What's in Your “Combating Burnout” Play?

The experiment last week came about as I made a mistake and mixed up my “Chasing Psychological Safety” and “The Future is Agile” newsletters. The topic wasn’t going to be different but the tone was. And I didn’t think the community reading this one could handle my up-in-arms tone, but I was pleased to discover I was wrong. They can. So we'll mostly keep the vibe.

Well not everyone could, a couple of hundred subscribers were lost. I’ve been thinking about them. 

Not for vanity but because we need to understand opposition more than we need to hear agreement. It’s the feedback we need the most and get the least, after all, as Amy Edmondson says in the Fearless Organization “you can’t mitigate for what is not said or heard”. 

While unfortunate, it’s very probable that they left because the tone irritated them. Too cutting. The question is, what was cutting about it - what made them dismiss me as an outsider who “doesn’t really get it” and want to hear nothing more from me. 

Was it that they thought I’m one of those people preaching from an ivory tower about real-life organisational predicaments I know and do nothing about? Can’t be that, I make no secret that writing the book was the second job while the “day job” one is designing our product for teams, and getting my hands dirty alongside hundreds of big organisations -half of which are big banks so you do the maths-. Plus, the second article in this series on Tuesdays is usually a short punchy video that always aims to contain step-by-step advice on making a difference. 

Or was it that they couldn’t hear it? That they actually agreed in their hearts of hearts but they had resigned to not ever doing anything about the HumanDebt so unsubscribing was an act of self-care so they aren’t made to feel guilty for their lack of action? I’d almost rather it was this, because if we’re going to advocate empathy we have to allow for how not everyone is in a position to wear their hero cape every day. 

People have life moments that have to take priority which will disallow them from expanding the mental and emotional energy it takes to undertake big organisational battles. Many people. Hell, most people. And that’s ironically the crux of this very issue. There’s one “life moment” that’s common to most of us and it will indeed prevent capes from being worn: “the being intensely burnout after a pandemic” moment. 

This is the higher irony of it all. How this is all about the humanity of it. About having lives and having emotions and how we’ve been asked to live in denial of the reality of it. 

There are good signs that it’s changing. That the dialogue on human matters is here to stay, no longer confined to the fluffy afterthought section of our work. All the “Is it ok to swear at work” surveys emerging. The “Ways to make parenting work in the middle of a busy WFH schedule” discussion. The “Kit an office room with a couch and soft furnishings for people to catch their breath and regroup in a wellness area” (debatable!) counsel. The ample “it’s ok to be serious about self-care” articles. 

This “get your own oxygen mask on” advice is the one that is most relevant here. We have to. The magical unicorn of the organisation won’t cure burnout for us. The smartest organisations may do the two main things that can help - give us ample time to recoup now and ample permission to redesign work going forward around true flexibility and that will help, but realistically, not even those enlightened ones will wave a wand and make it all better. The work of making ourselves fit for battle will come down to us again. A lot of adulting is needed. Where we explore our limits, are kind to ourselves and do what our minds and hearts need to heal from this trauma we all went through. With or without the organisation that’s heavily needed. That can’t be avoided. 

Add to it how most organisations won’t be smart enough to do those two main things (time off now - complete flexibility after) and how they offer nothing but sheer denial. That only makes burnout worse. Living in an organisation where the tone-deafness towards all that’s being talked about concerning flexible, hybrid, humanised work from anywhere and any time is evident every day, will eventually have most professionals reach for the contact details of the first headhunters once they gather their thoughts, yes -and that’s what will power what I think will be the biggest mobility wave in the knowledge industry that we have seen so far- but until the,n and until they muster the strength to be self-respecting enough and leave organisations not offering what has fast become the minimum requirements around ways of work, they stay and they suffer. 

And when we suffer we can’t be heroes. 

Here’s what I say: please don’t buy the rhetorics that now that it happened we're doomed - while burnout prevention is much easier than burnout reversal/regeneration/recovery, we are where we are and we need to do something about it.

And here's what I hope will work: don't go at it alone. The healing of the trauma, the counteracting of the burnout with the aggressive self-care, the work on feeling better again despite the organisation. Look around and do it with your team. Everyone else needs this theoretical permission. To be told it’s ok to be selfish for a while. To respect themselves. To know it's ok to care about their own wellbeing and that of their teammates. That there has to be time for batteries recharging, that there has to be time for the hard conversations around outcomes and productivity and time management and true flexibility. That they are worth it. Just having an honest and open conversation about it in the team will make a world of a difference. 

This is why this week, we go beyond the advice to focus your efforts on increasing empathy and we’re working on a new play in collaboration with a couple of teams that have attempted this as an offshoot of their “Team Re-Launch” plays called the “Combating Burnout Hackathon”.

Tomorrow and next week we’ll tell you a bit more about it and even give you a simplified version you can use even if you’re not a client of PeopleNotTech -needless to say that if you’re not you won’t see the effects of doing any of this work in data though- but until then take a few minutes today to think - “What could I do (more of) self-care wise?”