weeds work, plus their higher-level responsibilities, than their male counterparts. A task that may be presumed to be beneath a male employee often is thought to be something the woman employee can handle (on top of doing all the same things her male colleague is doing).
Redefining and Right-Sizing the Meaning of “Crisis”
The manager’s perspective of what constitutes a crisis also can be adjusted. There’s nothing more energy-depleting than a manager who rakes an employee over the coals because of a minor mistake or oversight. Even when more serious, there should never be a reason to approach the situation like a life-and-death emergency—unless you’re in a hospital or emergency services workplace and it truly is.
More often, the mistakes an employee can be beaten up over do not put anyone’s life at risk, and usually don’t even put the business at risk. Managers may need a reset in how to think about errors and how they address those errors with employees.
When you have a skeleton staff, you can’t expect perfection, or that employees will operate like robots that don’t need downtime.
A burnout coach who works with both employees and managers to create manageable workloads and work processes could be part of the solution to the widespread burnout employees (maybe even some of your own) are experiencing.
Do you think about, and work to reduce, employee burnout in your organization?