How To Help Your Team Deal With Burnout?

Welcome to the Vantage HR Influencers Podcast. This podcast is sponsored by Vantage Circle, the simple and AI-powered rewards and recognition platform for employee engagement. Do your employees hate Monday mornings, lose motivation throughout the week, and appear to be working just for the salary? Then most likely, your employees are burnt out. Burnout is a psychological and physical condition that emerges from continuous stress or extended work hours.

Susmita Sarma: Hi everyone, I am Susmita, your host from the Vantage HR Influencers Podcast. Today we will talk about employee burnout, or workplace burnout. Please join me in welcoming my guest today, David Shar. David is a burnout and meaningful work expert who has helped thousands of managers and employees design a burn-proof culture, discover meaning in their work, and significantly enhance creativity, efficiency, and the bottom line in the process. Hi David, welcome to the show.

David Shar: Hey, thank you so much for having me today, it's an honor to be on the show.

Susmita Sarma: Thank you once again for being here, and to begin with, please could you introduce yourself to our listeners today.

David Shar: Sure, so my name is David Shar and I'm located in Baltimore, Maryland, in the USA, where I live with my wife and five children and my 150-pound dog.

Susmita Sarma: And yes, a burnout-soothing dog.

David Shar: Exactly, yeah, it's like a wild ride around here, I embrace the chaos. But I practice industrial-organizational psychology, which is a really long title, but really what it means is that I go into organizations and help them, specifically with their culture and leadership issues and the way that might be affecting employee motivation, burnout, things like that. And that's what I do for a living. It's a blast, and I do that inside organizations and on stage, wherever.

Susmita Sarma: So what exactly made you interested in employee motivation, and especially employee burnout?

David Shar: Ice cream. Not the answer you were expecting, huh? So I was a serial entrepreneur and I had a small ice cream franchise.

Susmita Sarma: I would definitely get motivated with it.

David Shar: Exactly, it's easy with ice cream. But I had this little franchise, this little ice cream parlor in Baltimore, Maryland, and I had no idea what I was doing in business, so I was sort of making it up as I went along. My employees came, most of them, from the inner city of Baltimore, Maryland, really rough streets and rough neighborhoods around there. And these young adults came and scooped ice cream, and somehow I accidentally helped create this environment where they wanted to be at the ice cream parlor even on their days off. They didn't want to leave. I didn't have the turnover that all the other restaurants around me had. These young adults were completely engaged, and it was beyond just employee engagement. They found meaning in scooping ice cream.

I wasn't sure about the impact I was having until one day, one of my crew members, who had a boyfriend who was in a local gang, came into work. She was about 16 or 17 years old, and she seemed really down, and she was usually the life of the party, so this was odd. I called her in the back and said, "What's going on? Is everything okay?" And she explained that her boyfriend had been found shot multiple times and left for dead that morning. He was flown to the hospital via medevac helicopter, and things didn't look good. I tried to shoo her out of the ice cream parlor. I told her, "Some things are bigger than ice cream, you've got to go be with family, be wherever you need to be." And she said, "No, I need to be here. I can only be here. This is my happy place."

That was like a load of bricks on my shoulder, recognizing what business could be, what leadership could be, what meaning there could be at work. And looking around at my friends who were doctors and lawyers and teachers and nurses, all these objectively meaningful jobs, they were dreading going to work on Monday morning. But these teenagers and young adults, in an industry where you have well over 100 percent annual turnover and disengagement, they just wanted to be scooping ice cream. They found meaning in what they were doing. That led me to the academic field of organizational psychology and researching burnout and employee motivation.

Susmita Sarma: Brilliant, quite an interesting story, David. And honestly, employees and leaders are busier than ever before, which may be contributing to their burnout. So could you describe exactly what we mean by burnout, and maybe expand on the common indicators that someone is burnt out, before we really delve into this topic?

David Shar: Sure, yeah, they are busier than ever. And as we can get into, it's not just that they're busier than ever, but there are now all of these barriers standing between them and doing the work they are there to do, the work they find meaning in.

When we talk about burnout, a lot of times we talk about it like depression. Somebody who's feeling down for a day might say, "I feel depressed," but that's not clinical depression. I think it's similar with burnout, we use the word a little too casually and too often. But like depression, burnout takes time and happens over a period of time. Its three main symptoms, if you will, are emotional exhaustion (not necessarily physical exhaustion, though that typically comes along with it, and mental exhaustion typically comes along with it too, but just feeling emotionally exhausted, emotionally spent, is one of the top three symptoms), increased cynicism, where we become cynical about our work and the meaning in our work, and reduced sense of self-efficacy or personal accomplishment, where we don't feel like we're getting out of our work what we're putting into it. We don't feel like we're being as effective as we should be, or as appreciated as we should be. So those are the main symptoms that we see.

Susmita Sarma: So it excludes our physical health, right? When you talk about burnout, does it typically exclude the physical health?

David Shar: Yeah, so physical health is typically something that comes down the line with burnout. It doesn't typically start there, but usually it gets you on this path where we see people using a lot more sick days, and some of them are actually mental health days. They're psychosomatic symptoms, and some of them are very real symptoms. You know, that mind-body connection, where when we're emotionally exhausted, it very quickly pours over into physical exhaustion and mental exhaustion, just not being able to think anymore. So we do see things like that: we see headaches, we see body aches, we see nausea, we see people who just don't want to get out of bed. You can see any of those things, but even absent those physical symptoms, somebody could certainly be experiencing burnout. It doesn't have to get there before we start calling it burnout.

Susmita Sarma: Thank you for giving us a clear description of burnout, David. Now talking about multitasking: there are people who love to say, "I'm a multitasker, I can have more on my plate than anybody else can." So why do you think this concept has always been a badge of honor?

