How Can Managers Combat Work From Home Burnout?

What Is Burnout?

Burnout, as defined by The World Health Organization, is a serious condition and a workplace syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. The WHO furthers elaborates burnout as being characterized by

Chronic exhaustion and feelings of energy depletion,

Alienation from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job, and

A feeling of professional inefficacy.

Burnout can manifest as restlessness, resignation, apathy to work and life, inappropriate responses to everyday situations, or can take more stark forms of anger, anxiety, or depression. Its multifaceted and changing nature makes it hard to identify and pre-empt burnout.

However, the more we understand the problem, the better we are at tackling the challenge.

Burnout – an emerging challenge in the remote workplace

For many, remote work was the opportunity to allot focus time, find work-life balance, and put a pause on the routine office work environment. However, with the overnight shift to remote work due to Covid-19, this work model became a nightmare for many. Several employees lacked infrastructure, space, and quiet to work from home exacerbated by loneliness and worrying about job and health insecurity. This stressful environment led to burnout.

How Can Managers And Leaders Help?

As remote work is being largely practiced in the modern work world, managers have to ensure they protect their teams from burnout. Here are some guidelines on how they can help their teams:

Rely on factual visibility

A culture of visibility that prioritizes data and factual knowledge allows team members to focus on performance rather than focusing on presenteeism, encourages a collaborative team culture, and pushes people to work towards shared goals.

Managers should adopt fair and transparent practices and communicate guidelines for performance assessment and management practices. Managers should also consciously avoid personal and organizational biases and stress on data-driven decision-making.

Set clear goals, communicate strategies and evaluation criteria, allow conversation and questions, and ensure data-facilitated performance management. As an organization, recognize and reward accomplishments, both personal and professional. Team cohesion can lead to great outcomes without the stress of overwork.

Data-driven workload management

Promote work-life balance by adopting a data-driven approach to workload management. Leverage data to understand what your teams are working on, how they connect and collaborate with each other, and to understand if they are overworking. This insight can help in allotting manageable workloads that have time for other aspects of life. Are your employees getting enough days without after-work calls, are there any indicators of anomalies such as missed deadlines, or what signals of burnout arise in your teams? Understanding the answers to these questions can help managers prevent burnout.

Facilitate asynchronous work

Asynchronous work gives employees the freedom to work at a time and place they feel most productive. This helps improve outcomes by allowing employees the flexibility to choose to focus while they work and prioritize other aspects of life at other times. Async work thus promotes better work-life balance and gives employees time to care for their health and well-being.

Better 1:1s

Great managers are always looking for opportunities to connect and communicate with their teammates. When leaders are empathetic and reliable with interactions that are intention-driven, teammates align better and the team becomes more cohesive. 1:1 meetings can go a long way in building cohesive and healthy teams. Ask thoughtful and mindful questions in one on one meetings, give relevant and useful feedback, and stay empathetic when communicating about employees’ mental well-being. Use the one-on-one conversation to talk about what efforts businesses and managers can make to better well-being in the team.

Work-life balance, from the top down

Encourage harmonious social connectedness at work, raise awareness about the importance of healthy habits, encouraging digital detox and breaks, while also emphasizing time management to be more productive at work. Finding the balance between professional and personal usually is adopted after examples set by team leaders.

Purpose-led team culture

What are your employees’ goals and priorities? How can you, as a leader, connect individual priorities to team goals and visions? Understanding insights into these questions can help you in making employees feel engaged in their jobs and promote employee retention.

Conclusion

Burnout can be detrimental to the ethos of a team. Managers should create an environment that focuses on employees’ engagement and well-being. On this front, using data to support practices of well-being in the remote workplace can help in building resilient organizations that can rebuild a new workplace culture for the future of work.

💡 Hatica’s work analytics platform identifies imbalance in work allocation, patterns of

cognitive overload and a lack of quiet days, and other burnout signals in your engineering teams and provides data-driven visibility for managers to take action. Come, find out more at hatica.io

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