Decrease burnout risk while improving performance
In the last 3 years, we've been researching how to decrease burnout risk while improving performance. We learned you need 3 levels of focus:
- Individual
- Team
- Organization
Individual level (start here)
Last year we assessed more than a thousand people’s ways of working. We saw that since the pandemic, many are working in unhealthy ways. Many of us can feel this but are not sure what we can do about it.
We've found that the fastest way to help people get back into balance is by giving them data and insights on their current ways of working (burnout risk, performance/ growth balance, values alignment) + concrete insights and recommendations on what to adjust.
By doing this in groups for 90 minutes, people learn from each other, and focus on specific and practical changes to make. That’s a good start.
Team level
An individual focus is good. Individual plus team works even better.
In our research, we found that most teams develop patterns of working that make healthy, sustainable performance difficult. The most common are:
- Meeting overload
- Culture of interruptions
- Lack of deep work time
- Poor work-home boundaries
- Working in the evening
We saw that teams could immediately decrease burnout risk and improve productivity if they had a process for discussing and improving their ways of working. Important note – this is not ‘team building’. This is about ‘how’ we get work done.
We used a simple process called Diagnose, Inspire, Your Action (DIY) learned from my partners at Adeption.
Diagnose - teams diagnose which of the above challenges most impact them
Inspire - they hear stories of how other teams have addressed the above challenges
Your action - the team chooses one experiment they want to run as a group (the most common seems to be increasing daily deep work hours)
For accountability, I join team meetings for 1 agenda item – how are we going on our experiments? What’s working? What challenges? (10 mins)
In a short amount of time, teams make surprising progress.
Organizational level
As individuals and teams start to make rapid improvements we've noticed that senior leaders get very interested. This is the point at which new practices and ways of working can be scaled. Some examples we share:
Meeting Doomsday - Asana had people delete all recurring meetings and add back only valuable ones. The average person saved 11 hrs a month of no longer valuable meetings, 17 days a year
Focus Fridays – Slack tried no internal meetings, turn off notifications Fridays. 84% of people say they have benefited
Core hours – Dropbox decided to only allow meetings and interruptions between 9am-1pm PST. Outside of that is Deep Work time.
The above might look like a lot but it's very doable if you just start small. A few workshops for individuals - and let momentum and excitement build till people say, “But, what about at the team and org level?”
