The World Health Organisation predict burnout will be a global pandemic in less than a decade and The World Economic Forum estimates an annual burnout cost of GBP 225B to the global economy. We know there’s an organisational cost of burnout too with increased turnover, absenteeism and of course the obvious impact on performance.
Burnout has increased since the pandemic and the future is uncertain. Here are 7 ways you can beat burnout for yourself and your team.
1. Mind your busyness – it’s not a badge of honour or a reflection of how valuable you are. It’s a sign you’re not at your best if you’re always busy and probably running on an empty tank. Slow down so you can be effective, rather than busy.
2. Prioritise rest and self-care to build your resilience and ensure you are a sustainable resource. Talk about the things you do with your team and ask others what they do to keep this front of mind and show it’s an important part of leading yourself regardless of your role/hierarchy.
3. Know your triggers when burnout is approaching, audit your energy levels and fuel the tank as necessary.
4. Master the art of tiny gains and focus on one thing at a time. Teams with too many priorities will feel overwhelmed and spread too thin. It’ll also hamper their progress on said priorities. Out of all your priorities which is the actual priority for now. The most important thing for day or this week? Start there.
5. Structure your life for success (harness the power of good habits). This can be as simple as taking a lunchbreak, introducing walking meetings or keeping a tidy desk. This also means delegating, setting boundaries and saying no to ensure you’ve not overcommitted or spread yourself too thin.
6. Create space. Thinking space is so critical; it’s where we innovate, it’s how we think strategically, it’s how we calm our minds, it’s also how we focus and gain clarity to make decisions and solve problems. Not to mention the impact it has on overwhelm, stress and our emotional regulation. Make sure there’s space in your schedule. It’s often where we add the most value and impact because of the ideas we generate that our creativity simply can’t access in a busy, noisy, overloaded brain doing back to back meetings and a hundred emails.
7. Get your flow on – the art of flow increases our productivity and focus allowing us to access a state of deep work. Know the kind of environment you need for focus and understand your daily rhythms so you know when you’re at your most productive. The same goes for those you work alongside.
Most importantly, as a leader, role model this stuff. Your people follow your example rather than your opinion. It’s not good telling everyone else to log off and go home to rest if you’re still sending emails at 10pm.
These are just a few of the tips from my Burnout to Brilliance programme where we so the practical work to bring these theories to life. It’s designed to allow us to find more time, to battle the busyness and cut through the noise to do important work, to improve our focus. It helps us understand burnout and avoid it. It helps our teams improve their productivity and focus. To understand the habits of high performing people and how we can hack some of those habits to gain control of our schedule and to overcome some of the overwhelm that can happen when we get busy.
Burned out staff will not perform at their peak, they will also not be engaged. We know that that has an impact on the bottom line. Retention will suffer as they won't be sticking around and there will be the obvious impact on productivity. To enable your team to perform at their peak, to re-energise, to re-engage, to press reset. We need a new way of thinking, a new way of doing things. To develop some practical strategies to wipe the slate clean, move forward and to be our best without burning out in the process.
Find out more about the Burnout to Brilliance Programme for your organisation here.