The Perfect Storm of Burnout
Apart from pivot, ‘resilience’ has become one of the most overused words since COVID-19 darkened our doors steps. In April 2019 I wrote an article called the [“Darkside of Resilience”] and it immediately became one of the most read articles we have ever produced. It explained how our research shows that people’s resilience levels are actually really high. You are probably as shocked as we were. It’s shocking because the current narrative in business is that to cope with the pandemic we need to maximise our resilience.
What our research shows is that we don’t have a resilience problem, we have a recovery problem.
We don’t need to be tougher we need to practice more self care. Rather than serving us as a strategy to improve our performance and wellbeing, the attitude that we need to be more resilient is encouraging us to push people way beyond what is reasonable.
Over 2020 and 2021 this compulsion to drive ourselves harder and harder has been put on steroids. The last 18 months has been a perfect storm of burnout conditions. Many have had to juggle; trying to work and home school at the same time, a monumental change in how we work and communicate, fear and uncertainty about the future, and the inability to get out and see others, all combined with the fact that we are taking less leave over this time.
All of these factors are leading to unprecedented levels of burnout, fatigue and feelings of overwhelm. The most common messages we are hearing in the hundreds of interviews we have done is, ‘I have never felt so overdone in my life’ or ‘I have never seen my colleagues struggle as much as they are right now’.
We have been trialing different strategies and approaches to prevent burnout with groups who are going through massive levels of pressure and who don’t have the opportunity to take long breaks or have time off work (obviously burnout is a very complex issue and our experience in the work place plays a significant role in areas such as workload, culture and systems. Within this research we chose to focus on what the individual could control). Our quest has been to understand the protective factors that act like a high functioning immune system to defend people from the slippery slope of burnout.
Some of the groups we studied were:
School Principals
Collections departments of banks
Paramedics
Partners in professional services
Executives
Leaders
As you can see these are some seriously tough roles.
After years of research and many many studies, we found was that one of the biggest mistakes we make about recovery is that we think we require long periods off work to recover and reduce our risk of burnout.
The most common strategy people cited when we asked them, ‘so how are you going to manage your burn out?’ was, ‘I have a holiday in 3 months, I’m just going to push myself and then I’ll relax’. The big break has been our go to move for managing fatigue, but there are two main issues with this;
We are not utilising other strategies that can be just as effective.
Because of travel restrictions and the fear of cancellations due to future lockdowns, less people are taking leave because they don’t see the value in it. Why take a week off when I will just be attached to the lounge and binge watch Ted Lasso (for the record, I have become a bit of a super fan!)
Interestingly people are saying that their holidays are not as relaxing as they used to be. How many times has someone said, ‘I am back a week and it feels like I never had a holiday’? The reason our holidays are less restorative is that we have lost the subtle art of switching off. All too often it takes us a week to unwind, we have three good days and then we start worrying about work again. That means it feels like we have had three days off, not the two weeks off we thought we were getting. And to add to the insult, often the amount of work we have to do in preparation for the holiday and the volume we have to deal with when we get back negates the break entirely.
Our data shows that people are not utilising the restorative benefits of micro recovery. There is huge value in incorporating small moments of recovery into your work and personal life. Micro recovery is inserting short, regular and consistent bouts of recovery, which allows people to recover on the run.
We have been exploring the use of a temporal model to inject these small moments of recovery. We discovered that the application of recovery across different time points is a critical factor in the prevention of burn out. How valuable are micro moments of recovery? Turns out very valuable.
A key in preventing burn out is the practice of short, regular but consistent bursts of recovery, such as practicing deep relaxation daily, re-energizing weekly to refill your cup and taking a moment to shirk responsibility monthly. We taught leaders and their teams this temporal model and then compared the wellbeing of those who fully implemented the model, versus those that did not.
People who embraced the implementation of micro recovery reported a 60% increase in regular recovery activities. This resulted in a significant drop in stress levels (16.3%), the feeling of being overwhelmed at work (14.5%) and levels of burnout reduced significantly (44%).
To be clear, we love a cocktail in the resort pool bar, taking a romantic extra long weekend or flying down a black run at Thredbo as much as the next person. We know that spending time on holidays discovering new places and spending time with others is important to a balance wellbeing. But what if this could be even more optimal, and I don’t mean a Hemsworth in the deckchair beside you. What if that holiday could be even better?
An interesting finding that we did not expect was people reported that after consistently implementing this model their holidays became more restful and restorative, and my inner researcher just needed to know why. When we investigated this the reasons were that the model taught them the ability to relax and turn off, increases the capacity to do things that energise and make them light up and helps people resist the urge to cram more in their day by over-scheduling. All of this means that by practicing regular bursts of recovery, your ability to relax, turn off and decompress more quickly can get you straight into holiday mode, quicker than Roy Kent’s right boot can kick a goal.
If you’re interested in learning more for yourself or your team, simply get in touch with us today!