Covid - What are you doing from an employee burnout perspective?
Are you finding the working scenario during pandemic leading to employee burnout? If so what ideas do people have to ensure their teams remain engaged, motivated and energised?
Answers
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Hi Patrick,
I have been working with a few clients that have taken a very aggressive approach toward enforcing work-life balance. I know that term is a cliche, but the employees at these firms have felt the policy shifts were authentic and responded with appreciation for the the efforts of the leadership team.
- Encourage a strict rules about after hour email.
- Not booking meetings outside of a predefined time slot for all employees regardless of time zone.
- Challenging employees to take extra time, especially around holidays.
- Encouraging team leads and managers to do frequent checks-ins and one-on-ones.
- Obviously the virtual company meetups and parties have been well received!
4 -
@PATRICK COLLINS thank you for initiating this discussion and @Michael Smart thanks for your input. TSIA is going to formally launch a Rapid Research Response (R3) poll next week, but I wanted to make it available for the community now.
The intent of the poll is to provide insights on the long term steps support organizations are taking in response to the abrupt shift to a remote workforce. This is becoming a big issue as member organizations struggle with:
- Tools
- Work/Home balance (work is now always present)
- Home environment (young kids, roommates)
- Duplicating in office schedule (endless meetings)
- Employees feeling disconnected
- Interrupt driven work schedule (emails, texts, video calls)
3 -
Employee burnout has definitely been a concern, both from the added stresses of the pandemic as well as high customer demand due to the pandemic. Our company has given a few additional global days off as "wellness days" during the summer and we have also implemented a "Flex Friday" schedule, reducing meetings on Fridays to just business critical or customer calls that must take place.
Earlier in the year, we had success with virtual social sessions, including team happy hours and executive townhalls. There's also been a lot of employee engagement with our Employee Resource Groups which are self-organized internal advocacy groups, including things as varied as weekly ASL classes, parenting seminars, and a global virtual relay in honor of Ahmaud Arbery.
As the situation has progressed, we've been deprioritizing internal programs in order to free up additional time. Many of our folks enjoy traveling for vacation, so they've needed some extra encouragement to take time off despite not being able to travel, even if just for a few days in between projects or during slow downs in demand.
Something that's been helpful throughout has been staying in close communications with the team, especially skip level 1:1s between management and the field teams. Our teams have responded well to regular video check-ins with the leadership team, so we've been publishing videos that are 2-3 minutes long every week to check in and share insights about how the business is doing and what they're hearing across the teams.
Hope this helps!
3 -
Thank you Michael, Vele & Benjamin. It is encouraging for me to see we are not far off the mark in our approach and there are a couple of ideas in there we are going to explore.
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