I’m working with several organizations that have invested heavily in initiatives designed to enhance the wellbeing and psychological safety of their employees. In spite of that, they still continue to report high degrees of burnout among their workforce.
Why is it burnout still so prevalent?
One clue might be a little recognized change in how people must do their work.
In a 2023 Harvard Business Review article entitled What’s Fueling Burnout in Your Organization?, the authors state that burnout is not being caused by an increase in overall workload.
What? Doesn’t everyone know that having to do more and more with less and less causes stress that contributes to burnout?
Yes. And. According to the authors, the greatest amount of stress is caused by increased demands for collaboration that people must engage in to complete their work.
They write,” the volume and frequency of the collaborations that people have to engage in to complete the work — what we call the collaborative footprint — have risen over the past decade and a half, bringing exponential opportunities for stress. This comes through the increased potential for misunderstanding, misalignment, and imbalances of workload and capacity, among other things. All of this combines to create a battering of everyday stresses.”
A battering of everyday stress. That sure sounds like what my clients are experiencing. Too many bosses (aka “stakeholders”) demanding people to do too many things without a set of clear criteria for what to allocate resources (money, time, people) to.
The article continues, “Many teams are underperforming today due to priority overload where too many uncoordinated asks are coming into the teams from disconnected stakeholders and failures of coordination and prioritization at high levels in the organization.”
In my book, Why Not Lead?, I wrote that one responsibility of leaders was to help their people maintain a sustainable balance between urgency and complacency. This requires the capacity to determine what is most fundamental, in other words, to set priorities. If you’re working on a team that isn’t clear on their priorities, you’ll respond to the loudest voice, the first thing that comes along, your own sense of what’s most important…without a commonly held framework for how to work together.
Many teams I work with lack such a set of agreements. I’ve become increasingly aware that any team building effort needs to start with inventorying the team’s responsibilities, creating a team purpose, and coming up with agreements about how the team will work together in key areas of interaction. The article underscores the importance of having this framework clearly spelled out.
Here are some possible areas to focus on:
Accountability
Feedback
Decision-making
Conflict resolution
Setting priorities
Team norms and values
Onboarding of new members
Meeting structure and frequency
Working agreement maintenance
Managing workflow
To name a few…one clue that an area of interaction needs clarifying is when there is recurring friction between team members that isn’t only about differences in style or personality. In fact, it might make sense to start by viewing the friction as a systems issue and not an interpersonal issue and see what difference it makes.
If your team is experiencing the kind of stress I’ve described, why not start with developing a set of team agreements? Having them could help you fulfill your purpose and reduce the stress your people are experiencing.
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