1 Simple and Often Overlooked Leadership Solution to Employee Burnout

The pandemic has exacerbated organizational challenges related to employee wellbeing and mental health. Countless national and global studies have highlighted the increasing rates of burnout and the associated risks for individuals and organizations.

Are employee wellness programs the answer? As Christie Hunter Arscott, author of Begin Boldly puts it: “Unfortunately, empowering individuals to combat burnout and burnout through programmatic offerings has its limitations. burnout is now recognized by the World Health Organization as a 'phenomenon', which places the responsibility for solving it on the organization, rather than the individual."

What can business leaders do to combat this rising trend? According to Arscott, there is a simple and often overlooked solution to burnout that organizations can implement immediately.

The Solution

The solution is to make sure employees understand what matters most to their managers so they can make an informed investment of time and energy.

According to Arscott's research, most employees felt pulled in too many directions, while experiencing feelings of conflict, tension, and overwhelm. The reason? “Employees often fall victim to investing in activities they think are important at work, while neglecting what is actually critically important to their managers and teams. Their investment of time is based on assumptions rather only on informed information."

Here's how to act.

1. Focus employees on the tasks that provide the best return on their time investment

Arscott encourages leaders to imagine that employees have a wallet with a limited number of dollars: their time. Leaders are responsible for helping employees invest those dollars in the activities and tasks that produce the most returns. Optimizing investments means that employees will be less likely to burn out. Failure to optimize them leads to ongoing feelings of conflict and tension. If your employees are investing based on assumptions rather than ideas, you are likely unintentionally creating a culture of burnout.

2. Make sure managers share what matters

In the daily hustle and bustle of competing tasks and priorities, managers may not share what matters most to them. This prevents employees from prioritizing and assigning their tasks accordingly. Without insight into expectations and priorities, employees can fall victim to frantically investing time in things that don't matter, with heightened feelings of tension and conflict as a byproduct. Even if they work 18-hour days, employees can receive negative feedback during a performance review if they don't prioritize and execute on what matters most to their managers. Arscott shares that this is comparable to "pushing a boulder up a mountain to get to the top and realizing you're climbing the wrong mountain. If managers don't provide direction on which mountain to climb, employees will invest their energy in the bad climb to the detriment of well-being and productivity." It is a bad investment with bad returns. Encourage all managers to set up weekly, structured time or communications to share what matters most, what their priorities are, and help employees invest their time accordingly. Building an understanding of real expectations can ease the pressure.

3. Create a culture of curiosity

As Arscott shares, "Curiosity leads to clarity." Leaders should encourage employees to ask questions about how best to invest their time. Once they have clarified expectations, they can optimize investments. If they invest most of their time at work trying to manage customer requests, when what's really important to their manager is meeting a particular project deadline, they can...