How To Help Team Members With Burnout: 6 Ways
Recognize The Signs Of Burnout Early: Catching burnout early, by identifying symptoms like decreased productivity, disengagement, and reduced quality of work, makes it easier to reverse.
Practice Empathy With Your Team: Understanding and validating your team's feelings and fostering open discussions will help them overcome their burnout (and can prevent it from occurring in the first place).
Keep A Close Eye On Workloads: Check what's on each person's plate regularly, have frequent individual meetings to discuss priorities, and use project management software to balance and reassign tasks as needed.
Be Open To Feedback: Create an environment where team members feel comfortable speaking up, practice active listening when they share concerns, and implement change as needed to keep the team engaged and motivated.
It’s normal to experience stress while working on a project. Stress and the adrenaline that it creates can help to push a project team to meet a delivery or deadline date.
However, what happens when stressors become too much, and it starts impacting the project negatively? What happens when the team is so stressed that they become burned out? This article will highlight some of the warning signs to spot burnout and what you can do to help a team avoid it.
Signs Of Burnout In Your Team Members
Burnout on your team can be subtle at first but becomes more evident over time. It can affect not only your team’s professional life but also their personal life as well.
Apart from the physical and mental health implications of burnout, it can also lead to a recruitment and retention issue with high turnover rates for the organization.
To avoid a situation where burnout gets so bad that it’s damaging your team (physically, mentally, and emotionally), here are some common signs to watch for.
1. Decline in Productivity
If a team is experiencing burnout, this will be reflected in their output. These signs include:
- Reduced output and efficiency
- Tasks take longer to complete than they should
- Increased mistakes or errors
If you notice that a team is suddenly underperforming and there are no other issues (such as time, cost, and scope constraints), then the team may be experiencing burnout.
2. Decreased Engagement
While no one can be fully focused 100% of the time, in general, most project teams will be engaged in the project and show interest in the project activities.
However, if the team is experiencing burnout, you may see a decrease in engagement among the team that looks like this:
- Lack of interest in team meetings or discussions
- Withdrawal from social interactions with team members
- Reduced initiative or reluctance to take on new tasks
- Absenteeism or unplanned absences away from work
If employee engagement on the team was great but you suddenly notice that the team just isn’t into it anymore, workplace burnout may be the reason.
3. Physical and Emotional Exhaustion
Burnout can take many forms, including physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion. If you see any of the following happenings, the team may be experiencing burnout:
- Visible fatigue or stress in team members
- Reports of sleep problems or physical health issues
- Emotional outbursts or uncharacteristic irritability
If you observe any of these amongst your team, or you notice a change in the emotional well-being of a member of your team, this could indicate burnout.
4. Reduced Quality of Work
Your project team is likely full of the best and brightest people—they’re highly proficient and capable of their work.
So, when you notice a significant change in the quality of their work, you may want to consider if burnout is a symptom of the following:
- A noticeable drop in the standard of work delivered
- Missed deadlines or rushed work
No one wants to purposely deliver work that is of poor quality, but if there are other factors affecting the team (such as burnout), this may contribute to overall poor quality.
5. Isolation
Regardless of whether your team is using an agile or waterfall project delivery framework, communication, employee engagement, and collaboration are key for any project’s success.
If the below statement describes the state of collaboration on the team, burnout may be contributing to this lack of communication and collaboration:
- Team members working in silos rather than collaboratively
- Lack of open communication
- Reduced responsiveness
If members of the team are experiencing burnout, they may exhibit signs of isolation.
How To Help Team Members With Burnout
Here are six steps for helping your team members or employees with burnout.
1. Take It Seriously
Burnout and stress are real. Employee mental health is just as important as meeting a project deadline or closing a sale. According to Deloitte, in Canada, mental health issues account for 30 to 40 percent of short-term disability (STD) claims and 30 percent of long-term disability (LTD) claims on average.
This is real and has an impact on your organization. Even though it may not be something physically you can observe with your team, burnout and the stress it’s associated with can be mental and emotional.
Overlooking or dismissing signs of stress and fatigue can be dangerous for your team. Do team members who are normally energetic seem sluggish these days? Is there a lack of enthusiasm among the team? You can help by taking it and any signs such as deviations in behaviors or habits seriously and not ignoring them.
2. Approach Them With Empathy
It’s important that team members feel that they have a leader who understands what they are dealing with. Having empathy and understanding the position of others is important for helping team members deal with burnout.
Try to understand how you may feel in their shoes (scared, anxious, frustrated) and what it may feel like to experience burnout. Having empathy will lead to a culture where team members can openly discuss burnout with their leaders and where solutions can be developed.
