In this video, you will discover the delicate balance between increasing employee productivity while mitigating the risks of burnout. Listen to our experts and their real life examples. Prioritizing a supportive work environment is key.
Transcript automatically generated from the video. Please excuse any typos!
All right hello everybody Welcome Back to the burnout panel today we're talking about increasing employee productivity but I think this discussion may go in some directions that you may not be expecting because productivity is a symptom but it may not be the problem so we're going to be digging into that today.
My name is Audrey Holst and the founder of Fortitude and Flow and I work with companies and there are a couple of things that are going to be important to Anchor to during this conversation in order to really understand how we are talking about productivity number one employees cannot run on adrenaline long term and they have been running on adrenaline for the last few years especially High performers especially folks who want to get the work done especially High performers all of these people working and there is absolutely no reason for productivity things that we do in 2023 have to be made in 2023 we cannot be thinking about the stuff that worked back in 2019 and try to get back to there because we are at a different location in time we are at different place in our workplace we are different place with our mind and bodies so whatever works standards existed back then is not going to be relevant to the solutions that the workplace needs now so we have to be honest and present about employees needs right now and thank you for that intro Audrey.
I'm Dr Sandra clinical psychologist and personal energy strategist who is absolutely focused on how do we have the resources we need to actually to sustain this productivity that we want to have right how do we actually create that for our people in our workspaces and how do we help them recognize how things to what matters to them so when you think about productivity you want to actually think about this kind of intersection between the demands are challenges of what you're doing and the skills that someone in the resources that someone brings to it as or as you started alluded including to it people are overloaded that's what they can give to that place and they start to feel like it is taking me twice as long to do half as much twice as long to do half as much so you can imagine that that actually at some point you have people who are high performance and when you're in that space and you're not having resource you don't have the resources you need you actually just start to say I'm not sure I'm me anymore there's a sense of self-doubt that comes and a loss of confidence so in order to help people find this place that some writers are here too and I've got I got this right nowthis organizational Mission also matches something in my own internal Mission so as employers one of the things that's important for helping people to have this sense of flow toYou want to look at how you're setting up the environment for that I wanted to a real estate office last year sometime and they actually had it on the wall their mission and their philosophy I was like so every time you walk in here somebody sees this so whatever their minds are that you can put in place that would support people knowing this is the mission this is what we're going for in this project is a part of making right now involved with this Mission so having people get clear about how their own personal values natural this organization like I mean I know many of us no matter what we do it's like we're at a point in our careers where we don't want to be in places where that don't match our values and this is something we're seeing about younger Generations as well is that people are looking for work that's fulfilling so when you do that you can actually help them make the most of that relationship between the demands and the challenge that they have being flexible some people need flexible work schedules that's another way to help them like stay there stay with it right but the why behind there there is is really important because when you stay in touch with that why that is like a resource inside of you that matches the resource outside of you this goal that the organization has that can sustain you over time so those two things for me I think are the most important things and employers can do are one is to make sure there's flexibility in the environment and then the other is to make sure that there's a clear connection between employee purpose and values and organizational purpose values Mission I think the last thing I would add is something or drink into it to normalize taking breaks and to put in place buddy systems even more people help each other and so those are my thoughts on this productivity.
hello everybody my name is Cait Donovan and I work with organizations to reduce burnout so they can keep top talent which is currently a massive issue when I think about productivity one of the first things that pops into my mind is the study that was released I want to say 2017 or 2018 about the fact that when we are distracted it takes us 23 minutes 23 minutes so slack emails text messages on and on and on when we moved to a hybrid and or remote situation we expected people to be answering our dings all day every day and the problem with that is we're not giving people any Focus long-term not a great thing but on a short-term helps people focus however you can't get the benefit from it if you're aiming to create a focus if you're starting something and then you are continuously distracted so as an employer as a leader if you can create space within your teams that people are allowed to be on do not disturb for period yes exactly I see Rebecca virgin it can take even longer exactly so let's really pay attention to the fact that if we want people to stop and focus and be productive we have to create an environment in which within which that is acceptable that is my spiel for today and I'm going to pass it on to Aileen to give you more.
