We Are Burning Out, For Real
Photo by Elisa Ventur on Unsplash
I had the privilege of chatting with my colleague and friend Paul Dubal of Perfect Balance Consulting yesterday about burnout and resilience. It's prevalent and perhaps more than you'd think. In our Zoom poll 71% of respondents reported being at least somewhat or highly burned out! In a recent survey by McKinsey and Company, 49% of employees globally are experiencing burn out.
It's really not surprising when we consider our circumstances. With the onset of our current pandemic, many organizations have pivoted to remote working with little to no strategy for their employees, assuming that a mirror effect will work. As a result, employees are in back to back virtual meetings with no breaks. What used to be a 5 minute "hey can I ask you.." check in, has become a 30+ minute scheduled call with a whole bunch of "while I have yous...". Added to that is the fact that our home and work environments have bled into each other physically - the kitchen table is our new office, or even the bathroom (I've seen it). And we're probably homeschooling our children at the other end of the table. Oh, and then there's those really inconvenient meetings from 11:30am - 1pm where we try our best to focus while feeding our children lunch! Nevermind all the tasks that come out of these meetings that we have no time to complete...so we work our weekend. Sound familiar? I'm feeling overwhelmed just writing this, so if this is your reality you have my permission to own your overwhelm and exhaustion!
Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash
Newsflash: No human being is designed for this pace of performance! And I venture to suggest the output isn't top quality either. So where do we go from here? This week, with a few of my clients, we began tackling this very concern - one of the metaphors that has resonated is Slow Is Fast. Yes, you read that right....Slow. Is. Fast. Slow, as in deliberate, conscious, calculated, and reflective action. Too often we're caught in the hamster wheel in a state of naive practice rather than deliberate practice. I like how Dr. Jacinta Jimenez puts it in her book, The Burnout Fix: It's time to get off the "merry-go-round of the wheel of weariness" that's making us all motion sick! We need to stop and create more moments in our day where we pause, reflect, and notice. What are you experiencing and are you learning from it? John Dewey says that "we don't learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience". From here we can generate clarity and focus. And when we do, the next steps and decisions become more clear. So I pose this question to you - what's one small, I mean laughably small, behaviour change you can engage in today to be more deliberate, conscious and reflective? Perhaps it's sticking a 10 minute break between the next 2 zoom meetings, or maybe it's writing down one thing you learned today. Whatever it is, I challenge you to start doing it and noticing the difference it makes in your life.
Wondering what this means for your teams or organization more specifically? Connect with me for a Free Consultation Call.