White Paper for Leaders

A ‘How To’ For Building Stress and Burnout Resiliency

Leaders, how do you go about decreasing employee stress and burnout? First, you accept that you can’t stop the force of the two critical causes. You can’t guarantee anyone job security for life – a huge stressor for all but the young – and change remains a constant as far into the future as we can see.  Job security is linked directly to change, particularly the speed with which it occurs, and you can’t slow that down nor can you predict where it is going to come from. Your organization needs to flex and shift directions in order to keep up with both new threats and new opportunities in today’s economy, and who knows ahead of time what that shifting will need to look like.

Fortunately, there are some things you can do to reduce the impact of change and loss of job security and lower the costs associated with employee burnout and stress.  First, you can ensure that your people build their change resiliency. Second, you can increase your organization’s capacity to be both discerning and transparent about the changes it makes by building its change resiliency.

Building individual change resiliency – what does that even mean?  It refers to two things.

Individual Change Resiliency: Conceptual Shifting

First, it means people making a critical conceptual shift in their expectations of how they can manage the new tasks associated with each change. They have been deeply socialized to understand and respond to a chain of command which, if it still exists, is no longer effective. People have learned that their place is to wait to be told what to do, then do it. This is not a productive expectation in the face of constant change because leaders simply don’t have all the answers anymore. It is impossible for them to have, because, like everything else, the answers change constantly.

How does this employee expectation affect stress and burnout and what can be done differently? Employees who believe that they are to carry out every task assigned to them – beginning with those outlined in their job description, and then including tasks that each new change gives birth to – go innocently into the stress and burnout chamber. Without being properly equipped to discern which tasks to give their time and energy to and which ones to set aside, they simply try to do everything. They do the best they can with what they know but typically end up stressed and burned out as they attempt to remain a valued employee. Remember the job security factor? They are terrified of being made redundant if they are not seen as valuable!

It is critical that employees shift their expectations. Expect to stop taking all their cues from external voices – blindly doing what they are told by their superiors, thereby piling tasks upon themselves . Expect to start using their internal voice – deciding for themselves (within the framework and needs of the organization) where to expend their energies to get the best ROI. Expect to manage their work and themselves, including their own stress and burn out levels by striving daily to be doing work that takes the least amount of effort to do the most amount of work. That is how they keep themselves healthy, productive and fully engaged in their work.

Individual Change Resiliency: A New Type of Toolkit

It is not enough to get employees to shift their expectations from an external motivator to act to an internal voice that guides their actions. Leaders must equip them with the tools needed to make this shift happen – tools that allow them to analyze, evaluate, decide, set a plan about where to expend their energies every day – and with every new change – and then put their daily work plan into action with energy, excitement and fortitude.

Once equipped with these tools, they are able to look forward, figure out what work will give them their highest personal ROI, map backwards to figure out how the work they are going to focus on fits with the needs of the organization and then continue mapping backwards to figure out exactly what they need to be doing right now so as to self-manage stress and burnout factors while giving their all to the tasks. This is how you maximize productivity and minimize stress and burnout!

Employees need to know how to keep themselves resilient, but they can only do that when they can fit themselves into the needs of the organization. That requires the organization to build its own resiliency. So, what does that mean?

Organizational Change Resiliency:

Employees can’t make their daily action plans in a vacuum! They need to understand exactly where and how to focus their efforts in order to have a snug fit with the needs of the organization. This can only happen when the organization builds and shares its own change resiliency.

Organizational change resiliency refers to equipping an organization with its own purpose – that place where it is always trying to get to and that stays constant over time. The purpose makes it possible for the organization to remain grounded even as it flexes and shifts to accommodate the external forces of change. The organization’s purpose forms the basis for deciding which changes and opportunities to grab and which ones to let go of. It becomes the organization’s primary decision-making tool.

The purpose is also the primary communication tool. When an organization can stay grounded while it is flexing in response to change, it is easy to communicate clearly and concisely exactly what tasks the employees need to focus their efforts on, and – most importantly – how their tasks will support the purpose. The purpose then becomes the beacon that provides clarity for everyone. Every decision leaders and employees make is simply checked against the question “is this work going to move the organization along the path towards achieving its purpose?”.

An organization’s purpose also guides the leaders’ decisions about what major areas of work to focus on and even which micro tasks are critical to have taken care of in the moment. In short, organizational change resiliency lies in its ability to look forward, figure out where it is headed, back map to figure out the best ways to get there and then back map further to decide exactly what work it needs taken care of right now. That clarity makes it possible for employees to use their own tools and skills to figure out where to zero in on the work they are going to be internally motivated to do and excited by – not stressed by – doing!

It also makes it easier for employees to ante up when they hit those times when tasks they really don’t like doing have to get done. They see exactly why they are necessary and are willing to pay the piper because they can clearly see why they are necessary and that they will be able to get back to doing work they find internally motivating as soon as these less appealing tasks are completed.

With both the organization and the employees properly equipped and able to communicate clearly with each other, they are both able to stay resilient in the face of change and their combined journeys become much less stressful. Burnout is reduced in direct relation to the degree of alignment that exists between their journeys and as they help each other grab onto exciting opportunities and options. However, that alignment does not happen by magic. Someone has to oversee the implementation of it on an ongoing basis. That is why leadership change resiliency is also critical to the bottom line. What is leadership change resiliency?

