Your Hustle Culture is Crushing Your Employees. Let's Solve Employee Burnout.

In today's mostly remote, distributed, post-pandemic environment, it's quite common for employees to feel burned out.

Many organizations experienced record-breaking productivity during the pandemic but it came at the cost of an almost "always on" work culture.

This obviously led to employee burnout and all the great resets, resignations, reshuffles, etc we saw in 2022.

This episode covers 5 steps that employers and leaders can take to create a more engaged workforce.

Let us know what you think. Share this with a friend.

Music Credit: Music Credit: Maarten Schellekens - Riviera

Solving Employee Burnout

[00:00:00] Dr. Jim: welcome to today's episode of Cascading Leadership. I am your friendly neighborhood talent strategy nerd, Dr. Jim. And then today's episode we're gonna tackle the issue of employee burnout and how you can trans.

[00:00:10] Dr. Jim: Form an organization from being one that has a burnt out team to an organization that has a highly engaged team. We're gonna cover five quick strategies to better support your team. So let's get to it. So first things first. What you want to do as a leader within that organization is that, If you're looking to create an engagement culture, you need to encourage and create balance.

[00:00:31] Dr. Jim: You need to encourage people to unplug the hustle culture mentality where you're always on. And working all sorts of crazy hours is great if if you're in a startup environment. And that's That's something that's set the precedent is set up front, but that's not sustainable. So as you grow as an organization and as you develop, if you want to better develop your people, keep them engaged stop the revolving door, you need to encourage them as a leader to [00:01:00] unplug from what they're doing.

[00:01:01] Dr. Jim: Take their vacation time and make sure that they're. Are boundaries that are established when it comes to accessibility from a leadership tier all the way down to the individual contributor. People are gonna be looking at you. To set the tone. So if you're creating an environment where people always have to be on, expect a high level of burnout and turnover in those environments.

[00:01:24] Dr. Jim: Next thing that you, can do is promote a healthy work environment. and that can mean a lot of different things. It can mean having wellness programs in place where you're encouraging healthy eating, where you're encouraging exercise where you're encouraging mental health and supporting those sort of initiatives.

[00:01:42] Dr. Jim: And it doesn't necessarily mean that you need to have those resources in house, but. As part of your total compensation or total health and wellness plan, if you have access to those resources through various partnerships and and, employee services, that goes a [00:02:00] long way into curbing that burnout that you might experience within your team and creating a more engaged workforce.

[00:02:08] Dr. Jim: Third thing that you want to do is create a positive work, culture. And one of the biggest thing ways that you can do this is by the type of communication culture that you create. What it looks like is that from leadership on down, you need to operate from a position of transparency.

[00:02:25] Dr. Jim: If you are clearly communicating across all levels of the organization. Drawing clear lines on what's acceptable, what's not, where the state of the business is, what we can do about it how can we work together as a team to overcome some of these things? Celebrating the wins. Those are all part and parcel of creating a positive work culture.

[00:02:44] Dr. Jim: And it all starts with how you communicate to the organization. So the fourth thing that you can do, if you're looking. Creating an engagement culture is really focused on employee development and specifically areas where you can support growth and challenges for [00:03:00] your employees. So growth can mean exposure to other functional areas of the company.

[00:03:04] Dr. Jim: It could mean promotion paths, it could mean stretch goals, it could mean any number of things, but you need to have an eye towards, okay, how are we growing our people and creating a an organization Where people are encouraged to try new things and expand their skillset, and that goes hand in hand with an environment where you are encouraging teams and people to take on challenges.

[00:03:31] Dr. Jim: So it's through that challenging environment and that growth environment, you're gonna keep your team and your people more engaged. The fifth thing that you can. Is have an eye as a leader, have an eye on workloads. You're gonna have all sorts of different people on your team.

[00:03:46] Dr. Jim: There are gonna certain members of your team who tend to be people pleasers and don't say no. So you need to make sure that you are monitoring the workloads of everybody on your team so that those people, pleasers, are protected [00:04:00] from being overloaded.

[00:04:01] Dr. Jim: And one of the key things that you, should focus on as a leader is to make sure that you're shifting workloads appropriately so that everyone is I, is in a good head space and a good energy level throughout the course of the year. Recapping. If you're looking at converting an environment that's burnt out to something that is much more engaged, step one, encourage and create balance.

[00:04:23] Dr. Jim: And that means unplugging from work, taking vacation time, you wanna promote an environment where you're creating healthy habits for the whole person. And that can include Healthy eating exercise, mental health, and promoting all aspects of what health and, wellness encompass encompasses.

[00:04:40] Dr. Jim: When you're talking about individuals create a positive work culture. That's step three this often involves how you communicate and what you communicate in the level of transparency. So have an eye towards that. Step four is to make sure that you're encouraging an environment where people are pushed.

[00:04:57] Dr. Jim: Or encouraged to grow and [00:05:00] challenge themselves and expand their capabilities. This is how you build an employee relationship for life. And step five is to manage your workloads effectively. So hopefully this five step framework where you can impact or build a highly engaged team is gonna be useful for you as you look at 2023 and what you can do differently.

[00:05:20] Dr. Jim: We are heading into some pretty challenging times, so keeping people dialed in and and, effective is gonna be critically important because a lot of organizations are gonna be, and leaders are gonna be asked to do more with less. And the way that you can pull that off is by making sure that your entire team, at every level is highly engaged in the work that they do and the impact that they're ma making.

[00:05:43] Dr. Jim: We hope you like the episode. I'd be curious to get your input on what you would do to keep your employees engaged.

[00:05:50] Dr. Jim: You can find cascading leadership on all your favorite podcast platforms if you liked the show tell a friend, have them subscribe to us wherever you can find the cascading leadership [00:06:00] handle. We're on LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube. Facebook and marginally on Twitter.

[00:06:04] Dr. Jim: Were not on Instagram cuz that's for food picks. Looking forward to having more great conversations about how we can help you move your career forward on a future episode of Cascading Leadership.

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Your Hustle Culture is Crushing Your Employees. Let's Solve Employee Burnout.

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Solving Employee Burnout

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