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!