How are CEOs Preventing Burnout?... Empathetic Leadership

 

Jay Holstine discusses tactics to minimize employee burnout

In today’s virtual workplace, many of us feel we are living at work, regardless of where we are working.   When faced with chronic stress, growing pressures and dwindling space to manage frustrations, the ability to weather yet another predictable stress can cause a debilitating crack, ….burnout.  Often, we don’t realize we are at this limit until it's too late. How do you prevent this overload?  

  

Often, leaders simple add seminars on mental health, in addition to after-hours group activities involving physical health, like yoga classes, or a company retreat.  

Resourceful, resilient leaders are working to head off workforce burnout with thoughtful agility, in order to strengthen their company’s ability to flourish in the midst of challenges.   

Empathy is a major factor in leaders’ ability to help employees stay strong and navigate today’s challenges in healthy ways. 

Whether you’re a leader safeguarding your workforce’s productivity, or someone who has experienced burnout firsthand, your insights are important.

Perspectives: 

While most companies have started initiatives to mitigate burnout, a third of employees report a desire that their company would act with more empathy.

In the workplace, practical empathy entails seeing beyond your role’s responsibilities in order to actively listen to the needs of your people, assess opportunities, and adjust policies and requirements to help.

For example, they learned that there are advantages to incorporating more results-based metrics over time-consuming large meetings.  

Other ‘lessons learned’ included replacing hours-long attendance in video conferences with more relevant, smaller sub-groups, reporting more concise conclusions to the overall coordinator.  

Additional empathetic realizations involved reassessing if a required ‘relaxation’ activity actually improved employees’ well-being, or possibly, turned well-being into more workload.

As managers, we routinely tune in to the marketplace to optimize conditions for our Product…  we must also do that for our People.

Being perceptive, responsive, supportive to our workforce, and open to imagining new solutions to optimize productivity will go a long way in reducing burnout. 

What are your thoughts?