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Burnout Series Part 2: Preventing Burnout and Building Resilience

by Jason Haller

Last week in Part 1​ of my series on burnout, I focused on what burnout is, what causes it, and the negative impacts on your personal and professional well-being. In this installment, you will learn about individual strategies to address burnout and organizational strategies to prevent it.

Part Two: Preventing Burnout and Building Resilience
To optimize performance, increase flow, and manage stress effectively, the best tools are active recovery, quality sleep, low cognitive load, and a healthy lifestyle. Active recovery comes in many different forms, but the key attribute is that it is helping to speed up your recovery and re-energize you.

An example of passive recovery might be watching tv, which seems restful since you are just sitting there. However, watching tv induces gamma waves in your brain, the highest frequency waves of all. As stated by the flow research collective, they relate to simultaneous processing from different brain areas responding to high stimulation. While you may be trying to veg out on the couch, your brain is still hard at work.

Active Recovery
Active recovery in the form of moderate exercise, yoga, breathwork, massage, hot or cold therapy, uplifting social interaction, or just quality sleep can make a huge difference for speeding up recovery and metabolizing stress before it reaches unhealthy levels. Finding ways to incorporate these habits into your daily routine is the best way to help keep stress levels in check and avoid spiraling towards burnout.
​ A couple of ten to thirty-minute sessions per day would be ideal, like a walk or midday workout and maybe one short stretching/mindfulness session to start or end the day. Some of the more involved recovery techniques can be taken advantage of at longer intervals. For example, a weekly or monthly massage or sauna session. These should be things that provide benefit, rather than something that feels like an additional “to-do” item that ends up adding pressure to your day. Be mindful of what’s realistic for your situation and start there.
Building Grit

​ A different way to build resilience is to build grit. I wrote more about this in a previous blog, but it’s worth mentioning again here. At a very basic level, if you expose yourself to uncomfortable or challenging situations that you find your way out of, that helps build confidence and shifts the bar for what you consider stressful. It won’t change the stress you are exposed to, but it will change how you perceive that stress.

“90% of your long term happiness is predicted not by the external world, but by the way your brain processes the world” – Shawn Achor
Flow Triggers
Embracing flow triggers and habits that help keep cognitive load low and prevent multitasking can be beneficial as well. When your cognitive load is high, the perceived challenge is greater than when you have less on your mind. Working with clear goals and avoiding the temptation to rush through everything, allows you to work at a more efficient level and experience less challenge and less stress along the way. Over time, this can add up to significantly less exposure to unnecessary stress. Checking email multiple times per hour, scheduling back to back calls and meetings all day long, switching from one task to another frequently, hopping on social media or internet browsing during work blocks, are all examples of ways people reduce their focus and make work harder and more stressful for themselves.
Setting boundaries and clear goals for yourself can help you stay focused and engaged as well as prevent you from overextending on projects or with your schedule. Sometimes saying “no” and establishing boundaries is necessary to protect long-term performance.
Optimal Health
Lastly, building and maintaining a healthy lifestyle in general increases resilience to stress. When we become less healthy (poor sleep, diabetes, obesity, dehydration), there’s a cost. You may not see it, but chemically the price has to be paid and resources have to be spent. When we use those resources, we have fewer resources left to allocate towards incoming stresses. The more time you spend incurring new stress without spending time dealing with existing stress, the farther you fall behind. Eventually, there aren’t enough resources to cope and you experience fatigue, irritability, and burnout. Regular exercise, a balanced diet, some time out in nature, and good quality sleep are all excellent ways to look after your health and protect against burnout.

“Well-being is the foundation of sustained peak performance. Your time is fixed during the day, but the energy available is variable. To better manage energy output, you need to oscillate or switch, between energy expenditure and recovery throughout the day. “

What Can be Done at the Organizational Level?

According to the World Health Organization, for every one dollar spent on scaled-up treatment of common mental disorders such as depression and anxiety, there is a four-dollar return in the form of improved health and productivity. That’s a great ROI, but burnout is much easier to prevent than it is to treat. To prevent it, we have to look at what’s causing it rather than who suffers from it.
Look at more than just salary

An MIT Sloan study​ looking into the great resignation found that “a toxic corporate culture is by far the strongest predictor of industry-adjusted attrition and is 10 times more important than compensation in predicting turnover.” A toxic culture is typically made up of several of the burnout triggers previously mentioned, such as breakdown of community, values conflict, and unfairness. As a result, we can see how burnout is contributing to turnover, even if the study doesn’t outright list it as the top cause.

