Presentations on well-being, leadership, and burnout prevention:
Burnout & Well-Being: Help Your Workforce Win, presented to Lynchburg Regional SHRM, June 2021.
Leadership & Well-Being in the Remote Work Era, presented to Environmental Law Institute’s Emerging Leaders Initiative, May 2021.
WHAT IS WELL-BEING
Well-being is the experience of health, happiness, and prosperity. It includes having good mental health, high life satisfaction, a sense of meaning or purpose, and ability to manage stress. Tchiki Davis, What is Well-Being? Definition, Types, and Well-Being Skills, Psychology Today (January 2, 2019).
YOU CAN IMPROVE YOUR WELL-BEING
There are many ways that you can improve your well-being. Four are listed below.
Incorporate nature
Why nature? “Spending time in the woods—a practice the Japanese call “forest bathing”—is strongly linked to lower blood pressure, heart rate and stress hormones and decreased anxiety, depression and fatigue.” Betsy Morris, For Better Health During the Pandemic, Is Two Hours Outdoors the New 10,000 Steps?, Wall Street Journal (Feb. 14, 2021).
Here is a PDF of five ways that Nature can improve well-being.
Even a few minutes outside in nature can help. Don’t do nothing just because you don’t have an hour. Spend a few minutes a day in nature if you can.
Stop in a park and look closely at a tree or flowers. Use all of your senses. Take in the breeze (or humidity!), sunshine (or clouds or rain!), feel the ground under your feet. Smell the air.
Add houseplants to your office or home.
Watch nature videos and listen to sounds online if you can’t get into nature in real life.
At the organizational level, consider greening your indoor spaces. Create oases around your building where employees can spend time in nature.
Movement
Walk, exercise. Move your body! If you don’t have large chunks of time, take small breaks to walk around or stand up and stretch.
Integrate work life and personal life
If you don’t feel that you have good integration, you may feel lower sense of well-being. Create a worksheet you can use to start keeping track of your work life activities and personal life activities. Then you can start identifying what you’d like to exclude in one arena or the other and what you’d like to start including.
Improve your emotional intelligence
There are four EQ skills that correlate to well-being: self-regard, optimism, interpersonal relationships, self-actualization. Each of these can be practiced and improved. The EQ-i 2.0® emotional intelligence assessment can help you identify where to focus your attention. One-on-one coaching sessions can help you build your EQ skills.
More resources on Nature
Florence Williams, Take Two Hours of Pine Forest and Call Me in the Morning, Outside Online (Nov. 28, 2012)
Florence Williams, This Is Your Brain On Nature, National Geographic
The American Society of Landscape Architects has an abundance of resources on the health benefits of nature on their website
David Strayer, TEDx talk: Restore your brain with nature
WHAT IS BURNOUT
Burnout is the opposite of engagement.
Burnout is the result of unmanaged stress.
Burnout happens when the demands from work outweigh the resources to deal with them. Monique Valcour, Steps to Take When You’re Starting to Feel Burned Out, Harvard Business Review (June 20, 2016).
Burnout is in the purview of the employer. Well-being is more within the individual’s control. That said, there is overlap such as taking time away from work, not answering emails after a certain time of day, taking breaks throughout the day.
resources for your organization to prevent or reduce burnout
Naz Beheshti, Is Pandemic Burnout Draining Your Motivation and Energy? Here’s How We Can All Promote Recovery, Forbes (March 11, 2021).
Keep lines of communication open
Honest and open communication clears the air, builds trust and connection, and helps us take concrete steps to counter stress and burnout. On an organizational level, transparency from leadership is critical, especially during times of high uncertainty.
Individual employees must also be candid in articulating their challenges and difficulties.
Additionally, leaders need to foster a work environment where all employees feel free to discuss mental health issues. According to the Harvard Business School survey cited, 65% of employees do not feel comfortable doing so.
Create a thriving culture in your organization
Although there is much that individuals can do to take charge of their health and well-being, we cannot hope to make lasting progress against burnout unless business leaders intentionally create a workplace culture in which employees can thrive and feel fulfilled.
Make sure work is rewarding.
Foster autonomy.
Ensure a reasonable workload.
Create a sense of community.
Affirm shared values.
Promise fairness and transparency.
Jennifer Moss, Burnout Is About Your Workplace, Not Your People, HBR (December 11, 2019).
We tend to think of burnout as an individual problem, solvable by “learning to say no,” more yoga, better breathing techniques, practicing resilience — the self-help list goes on. But evidence is mounting that applying personal, band-aid solutions to an epic and rapidly evolving workplace phenomenon may be harming, not helping, the battle. With “burnout” now officially recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO), the responsibility for managing it has shifted away from the individual and towards the organization. Leaders take note: It’s now on you to build a burnout strategy.
Workplace stress is estimated to cost the U.S. economy more than $500 billion dollars, and, each year, 550 million work days are lost due to stress on the job. Another study by the APA claims that burned-out employees are 2.6 times as likely to be actively seeking a different job, 63% more likely to take a sick day, and 23% more likely to visit the emergency room.
[A] survey of 7,500 full-time employees by Gallup found the top five reasons for burnout are:
Unfair treatment at work
Unmanageable workload
Lack of role clarity
Lack of communication and support from their manager
Unreasonable time pressure
The list above clearly demonstrates that the root causes of burnout do not really lie with the individual and that they can be averted — if only leadership started their prevention strategies much further upstream.
Burnout is preventable. It requires good organizational hygiene, better data, asking more timely and relevant questions, smarter (more micro) budgeting, and ensuring that wellness offerings are included as part of your well-being strategy.
Six HBR articles on burnout including what some companies were doing wrong, what Massachusetts General Hospital and others did right, Feb. 2021, $24.95
Sandy Smith, Workplace Interventions Can Reduce Stress and Burnout, (March 9, 2016)
Occupations in the UK with the highest reported rates of work-related stress were health professionals (in particular nurses), teaching and education professionals and social workers and other advocates for people at risk.
A new report from researchers at Leeds Beckett University reviews the most effective ways to treat and prevent burnout and work-related stress, and revealed organizational interventions in the workplace may be more effective than individual interventions alone.
Findings from this report suggest that:
Interventions designed to reduce symptoms and impact on burnout and work-related stress were conducted more often at an individual or small-group level than at an organizational level.
Individual level interventions that can reduce burnout include staff training, workshops and cognitive-behavioral programs.
Changing aspects of an organization’s culture and working practices might be considered alongside individual level interventions to more effectively prevent burnout.
Changes to workload or working practices appear to reduce stressors and factors that can lead to burnout.
Evidence suggests that organizational interventions produce longer-lasting effects than individual approaches.
Organizational interventions in the workplace may be more effective than individual interventions alone.