3. Identify The Cause
Understanding what the causes of burnout are can be very beneficial for helping team members deal with it. Causes could include:
- Unrealistic project timelines and a heavy workload
- Inadequate project resources (often, not enough resources)
- Unclear scope and requirements from customers and clients
- Conflict among the team
When looking to address and prevent employee burnout within the team, it’s important to focus on the root cause of the issue and not the symptoms.
4. Monitor Workloads Closely
One of the ways to help address burnout is to make sure the workload of your team is balanced and team members are not subjected to excessive heavy workloads.
One of the ways that you can do this is to use a project management software tool that helps with scheduling and resource planning.
Proper resource management can help ensure that team members or resources are not overloaded or underutilized.
Also, having some type of regular status meeting with your team (or a daily stand-up meeting if your team is agile) can help you monitor the workload of your team by raising awareness of everyone’s tasks and constraints.
5. Create A Team Culture That Supports Work-Life Balance
To help prevent burnout among the team, leaders should look to create a culture that supports work-life balance. Timelines are important, but so is employee well-being, health, and welfare. This is a message that should not only be communicated by an organization’s leadership but also practiced.
One way to do this is to have a core set of working hours and flexible work schedules where team members can collaborate. This allows team members to have flexibility in the day to arrange their work as they see fit or to schedule things like personal appointments.
Likewise, leaders should look to plan activities that promote a healthy work-life balance. Social events such as outdoor picnics or other social events can help to prevent burnout.
Likewise, organizations can encourage team members to take PTO and ‘disconnect’ from the office without fear that their performance will suffer. Lots of organizations offer resources and support in the form of healthcare and wellness benefits like Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs).
Employers can also provide services and other benefits that promote health and well-being, such as access to counseling or reimbursement for fitness activities (and actively encourage the team to use them).
If you’re unsure about what benefits are available to employees to help avoid burnout, consult your human resources colleagues.
6. Be Open To Feedback
To avoid and combat burnout, leaders must be open to honest feedback from their team. They should be open to hearing about the causes and symptoms of burnout that the team may be experiencing without judgment, and be committed to taking steps to address it.
Not only will this create a culture where people feel comfortable communicating with their leaders, it can also create a culture that supports work-life balance.
Likewise, if employees have feedback about issues such as workplace stress and other employee experiences that may contribute to burnout, they should feel comfortable discussing this with leadership.
Mistakes To Avoid
Don’t panic! Just because your team may be showing some of the signs of burnout does not mean your world is about to crash down. Avoiding burnout on your team requires a proactive and mindful approach. Here are some common mistakes to avoid:
1. Ignoring Early Warning Signs
Overlooking or dismissing the signs of stress and fatigue in yourself is bad, and it can also be dangerous to ignore these signs in others. Pay attention to the signs of burnout mentioned above in this article and take steps to address them.
One easy way to do this is to have regular check-ins with your team (whether this is done at a group level or one-on-one with team members). Check-in with your people and ask them about their stress levels and any concerns or issues they might have with the workplace culture.
Be open to listening! This is especially important if your company has been growing quickly—burnout is often linked to rapid growth and change in an organization.
2. Failing to Manage Workload
Overloading team members with too many tasks or unrealistic deadlines is generally not good for projects as it can lead to burnout, employee turnover, and retention problems for the organization. To help avoid burnout, aim to balance the distribution of work and schedule resources in a balanced way across the team.
Likewise, it’s important that everyone understands what work is in scope and not in scope for the project to help manage the workload. Lack of clarity on priorities and scope can lead to confusion and overwork.
3. Neglecting Time Off
All projects have a timeline with a start and end date. The movement towards meeting that end date on time can be stressful for a project team. It can be very easy for team members to not take or delay taking time off work for PTO, or even avoid taking breaks during the workday.
Project managers should encourage a culture of mindfulness where taking breaks or vacations is encouraged. Any planned time away from work (public holidays, PTO, and other absences such as mental health or self-care days) should be accounted for in the overall project schedule.
This will help to make team members feel like they can actually take this time off and disconnect. If taking time off work is ignored or frowned upon and work-life boundaries are not respected, practices like after-hours work or skipping vacations can become the norm, and this can cause burnout or make it worse.
4. Poor Examples From Leadership
You as the project manager and other leaders within the organization play a role in preventing team burnout by setting the right example. When leaders are working excessively long hours or not taking breaks, this sets an unhealthy example.
Failing to model a balanced approach to work and life is a mistake that you should avoid.
Don’t Crash & Burn
Now that you’re prepared to see the early warning signs of burnout and avoid it among your team, go talk to your team members and see how they’re doing. It’s never too late to organize a team coffee break or a trivia game meet-up.
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