Promote growth and lateral movement from within
Interestingly, the same MIT study also found “providing employees with lateral career opportunities is 2.5 times more powerful as a predictor of a company’s relative retention rate compared with compensation” and “lateral career opportunities are 12 times more predictive of employee retention than promotions.” What we can see here is that compensation, while critical, is clearly not the key factor for employees when making career decisions, and often what the work is and who it’s done with is more important.
Monitor the predictors of attrition to align employees to the right role

The great resignation has shown that employees and executives alike are willing to give up positions and careers to find better situations for themselves. A recent survey, however, found 72% of participants regret leaving their previous jobs. Perhaps, the answer is not to switch jobs, but to create change from within. Change begins with leadership keeping an eye out for signs of burnout, genuinely being interested in solving the problem, and being open to feedback from their employees.

Pilot programs that are meaningful to actual stakeholders​
Dr. Christina Maslach gave an example of a company that put a volleyball court on the rooftop of their building to improve employee morale. Instead of improving morale, the employees noticed how little use it got and developed resentment and cynicism thinking about what they could have done with some of the budgets that went to that project. Clearly, this idea did not come from the employees and was an attempt at guessing what might appease them. These employees probably needed a few simple and affordable things to make their lives easier and work more efficiently, but, instead, got a volleyball court.
Ensure you are in touch with the reality of the current state​

Once leadership is committed to creating a better culture and work environment, a baseline needs to be established to find out what areas need improvement. This could be a casual conversation with employees, a survey tool like Maslach’s burnout inventory (MBI), or something a bit more extensive in scope like our Wellness Wave™​ at Five to Flow (a proprietary diagnostic tool aimed at assessing organizational wellness).

Communicate and iterate​
Once you have some data, it is important to be transparent when relaying it back to the employees. Only reporting positive findings will be perceived as inauthentic and you’ll be less likely to get genuine responses in the future. It’s important to relay these findings because the next step is getting the employees involved in creating solutions. Typically, it will work best to have smaller groups or teams of employees come up with ideas for their situations, rather than aiming for broad sweeping changes that are harder to get consensus on and are more likely to be at higher risk financially. Over time certain strategies may be successful and can grow into larger programs.
Reinforce accountability and measure both successes and failures
In order to assess the effectiveness of these programs, accountability, adherence, and reassessing is necessary. If the program isn’t adhered to because there’s no accountability, then when you reassess after four to six months the results will not be representative of the pilot program, but rather the lack of adherence.
Watch for both positive and negative domino effects of your changes

One of the real-world companies Dr. Maslach worked with exemplified this process​ perfectly. They gathered data and found “unfairness” to be the second-lowest scoring category out of the burnout triggers. The executives were shocked and committed to a year of working towards addressing this problem. They followed the process outlined above and a year later their unfairness score was dramatically improved, as was the score in all five of the other categories (workload, reward, community, values, and control). There was a ripple effect that Dr. Maslach describes as being very common, and I can see why.

Listen, care, and take action
We’ve seen firsthand how a short interview with an employee of one of our customers can inspire feelings of hope and engagement. To them, the idea that someone is asking them these questions and genuinely listening to their responses makes them feel heard and involved. The idea that they are not alone, someone cares, that something might change, or the minutia they deal with day to day might improve is something positive to aspire to. The thought that they helped contribute to that positive change is empowering and drives more investment into their work. That is a huge step toward optimizing flow and preventing burnout. ​
Your Call to Action

There are thousands of variables that will determine the individual challenges each company faces, which can take time and resources to parse out. The companies that invest in this issue, however, will gain a significant advantage over their counterparts and the people who work for those companies will enjoy their work more. Ultimately, this leads to enjoying their life outside of work more. If you want to prevent burnout and don’t know where to get started, take the Wellness Wave™​ or schedule an appointment​ with one of our coaches today.

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