Last week I wrote about burnout on a personal level: why we burn out and what you can do about it yourself. This week I want to talk about the other side of the equation. What can you do if you’re a leader, a business owner, or someone with any influence over the people around you at work?
I’ve been CEO for 10 years of a relatively small organization. I have about 30 employees. We’re small and family-owned. I don’t have a board to answer to. I’m not a giant corporation, so I can’t pretend to understand what it’s like to work in corporate America.
But I do believe we all have agency. Whether you work for yourself or you work for the man, you can make decisions on a daily basis that make the world a little better around you.
Here are some of the things I do as an owner-operator that I think other leaders could try.
Give people autonomy
One of the reasons employees get burned out is a lack of autonomy. A lack of feeling like they’re in control. And while I believe we’re all in control of our own fate, that’s hard to remember when you’re working a nine-to-five.
So as a boss, I try to put a lot of those choices back on my employees. I also try to put myself in their shoes. I don’t make rules I wouldn’t want to follow myself.
We have unlimited vacation. It has pros and cons, and I’ll be honest, it takes trust and effort to maintain a feeling of fairness. What ends up happening at most organizations with this policy is the opposite of what you’d expect. Some employees take a lot. But the ones who don’t take enough are usually the ones who need it most. I’ve had to actually force vacation on people. On average our team takes four to eight weeks a year. I had to start taking more myself to show it was okay.
We also have very flexible work-from-home policies. If you’ve heard me talk about this before, you know I’m not a big fan of 100% remote work. I think it’s contributing to burnout and it hurts teams. But flexibility is different from full remote. Flexibility gives people a feeling of autonomy over their own lives that’s really important. Most of our local employees are in the office two to four days a week, and we make sure Tuesdays and Thursdays are days we’re all together.
We have flexible maternity and paternity leaves. Most of our women have taken about three months. The men vary a lot. Some of our seasoned dads have taken three days because they wanted to be back. Newer dads have taken four or five weeks. Nobody’s really counting. The expectation is that you communicate with your team.
Parenting is freaking hard, especially when you’re just starting. And it’s not just maternity leave. It’s the daycare call-outs. The runny noses. The kid you can’t drop off. If you’re not flexible as a boss, you have to know you’re setting up your parents to burn out and quit. I would rather say take today off and check in from home than draw a hard line and lose a great employee over it. Employee retention matters more than day-to-day productivity.
I hear a lot of people say the balance of raising kids and corporate life is the biggest reason they want to leave the corporate world. So why don’t we make workplaces more child-friendly? We have dads bring babies in when daycare is closed. We’ve always got kids around. I’ve dreamed about opening a daycare in our company and I haven’t done it yet because it’s a lot of work, but I’d love to be able to offer that.
You just have to help parents get through the first five years. Once kindergarten starts, life gets easier. I want employees to be around for 15 or 20 years, so I have to help them get through the hard part.
Build relationships, inside and out
In the last podcast I talked about purpose in and purpose out. Purpose out is the connection to your customers, to the humans your work serves. Purpose in is the connection to the people you work with.
You can find purpose in even if you don’t love your job. I’ve worked in jobs I didn’t love where I loved my coworkers, or even just one of them. If you’re stuck somewhere and you can’t leave, ask yourself if there’s anyone at work you rely on, trust, or care about. I’ve seen the comments that say “they’re just work friends.” Fine. Make the best of what you’ve got. Being a human around other humans is a lost art. We need it.
If you’re a manager, you can encourage this. And if you’re not a manager, you’re probably still a leader on your team in some way.
Here are a few things we do that have worked.
Weekly routines. For years we had Wild Wednesdays, where everyone got together for a drink in the afternoon. Once more of us became parents and we all had to leave to pick up kids, we changed it to Thursday mornings with coffee and bagels. I’ve actually enjoyed the morning version more. If you follow my personal Instagram you’ve seen the goofy stuff that happens on those mornings. Baseball throwing contests. Random tape measure games. It’s stupid and I love it.
You don’t need to work at a small family business to make this work. If you’re on a team of three and you hate your boss, buy your two coworkers coffee every Friday. Don’t make it a thing. Just text them and ask what they want from Starbucks. Give yourself and the people around you little nuggets to look forward to. I don’t know the science, but it changes things.
Cross training. Force people to learn each other’s jobs. There aren’t a lot of jobs at my company I couldn’t do if I had to. I couldn’t do them well, but when I speak to my team, they know I know what I’m asking for. That matters a lot. Not just for a boss, but for coworkers. We send everyone down to the warehouse to pack boxes and print labels. It builds mutual respect. It also opens up advancement opportunities. Half of our current magazine designers started in other roles and asked to learn.
Read books together. This one’s not contrived. It’s just something I enjoy, and it works. Right now I’m reading the Red Rising series with four guys at my company. They’re not people I would normally talk to every day. But now we’re checking in constantly about where each other is in the book and what we’re thinking. If you’ve ever read Red Rising, you know it’s a roller coaster. If a book changes your life, buy two copies for your coworkers and put them on their desks. Say “I think this might help” or “I really enjoyed this.” It’s humanity. Just be human.
Celebrate wins
This is one I’m still working on. Really struggle with. It’s a hard thing for entrepreneurs to do because we’re always looking for the next thing. We work toward a win, and then we get the win, and we just keep going.
That’s bad for my mental health and bad for my employees. So I’m actively working on changing the language around our wins. Congratulating people when they accomplish something. Pushing through raises even in a hard year because I need to recognize the people who bring it every day.
I was on a call with a leadership group last week and one of the other business owners shared something he does that I’ve already started copying. In his one-on-ones, he asks his direct reports to name someone who’s had a standout moment lately. Someone who doesn’t usually report to him. Then he handwrites a letter to that person. I started this week. I’ve got three letters to write. I’m going to handwrite them, because that part matters.
The important thing about the letter is that I tell them who nominated them. So they know I recognize them, and they also know their coworker or manager recognized them. That second part is arguably more important.
We’ve also started something in our all-hands meeting on Tuesdays where a few people go around and point out someone who did something great, and I hand out a small gift card. Twenty bucks to Starbucks or Grubhub. It gets the gratitude coming from coworkers, not just from me. If it always comes from the top, it doesn’t feel as genuine.
This might be my whole life, this job. But to my employees, it’s just a job. So they’re not going to feel the wins as heavily as I do. That means I have to help them feel it.
The point
Time off. Relationships. Recognition. These are the three things I’m working on as a leader to help my team not burn out.
I’m still figuring it out. This podcast is here to hold me accountable. So I’m sharing what’s working and what I’m still struggling with, and I’ll come back and check in on how it’s going.
If you’re a leader and something here worked or didn’t work for you, I’d love to hear about it. Share this with someone who might need it.
Most days, this is the real work.