Leadership for Change Resiliency

There has to be a highly skilled facilitator at the point where the work needs of the organization and the work needs of the employees intersect. That is the new and critical role of leaders at all levels. Their job is threefold. They take part in building the organization’s strong foundation and its capacity to flex and move in response to change. They also equip their employees with the tools and skills they need to self-manage their daily work to keep stress and burnout at a minimum. The third critical component of their work is to be the conduit through which the organization clearly communicates exactly what work it needs done and employees telling the organization exactly what work each of them wants to be involve in so as to decrease the possibility of stress and burnout.

When all three players – the organization itself, the employees and the leaders – can interact using this new self-management approach to decreasing stress and burnout, many side benefits rise to the surface. Employees who have their change resiliency tools in hand and can self-manage their work to minimize stress and burnout are employees who are doing work they are excited about. Their productivity is maximized, their levels of engagement increase and the likelihood of them being innovative goes up. Organizations who have built their change resiliency tools (a solid foundation from which they can turn and flex in the face of change) will be key players in today’s economy. Leaders who can facilitate bringing the work needs of the organization and the work needs of the employees into alignment are the final piece of this de-stressing approach.

Jobmatics specializes in equipping all three of these key “de-stressing the workforce” players, but we are not the only ones. If you are a leader who is struggling with the high costs associated with stress and burnout in the workplace, find someone who can provide both the concrete tools and a strong framework for building the change resiliency for the organization and the employees. Then make sure that the framework they provide is concrete and sustainable enough to make it possible for leaders to become expert facilitators in aligning the work needs of the organization with the work needs of the employees. Once you have that, stress and burnout will be reduced to something that people feel once in a while – until they get rested up or until something stimulating happens in their work – which is a very common occurrence when people are doing work they are excited by!

Individuals and Organizations: Similar Career Decision-making Needs

Many years in the career industry taught me a very valuable lesson – one that transcends the individual to include organizations.

The lesson is simple. People do not know how to do what Steven Covey tells us is such a critical starting place when attempting to move in a new direction – start with the end in mind.

After working with thousands of young people to help them set their next career development move, it became abundantly clear that my attempts to guide them were stymied from the get-go by their lack of clarity about where they were headed. The results always felt like we were in a gerbil wheel together – running in a continuous circle instead of gaining any forward movement.

Hounding them to share their insights about where they were headed in their career clearly wasn’t the thing to do; it only caused a look of fear and self-doubt to appear on their faces. That left only one solution – help them by teaching them how to identify their ‘end goal’.

This proved to be a real challenge because a methodology for accomplishing this goal did not exist in the career industry. A brand new kind of ‘how to’ process had to be developed. Once this was available, a bit of a miracle happened. When each young person went through the process and could identify what turned out to be a number of different but related end goals, they would suddenly go into action. Furthermore, they stayed focused and on track whenever they hit a challenge, and often got into some very exciting career steps that were way beyond anything the two of us could ever have imagined when working together. It turns out that Steven Covey was right on target; start with the end in mind and look what can be accomplished!

The process of realizing the missing piece for individuals, developing a program to close that gap, and consequently observing the increased engagement, excitement and dedication to the journey, opened my eyes to a similar situation in organizations.

Was it not true that every organization, be it private, government or non-profit, was dealing with the same dilemma? Did they not have to continually figure out ‘next steps’ on their career journeys because of the constant changes generated by rapid technological advances, expanding markets and competitors? Did that not then require an organization to develop that same clarity about where it is headed – to start with the end in mind? Did they already have that by setting their visions, values, mandates and mission statements?

A careful examination of what each of these variables consisted of, and more importantly how they were viewed and utilized within an organization, made it very clear that the end goal was often missing. An end goal is exactly that – where I (or the organization) want to get to way, way down the road. It is not a vision of what needs to be accomplished over the next 3-5 years, as is often the case with organizational vision statement. It is not a list of the major areas of work that an organization wants to ‘be the best’ at, which is often what you find in mission statements. It is an end goal that an organization continuously strives to achieve. In metaphoric terms, this end goal is a constant north star that guides every decision and every change.

Without that end goal, every career step (or change) an organization makes is a bit like a high school student thinking that their end goal is to choose the post-secondary institution they want to attend and the program they want to take. They problem they encounter is that, very soon after they get started on this new step, they realize they have to start on the process of setting their next career step – what to do after they finish their program. With no clear ‘how to decide’ process, they end up in exactly the same frustrated and anxious state that they dealt with in high school.

Isn’t that very similar to what organizations and their employees face every time a new change comes through the door? Don’t leaders and employees feel that same sense of frustration and anxiety each time? However, in organizations there is the added problem of multiple people experiencing these feelings – complicated by the fact that, unlike individuals making their own decisions, employees have no input into what changes come through the door. The result is many of them getting frustrated, anxious, discouraged, and they begin to disconnect from the change process in varying ways and degrees.

If organizations are facing the same need to make multiple career (change) decisions, and if it is leaders who are responsible for those decisions, is it possible that they also need a process available to them that they can use to identify the organization’s end goal(s)? Are they also experiencing the fear of not knowing how to decide?

With that in mind, my next career step became clear – to develop an organizational career decision-making process that leaders could use to set the organization’s end goal(s), and map backwards from there to determine exactly what needs to be done to move the organization toward that goal(s). That process is now ready to implement. Leaders, however, are another matter. Just like individuals when the process was first developed to help them determine their end goals and back map to identify their next career step, leaders find it hard to believe that it is possible to achieve this kind of long term clarity for the organization.

The time is here to recognize the similar needs of individuals and organizations to have a clear, concrete process to use to clarify their career journeys. The processes are in place; individuals are using their process with great success. It is only a matter of time before leaders are able to comfortably say that they too need this kind of clarity.