Americans aren’t strangers to burnout. The amalgamation of hustle culture, lack of work-life balance, outdated vacation and family leave policies, and poor access to affordable healthcare make the U.S. workforce one of the least healthy among first-world countries. Throw in a global pandemic and rapidly changing work conditions — remote, hybrid — and now we have employees experiencing anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder at record-breaking levels. And while it may feel like we’re finally seeing the light at the end of the COVID-19 tunnel, leaders should be bracing for the pandemic’s next wave: the resultant mental health crisis.
Why? A tipping point of stressors is pushing a wave of burnout that may actually be more costly to our businesses than the pandemic. Ongoing remote work is responsible for an increased risk of burnout, as is the idea of returning to the workplace. In one recent survey of over 4,000 employees, every single person reported being anxious at the thought of returning to in-person work, citing their concerns over a loss of flexibility, a need for childcare, and potential exposure to COVID-19.
I’ve said previously: extreme times create defining moments for leaders. In order to successfully survive the next wave of the global pandemic and burnout epidemic, we must recognize and act on the cognitive and emotional challenges our employees continue to face. We must acknowledge the risks and opportunities of our situation and apply what we’ve learned to move forward.
In leading through a time of extreme crisis, three actions warrant the attention of every business leader.
Re-examine and adapt your policies
As I watched my team grapple with holding their families together while also trying to preserve their own emotional wellbeing, I saw firsthand that our policies need to adapt. When a major event impacts your entire workforce, how can it not also impact your company policies and reset your managerial expectations? In the last year, in reaction to increasing burnout and worklike issues, our policies have evolved in some impactful ways:
Traditionally, employees were expected to be in the office from 9 to 5 every day, with the unspoken presumption that working before and beyond those hours was a sign of hard work and commitment. One of the first policies I addressed was reimagining our core working hours. Instead of 9 to 5, employees can come in earlier and leave earlier, or vice versa on the late side, as long as they are present between the hours of 10 and 4. Second, as a leader, I had to prioritize my employees’ self-care or else risk losing them, and that meant granting them flexibility and time away from the office to rest. If employees are burned out, their engagement will decline and their performance will suffer whether they’re in the office or not.
Another policy I changed was the introduction of all-company PTO days. People had nowhere to go during the pandemic, so they weren’t using any vacation time. And if they did, our fast-paced culture prevented them from fully enjoying their time off to rest. They were too busy thinking about their other colleagues who were still working or the mountain of emails that were accumulating in their inbox. Company-wide PTO days enabled all of us to feel better about downtime, creating a more productive way to foster time to refresh.
Develop their resilience skills
You can’t get rid of workplace stress, but you can train people in resilience skills so they can thrive in uncertain times. Highly resilient people are 28% more able to adapt to changing circumstances than those who lack the self-awareness and self-efficacy to recognize how they respond to prolonged periods of stress.
As leaders, we need to help employees unlearn what toxic work culture has taught them. Instead, leaders must model several foundational resilience skills and build them into their company’s culture to interrupt the stress-anxiety-negativity cycle that leads to burnout:
- Keep emotions in check to maintain calm and focus. Much more impactful than breathing is getting to the root cause of our emotions: the fears and suppositions that drive us. Anxiety and anger present when people are worried, uncertain, and fearful. Anger erupts when we feel people are violating our rights. It’s important to train employees on how to regulate their emotions, so they see more realistic, probable outcomes and their thoughts don’t spiral.
- Practice gratitude. When employees are feeling the weight of their anxiety in times of crisis, it’s important they maintain a positive attitude by focusing on what’s going right, instead of what might go wrong. Gratitude allows positivity to build upon itself.
- Build a support system. Empathy is an important skill to help people relate to others, anticipate how others feel, and support each other in tough times. When individuals can manage their stress in healthier ways, healthier behaviors and interactions spread, and this creates a positive, powerful network of support.
Our data has shown that employees who actively participated in digital resilience skill building had the smallest increase in job stress (+1%). In contrast, those who spent the least time had increases of more than 20% in job stress.
Leaders must see their employees’ mental health as a proactive preventive strategy for engagement and business success. It heartens me how acutely aware many business leaders are of how burnout impacts their employees and their business — and for good reason. More than ever, companies are seeing massive disruptions to employee engagement and productivity, and it costs them big — up to $2,246 per disengaged employee, in fact.
Establish a culture of support
We must eliminate the stigma and negativity surrounding burnout, and this is only possible through honest, persistent communication. Help employees feel empowered to talk about burnout, while also feeling comfortable enough to ask for help because they know the support will be there for them when they need it.
Employer support is a necessary safeguard against workforce burnout. Stress, sleep disorders, and burnout were 10X higher among employees who felt unsupported by their employer. Leaders need to make their teams aware of the emotional wellbeing and behavioral health supports available to them. Data-based assessments are a great way to safely and accurately predict at-risk employees and then privately direct them to the resources available to them.
Burnout isn’t an individual problem; it’s a company problem. The pace of transformation is relentless and has no end in sight. Commitment to employees must not wane. Let the first wave of the pandemic shine a spotlight on our shortcomings and establish what we must do to successfully navigate the fallout.