David Shar: Yeah, I think there's a lot that's like a badge of honor now. "I'm a great multitasker." You often hear people with the humble brags, like, "Yeah, I worked 50 hours this week, or 60 hours this week," and they say it like, "Woe is me," but really they want your praise, because we see work as this sort of value. I think it's really bad for society and for individuals, where it becomes this pissing contest of who works harder, who works more hours, who gets more done multitasking. There's some science that suggests multitasking doesn't exist in the form we think it does. It's really rapid switching between tasks, as opposed to us being able to literally multitask the way we think about it, and that's exhausting. In this culture where we value hard work, there's a lot of benefit to that, but there's also a lot of danger, where we feel this pressure to do more and push harder, until one day we look around and we're either burned out, or the other side of that is everything outside of work has crumbled around us: our family isn't there for us anymore, our friends aren't there for us anymore, because we put everything into our work and never calculated the cost of that.

Susmita Sarma: Very true, I completely agree with you on those points. And I think it's so essential for managers or leaders to realize and accept that they don't have to do it all on their own, and that they should utilize the importance of delegation, isn't it?

David Shar: Yeah, absolutely. We really need to think about what is essential and urgent. There's an Eisenhower matrix, I don't know if you or the listeners are familiar with this, but it's a two-by-two grid where you can measure out what is urgent and what is important. If we think about tasks that way, we can ask: what's urgent and important? Those are the things that need to be done now. What is urgent but less important? Maybe those can be delegated. What is important but not urgent? Maybe that goes on our to-do list for next week. And what is neither important nor urgent, we can avoid those tasks entirely, why even do those?

We really have to think about these things, because in a lot of work cultures, everything is treated as important and urgent, so we think we have to do it all. That's step one, even before you get to delegating: really understanding what's important, what's urgent, and not misrepresenting those tasks to yourself or to your employees. The second thing is to trust other people. They're not going to do everything exactly the way you would, and that's okay, because you're not perfect either. Giving people the space to do things and experiment and do them their own way, you might end up learning things, you might end up getting a better-quality product out of it. We need to trust and delegate, while also being careful that we're not overloading our employees or colleagues. And you also have to show the courage to be available and open up to your team members.

Susmita Sarma: This is where I stop and where I want our listeners to carry this task forward, isn't it? I love that point. Modeling good work-life balance, or work-life integration, type behaviors is so important.

David Shar: Often I speak with and work with managers who have a double standard, but not in the way you'd think. They have a double standard where they give more leeway and grace to their employees while not giving that same leeway and grace to themselves, and that's very damaging. Of course, it can be toxic the other way too, where we push everything onto our employees and think we're perfect. But flip that around: sometimes you have managers and leaders who put all of these expectations on themselves while cutting slack for their employees and teams. I think it's incredibly important that we understand and model what we want from our employees. If you want your employees to have balance, to set up boundaries, then you need to model balance and boundaries.

I was once speaking with a police chief who said his officers were burning out left and right and never stopped. I asked him if he ever stopped, and he said, "Well, I'm the chief of police, I can't stop, when my phone rings I need to answer it 100 percent of the time." I asked him, "Why don't you have a backup phone, an emergency phone that you carry during your off times, when you're recharging, and leave your main phone at home, so you'll still be there for the real emergencies that need to reach you?" But when you're not trusting your lieutenants, when you're not modeling the ability to walk away for some set time to refresh, then not only are you not refreshed, your bucket isn't full, and we need a full bucket to fill other people's buckets. So not only are you not at your healthiest, and not only are you burning out, but your people aren't going to do what you tell them to do, they're going to do what you show them you want them to do. And if they want to be promoted, if they want to be honored and feel like a valued member of the organization, they're going to do what they see you doing. So it's really important on both fronts: don't burn yourself out, and also model the behaviors you want to see.

Susmita Sarma: David, thank you for sharing that with us. And when it comes to discussing how leaders may go from feeling burnt out to finding some balance in their lives, we are definitely talking to the right person today. Would you like to give some practical suggestions for our audience to help them handle workplace burnout?

David Shar: Yeah, I think especially right now, in this moment where we're still in the traumatic experience of this worldwide pandemic and everybody's life has been turned upside down, and even if your life is starting to feel like it's going back to normal, there's still a sense of uncertainty out there. And we don't really experience trauma fully until the traumatic experience has passed. So we need to be forgiving of ourselves in this moment, and forgiving of our teams or employees in this moment. Everybody's doing their best, and that's what we can ask for.

But I would also say, remove obstacles from yourself and your team by truly identifying, going back to the basics, what this is all about for you. What is your work all about? What's the end goal here? What turned you on to this work to begin with? Let's figure that out again, reconnect with that, and set aside all the noise, the bureaucracy, the interpersonal conflicts, the policies and cultural norms that got in the way of that and just created noise. Let's move those aside and get down to the core of it. Now is the best time to be revisiting our policies, both the written ones and the unwritten ones baked into our culture.

Susmita Sarma: That's a great way to conclude here, David, on a positive note. But before we end this show, let us know how our listeners can reach out to you.

David Shar: Sure, I would love to continue the conversation on LinkedIn, I'm very active there, you can direct message me and connect with me. You can also find me on my website, illuminatepmc.com, PMC for Performance Management Consultants. Definitely reach out, let's continue the conversation.

Susmita Sarma: Thank you for coming on the show today and sharing your knowledge, ideas, and experience. I'm sure it will be both engaging and valuable to our listeners. So once again, thank you for joining us, David.

David Shar: Thank you, Susmita. Thank you all for listening.