The Simple and Often Overlooked Leadership Solution To Employee Burnout

The pandemic has exacerbated organizational challenges related to employee wellbeing and mental health. Countless national and global studies have pointed to the rising rates of burnout and the associated risks for individuals and organizations alike.

Are employee wellbeing programs the solution? As Christie Hunter Arscott, author of Begin Boldly states: “Unfortunately, equipping individuals to tackle overwhelm and exhaustion through programmatic offerings has its limits. Furthermore, burnout is now recognized by the World Health Organization as an ‘occupational phenomenon’, which puts the onus on solving it on the organization, rather than the individual.”

What can organizational leaders do to combat this rising trend? According to Arscott, there is one simple and often overlooked solution to burnout that organizations can implement immediately.

The solution is to ensure employees understand what matters most to their managers so that they can make informed time and energy investments.

According to Arscott’s research, most employees have felt pulled in too many directions, while experiencing feelings of conflict, tension, and overwhelm. The reason? “Employees often fall victim to investing in activities they think matter at work, while overlooking what is actually critically important to their managers and teams. Their time investment is based on assumption rather than informed insight.”

Here’s how to take action.

1. Focus employees on tasks with the most return on their time investment

Arscott encourages leaders to imagine employees as having a wallet with a limited number of dollars – their time. Leaders are responsible for helping employees invest those dollars in the activities and tasks that produce the most returns. Optimizing investments means that employees will be less susceptible to burnout. Not optimizing them results in ongoing feelings of conflict and tension. If your employees are investing based on assumptions rather than insights, you’re likely unintentionally creating a culture of burnout.

2. Ensure managers share what matters            

In the day-to-day hustle and bustle of to-dos and competing priorities, managers may not share what matters most to them. This prevents employees from prioritizing and allocating their tasks accordingly. Without insights on expectations and priorities, employees can fall victim to frantically investing time in things that don’t matter, with increased feelings of tension and conflict being the byproduct. Even if they work 18-hour days, employees may get negative feedback in a performance review if they weren’t prioritizing and executing on the thing that mattered most to their managers. Arscott shares that this is comparable to “pushing a boulder up a mountain only to reach the top and realize that you are climbing the wrong mountain. If managers don’t provide directions on which mountain to climb, employees will invest their energy in the wrong climbs at the expense of wellbeing and productivity.” This is poor investment with poor returns. Encourage all managers to set up weekly and structured time or communications to share what matters most, what their priorities are, and help employees invest their time accordingly. Building an understanding of real expectations can alleviate pressure. 

3. Create a culture of curiosity

As Arscott shares: “Curiosity leads to clarity.” Leaders should encourage employees to ask questions regarding how to best invest their time. Once they’ve clarified expectations, they can optimize investments. If they are investing most of their time at work trying to manage customer requests, when what is really important to their manager is executing on a particular project deadline, they can tweak their time investment accordingly. Employees can use curiosity to understand expectations and manage those expectations by investing in the activities that mean the most and generate the most value for those who have a stake in their careers. Employees can ask their managers: What matters most to you right now?