Thank you Cait. Experience workshops all around reducing stress and improving the employee experience beneath there's this balance rate of being availableHybrid environment and you can't just pop over to someone's cubicle and say hey can I ask you a quick question about this there is the need for those last teams emails Etc we have to find that balance of that deep focus time so what can this look like and what's the sign say around it Doctor Andrew Huberman podcast to the whole Siri behind this is that we can try to work with our systems with work with the way our brains work to maximize that efficiency and productivity so if you batch out 90 minutes to really have your head down and get things done and then take breaks you're more likely to be more efficient with the task that hand and the study show we can then tap into more of that critical things notifications of your employees who can you take that 90 minute Max window and start to think about the workflow and create ways for your employees to have that focused activity time and also maybe maxing out people can't have more than 90 minutes of meetings in a row and then of course you can move things around but there has to be that schedule do things that do not require the cognitive faculties to be online so it's washing dishes if you think about sleep that's the ultimate defocused time if you imagine this akin to doing weight training or weightlifting you wouldn't do 50 sets all at once you would do I don't know I don't like trying but a couple sets you take a break if you're saying yeah yeah you can have that head down time but then you are responding to emails during vacation your sending emails or asking people to be in touch nights weekend you're not walking the talk so specially for managers and leaders this is challenging cuz it trickles down if you say that deep focus time is approved and encouraged but then you're doing things so I am going to pass it on to Vanessa.
So they call me the business the fibrillator because I essentially helped ignite that spark amongst business owners and helping them to empower their own team members and employees also continue that spark and my lovely panelist members here essentially we went into a lot around the low productivity due to burnout right so your employees have low productivity due to burn out from doing so many things but there's also low productivity due to doing so many things that don't give you Joy right in summary your employees abroadokay so going back to the idea of flow right the doctor Sandra had brought up your employee support and I'm going to share a little bit about my experience as an employee when I was in the corporate space in corporate Consulting and working with Fortune 500 the multi-billion dollar companies with you know wanted to make more billions of dollars okay and then I'm going to a solution so the fact is that I like very things when you know you may find this as well too even as a team leader yesI like my work 75% of it but that's 25%, yesterday I was connecting with a software engineer and he had a bit of field for 15 plus years now the senior manager level you know and he was looking to definitely you know move up the ladder as well too to the principal level as well and he had shared that you know 75% of the role he does enjoy but there's 25% he does not and you can see that 25% is what is taking over because that he talks about his job you can see that there's the level of dissatisfaction you know but it's like yes he loves 75% of it and that he doesn't like that he doesn't enjoy now of course with all these layoffs happening whether someone is over performing underperforming he's very much like you know what let me know Rock the bull I'm just going to keep my head down management team hit the goals but you know he's still bored I remember those times when I was born to right maybe you're listening here as a team leaderboard now well guess what your employees your other team members are probably feeling similar things as well productivity your own team the main idea here is that you want to make them come to work you want to make them want to come to work you want to make them want to enjoy what they're doing and that looks different you can do that different ways right if you have a virtual team versus if you have you know everyone comes to the office or everyone comes to the business type of team it's going to look a little different but here are some ideas that some of my you know when I was a employee so for example but for example right one of the former employers that I used to work for today very popular when I was in the Consulting space as well where it's like happy hour right you leave the client office and it's time for happy hour let's all go out for for time for drinks or whatever I mostly drink the water but still it was so fun time activities hey Google as you know that yoga class that many golf in the middle of the day or at the end of the you know end of the work day those are also things that help to shift the mind and provide that break as well too right for your employees and sometimes it's just as simple as for me not simple this may not be as simple depending on your particle structure in your company but even putting a structure in place your company where people can move around or they can take on additional unnecessarily different projects strategy and at some point I was you know working on the US team and essentially so ultimately what happened is that myself and so that didn't mean I didn't do my usual us work but I also then did the US work and then also was able to take on the Canada team but you as a team leader think about like you're connecting with your peers at the VP levels the director level you know what else is happening in the organization do you see that one ofI hope your employees navigate how else can they you know bring that to Joy back into their work maybe you can't promote them but they can still be you know get some joy in and what is that they're doing so I'm going to pass it off.
