Entering the 3rd phase of the business response to COVID19 - BURNOUT
After a few days of the lockdown starting, we believed that we needed a survive, revive, and thrive strategy that would provide a framework and structure to move forward with. We put in place teams to be able to execute a survival plan. However, looking back we realise we got it wrong. It was based on the economic model of thinking: faster, cheaper, quicker and how we become more efficient and productive. COVID19 provided opportunity and threat in equal measure to our market and model, but we kind of looked at the speck in your eye, missing the log in our own eye.
Phase 1 of the response was not about surviving, it was in fact about exhaustion. The insights looking back were that phase 1 was all about tiredness, confusion, and being generally overwhelmed. It is clear that this was due to loss of rules, heuristics, and routines which made life possible or at least tolerable. We had been behaving like frogs in water with an ever increasing temperature.
Whilst the activity was survival based on cash availability, had we lifted our eyes from the screens we may have recognised that we were grieving. Grieving for the loss of freedom, model, security, and things that made us feel alive.
Phase 2 was conceived at the outset that we should enter into a revival period. The basis that during phase 1 we would adjust to the working environment, adapt to working from home and have costs aligned to a new model; now we could start to perform. However, what we got was a productivity explosion.
Performance for some staff has gone through the roof. The performers have had phase 1 survival tasks to execute on and are working 15 hours a day. No commute, no lunch, no distraction. However and equally others have been unable to perform at all. The new underperformers are in a position that they have never experienced previously; they don’t have a spare room, are juggling homeschooling with pets, ageing parents, no space, no second screen, poor chair, no desk, and no quiet area. Every small work area is needed by both working parents and the kids; there is no escape. Emerging from an intense meeting to full-on child care or total isolation in 5 steps, no break, no chance to breathe. We have all discovered that back to back calls are tiring but video calls are exhausting.
Leadership and management teams have focussed on and basked in the successes of performance improvements and day to day activities for survival. In reality, the performance figures are not sustainable and we should have focussed on our staff offering compassion and dignity.
Phase 3. BurnOut. Phase 3 was imagined to be about thriving, back to growth and excitement. A new normal where we can flourish. This early thinking appears to be so wrong.
We are starting to see a few over-performers are dropping off as they have had no let-up, feeling that they are doing everything including many others peoples jobs and are holding the company together but no one is supporting and looking after them. The long hours, no breaks, no holiday in sight and now expected new performance metrics have to be continually achieved are adding up to entering burnout.
Burnout is a relatively new term, appearing in the 1974 Book “BurnOut” by Herbert Freudenberger. He investigated the high cost of high achievement. He originally defined burnout as, “the extinction of motivation or incentive, especially where one's devotion to a cause or relationship fails to produce the desired results.” Burnout is a reaction to prolonged or chronic job stress and is characterized by three main dimensions: exhaustion, cynicism (less identification with the job), and feelings of reduced professional ability. More simply put, if you feel exhausted, start to hate your job, and begin to feel less capable at work, you are showing signs of burnout.
The underperformers cannot perform as highlighted earlier for more reasons that are possible to list as each person is unique but isolation is a killer. This group is aware they are underperforming and this adds to the risk and pressure to do more unproductive hours, increasing stress and lack of sleep. A different route to the same outcome, burnout. The scale of mental health concerns raises by the hour. The added pressure for everyone is that they may lose their job and income. It is evident that there are no jobs in the market which adds an intolerable toll to our teams and friends. It is a cycle of increasing mystery and demise.
Executives, leadership and especially the CEO have to bring in, adopt, build or learn fast new skills as chief counsellor and lead therapist.
Executives, leadership and especially the CEO have to bring in, adopt, build or learn fast new skills as chief counsellor and lead therapist. Leadership teams who may lack emotional maturity and honesty with themselves are failing to see the reality about how close to the edge of collapse members of their teams are, as the staff are under enormous pressure. Leadership who are leading by example and working long hours are creating their own end game.
To be clear, this is all of our staff who are heading to burnout (also read breakdown) led by the most productive and highest calibre but side by side with those who are struggling.
What should we be doing?
Right now many in leadership and executive offices keep focussing on productivity measures and congratulating ourselves for the improvements. The reality is that these efficiencies we celebrate are masking a different reality and we should consider the balancing item, which in this case is a hidden cost. We need to get data that brings into focus the short and long term effectiveness of our staff, friends and teams.
Effectiveness relates to getting the right things done. Effectiveness is the capability of producing the desired result or the ability to produce the desired output. When something is deemed effective, it means it has an intended or expected outcome.
During normal times burnout was bounded and limited in scope, what has happened with the current crisis is that Burnout can become contagious. One burnout will start a chain reaction. This is a virus with an R figure greater than 1 and it will spread like wildfire across your organization.
10 key actions to start today.
- Am I about to burnout, am I even able to sense burnout?
- Share this thinking and story and ask if we are talking about burnout?
- Look 360 - who is showing signs of burnout?
- What data do we have? What data do we need to determine our status?
- What governance, ethics and privacy issues does this create?
- Do I or any of my team need mental health training? Who, how and when?
- How do we refine/ change job descriptions to focus on what our teams can do and are good at in the environment they are now in. Why have office metrics when there is no office?
- Reduce the compromise we are asking our staff to make (balancing our children’s education with tasks that fill time and are actually not effective)
- How do we breaking the standard day, 9 to 5 ideas, 8 hours and think about what data we need to run our organisations
- Identifying and breaking performance metrics (KPI’s) that reinforce efficiencies which meet bonus requirements but destroy our teams and our effectiveness.