Target three key areas to protect your team from burnout.
BY MITHU STORONI, AUTHOR OF ‘STRESS-PROOF’@STORONIMITHU
For Inc.
photo: Getty Images
You’ve just landed the perfect team, generous funding, and a big once-in-a-lifetime project that will take a year to complete. You’ll be facing overwhelming workloads and intense deadlines, but you’re confident you’ll complete the project on time if everyone works at peak capacity. Your only worry now is that your team might fall victim to the heavy workload and burn out over the course of the project. Losing even one member of your team to burnout could spell disaster for the future of your startup. What can you do?
What is burnout?
Burnout, a concept first coined in 1974, lies on a continuum somewhere between chronic stress and depression. Early findings suggest that it can change the brain’s structure. Emotional exhaustion and cynicism are early warning signs of burnout, which can stem from an imbalance in six aspects of work and life: workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values. Many of these imbalances can be grouped around three key epicenters of risk–self-identity, control, and exhaustion–and turned into three golden rules.
1. Protect self-identity
Self-identity, self-worth, and social status operate at the heart of emotional exhaustion and burnout. Threatening these increases the risk of burnout.
- Clarify who does what. Being assigned a clearly defined role bolsters self-identity and protects social status within the team. Individual employees feel their contributions are recognized, boosting self-esteem.