Thank you so much Vanessa. I'm Dr Sharon Grossman I work with organizations that want to create a workplace environment where employees are engaged productive and fulfilled by addressing and preventing burnout now as you've heard here today there is more than one solution to Bringing productivity up but what I really want to talk about and I think some of our panelists have already kind of planted the sea but I want to take it I want to talk about leadership and culture so I just had a session this morning with a client who tends to be a perfectionist and he really leads with his heart so never would he expect his employees to have the same standards that he has on himself and what we talked about is that it's important for you as a leader to be a role model because even if you don't have those same standards and you're not getting your employees up for making mistakes or not having the kind of productivity that you expect they're watching you and if you have a different set of rules for yourself they're going to often emulate what you're doing and that perfectionism in those standards and there's unrealistic expectations may end up burning them out and affecting their productivity so it's not enough to say everybody has to follow these rules which takes care of them but I'm Different it's really important to remember that you are leaving this entire company and that even if you're just a manager and you're not leaving the whole company those employees that you're leading are looking up to you so you have to take that very seriously and not make yourself the exception to the rule it's important for you to as somebody here mentioned really walk the talk and so what that means is if you have perfectionistic standard you need to start with you right what is it that you believe that creates that standard is it a fear of failure is it I need to prove yourself is there something about if I'm not number one or if I don't do everything perfectly then you catastrophize what that means right think about what it's like for one of your employees and what you would do or say if they made a mistake or they didn't have the best performance ever you probably have a lot of compassion for them and are able to lead them with that compassion but if you're really hard on yourself and you're beating yourself up then that's going to be problematic so we really want to think about the kind of culture that you create through your example and we talked about the idea of not just getting to the goals that you have in terms of your productivity but also think about the Journey of getting there because you can get there in more than one way you can get there by really pounding the pavement and working super hard and working nights and weekends and never taking a break because you've got so much to do on your list or you can incorporate more of that wellness and getting away from the perfectionistic black and white thinking of things where we're really extreme thinking about how to incorporate and introduce a little bit more flexibility and validity so that you have that space to breathe one of the things I talk to my clients about is how let's see make a mistake yes you want to incorporate whatever you learn from that situation so that you grow from that experience but in between the mistake and the fixing of it or the problem solvingyou want to take that moment to just get in touch with your emotions because oftentimes we feel disappointed if you've worked really hard and you experience failure you're going to experience something emotionally so take that time out for yourself to really breathe some Humanity into the experience before you jump into the solution again the idea here is we're not robots and if we are going to be doing this in a sustainableHave to take into consideration the human element which includes our emotions so you've heard so many really great tips here today and I really hope that you take some of these ideas and you run with them and we'd love to hear in the comments also whether you're watching this on replay or live what you're going to do and to just close this out I know we're going to have some q&a's and I'm going to pass it over to Vanessa and then Audrey.
Yes so essentially a question that we got and is do we think that burnout has gotten worse right and I think this is coming from the space of there are you know layoffs happening and such that nature as well too in this world or at least in some industry not all industry but some Industries and there are people you know I think there was an article recently about how a lot of CEOs have you know quit ultimately thoughts here right now I think burnout is first of all we've gotten language around it so May 28th 2019 the World Health Organization decided burnout was a thing so first of all we're going to hear more about it because if you're looking for yellow cards you're going to find yellow cars we're looking for Burnout we're going to find more burnout is also more common to talk about it so we're going to have more people talking about it that being said what I see happening is you know when you are stressed for an extended period of time you go on vacation you end up sick or with a headache we talked about this on our last panel the same thing is happening on a grander scale everybody's stress hormones went through the roof during the pandemic we maintained we maintained now things are normal going to get again things are starting to come back down now if that makes sense any other thoughts yeah I had a similar thought which is that because the pandemic pushed us to change the way he worked so so rapidly traumatic in some sense like a shop that happened so we're at the place now where we're trying to heal it so even though I don't even know probably 20 30 years ago people who work in professional development we're talking about the personal images you do work in a way that sustainable and that fulfills us and that allows us to grow and evolve that's where I think we are so we can't get there without looking at the problem burnout exhaustion you know this sort of perfectionism all these things that we talk about are the pieces that have to be solved in order for us to get to this place where we're working in a different way that is sustainable that allows people to grow and that makes an impact in the world love it love it thank you so much for sharing I see you on music awesome awesome so if you have any other questions if you are watching us and you have any other questions feel free to type in the comments or chat if you are watching the replay because you signed up to watch replay yes then also type in your questions as well we love seeing them in the comments and we'll definitely keep an eye out as well too and oh and said this is a great panel I've gotten a lot thank you Anne appreciate you thanksbut yes yes love love andShared some people think it was just 20/20 but we forgot there a whole lot of other things pre-2020 absolutely right yes absolutely mentioned as well it's like the the topic got a lot more you know steam but I know that I was talking about growing a business without burnout is it before 20 okay you wrote a book on it you know and I'm not okay yeah exactly what Vanessa said we've been we do this every single month so last month we talked about we talked about high turnover rates and that's a big topic and we got a lot of interactivity on that so please head on back and take a look at that our next topic.
Next month we're going to talk about decreased morale and engagement we've got a lot of topics we're going to continue us we're not talking about computers all the solutions that we talk about are human Centric Solutions and these are things that are going to be number one on the list for for people going forward this is not going away this is only going to continue so this is work that the earlier you implemented the earlier you start to get folks like us on board in your organization the faster the better the results are going to be because these problems are not going away anytime soon so make sure that you are following us at the burnout panel make sure that you are registering for these events every single expert in this group is constantly posting really high quality high value and I keep those questions coming we look forward to seeing you again next month.