Address and avoid employee burnout: A Q&A with Rachel Bellow
Rachel Bellow, co-founder of Bonfire Women suggests engaging with your employers in what work they love and what work they loathe.
Employee burnout is continuing to increase and can cost employers millions of dollars in terms of employee turnover and lost productivity. However, Rachel Bellow, co-founder of Bonfire Women suggests engaging with your employers in what work they love and what work they loathe.
What leads to employee burnout?
In Marcus Buckingham’s article in Harvard Business Review, he posits that the antidote to burnout is not disengagement but rather re-engagement. That’s counterintuitive, but experience (yours, mine) shows us that true engagement extinguishes the fire of burnout at its source. Understanding engagement requires understanding what gives each of us (individually, not collectively) a renewable source of burning energy. What is ours to do, which is not the same as what we are able to do? Where does our work align best with our core values? Where does our natural authority shine, and in what environments is it respected? Women, in particular, tend to adopt and adapt to what they believe they must look like, sound like, act like, in order to succeed in their companies. But nothing causes greater burnout than trying to be something and someone you are not.
What are tell-tale signs of burnout?
The obvious signs of burnout are not difficult to see: fatigue, depression, low energy, low ambition, etc. The less obvious signs of burnout have a more aggressive, high-energy face: quick to anger, impatience, insensitivity to co-workers, shift in physical appearance (weight, clothing, hair).
How should we address burnout in the workplace?
It takes a new kind of management ethos to attend to individual preferences as to where, how, and on what their employees find engaging. This kind of individual attention may seem indulgent and coddling to those raised in a different era, but work is a human phenomenon, not a mechanistic one. It’s time to start investigating the underlying factors that lead to engagement versus noting decade after decade that disengagement (quiet quitting) is the scourge of the workplace. We are not recommending a radical shift in management strategy. It simply requires attunement to the individual, and a quarterly check-in on what kind of work they love, what kind of work they loathe, and where the ratio is in their daily lives at the moment. We all have parts of our job we don’t love, but when that portion rises above 30%, we enter quiet quitting territory.
How should we address burnout in managers?
For managers, the specific focus, vis a vis burnout, would be on boundaries. Women managers in particular tend to take a (laudable) holistic approach to manage their teams, where they focus on their employees’ physical and mental wellbeing, learning opportunities, work/life harmony, dignity and meaning at work, social support and sense of belonging. This kind of surround sound management can quickly lead to burnout if managers do not include their own boundaries and self-care in this picture.
How do burnout and company culture correlate?
Burnout is one of many signs that a culture is not well-aligned with its employees. A healthy culture is one that doesn’t wait for burnout to occur but rather remains both curious and attuned to the causes and early signals of burnout. A healthy culture recognizes that certain groups (ones that are least represented among the dominant employee population, ones that are not recognized, rewarded, and promoted as frequently) will experience burnout more frequently, and sooner.
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