Avoiding Employee Burnout

Business Brain Episode 399 Wow. 399 for Wednesday, September 28, 2022. Greetings folks and welcome to Business Brain, the entrepreneurs podcast where we are small businessing and using the mindset with which we approach our small businessing everywhere in our lives every single week here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. Our sponsors today include shopify.comsbs where you can go and enjoy a 14 day trial and full access to their entire suite of features and business capital providers@bcproviders.com SBS we'll talk a little bit later to learn how you can get funded for as much as 250k in as little as 3 days.

It's good stuff. I'm glad to be here. I'm Shannon Jean from Lafayette, California. I love those sponsors. I think it's great. You know, I love doing this show because we always have a great intro topic or introduction that you and I get to talk about before the show starts. And it's awesome. It's like a, it's like private small business therapy that sometimes goes well beyond that as well. So yes, it's great. I want to recognize, coming up on our 400th episode, I just want to recognize the value that I get out of connecting with you each week. It's fantastic.

I love really is a wonderful thing. I know we used to argue about who gets the most out of the show. I think we've stopped because we know that I do. But no, it is that small business therapy and we can do that for you folks too. Feedback BusinessBrain Show Send us anything at really anything that you've got going on that you're stressing about or celebrating, whatever. We're here to help and we're happy to do it privately. If there's lessons that we can share with the audience, we certainly will. But we'll keep your details private. Of course we've done it for other listeners over the years and we'll certainly extend that to you, but only you. The rest of the people listening, no. But you. Yes, that's right.

And we're having a love fest here. Cause we love doing the show. But what about people that are kind of burnout on things? And maybe, you know, we've done episodes about avoiding burnout as a business owner and things to keep yourself motivated and charged up. But today I'd love to talk about employee burnout. You know, there's a lot of people going back to work and how do you keep people motivated and all that kind of stuff. But before we jump into that, I found this interesting article that I was reading about virtual employees and I started thinking, okay, that I think that's coming more and more as small businesses particularly look to save money and become more efficient. But I also, I think you could frame it as, it could be a way to help your other employees avoid burnout from having to do so many repetitive tasks. And they could focus on things that are more productive or more enjoyable and more long term, let's say, career building type of efforts. And I would be definitely interested to hear how many people out there are embracing things. Virtual cashiers, customer service. We've had companies that are virtual receptionists on the show that talk about their services, and I think it's a good thing. But it all depends on the way you look at it.

I want to clarify the definition of virtual here because for years we've used the term virtual assistant to mean remote assistant. Right? Someone that's not in your office, maybe somebody that's even in another country. You know, the Philippines is a common place for virtual assistants. You know, like Romania was super common for programmers. But these are real human beings, which is why I call them remote. And especially now because when you're talking about virtual employees, you're not talking about real people. You're talking about like computers and engines that are doing things that, like you said, are repetitive tasks and kind of things that might cause other employees, like real humans to burn out. Right?

Sure. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm talking about, I guess both in the sense that, like the example in this article were, you know, restaurants in particular about, you know, walking into especially fast food or fast casual type restaurants, or you walk in and, you know, ordering on a, on a touchscreen type thing instead of a virtual cashier. Yeah, yeah. And, and I, I, I was trying to think about how I could have applied that to my, you know, various businesses. And, and yes, you would have less employees. Right. Because you, you don't have to have those folks interacting with people. But I think it could alleviate a lot of pressure from the more mundane tasks that you have to do over and over again. And I'd love some feedback. Feedbackusbrain show. Tell me how you've used it, if you think it's a good idea or if I'm wrong and heartless and people are gonna lose more jobs. I don't know what kind of framework you have on it, but mine is optimistic.

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Something trying to keep people motivated. I mean, your employees are your greatest asset. Right.

Right.

You have to protect them, nurture them, support them. And, you know, when you start seeing signs of stress and people have anxiety or calling in sick all the time or having health issues, you know, people look depressed or act, you know, and you could just see it. Well, those are. Those are not good signs. And certainly there's outside influences that can cause those things as well, but it may be happening at work or combined with outside, you know, influences that cause it as well. And I think it is very important to talk about. You know, there's a mentality that's just like, oh, you know, come on, you gotta, you know, toughen up and do the work and everything. But it's a different time. And I think we have to recognize that that's not the answer.

No.

At least not for everybody.

In. In my businesses, that's never been the answer because that's not how I treat me. I had to figure out a long time ago that my employees don't necessarily want to be treated the way I want to be treated. Right. If I were an employee, and. And that makes sense. Right. I finally came to that realization, and it was like, oh, they. They really, you know, they. They want to be treated differently than I would want to be treated. But guess what? They don't want to be the business owner. Right. Like, this is.

Right.

This makes sense. However, in this regard, it's. Everybody's just a human. And so, you know, a lot of the things that we do, the flexibility that we talk about, that we afford ourselves, oftentimes we can afford to our. Our teams. And that is a good thing. That. That is generally something people want. Yeah. Or people.

And I think we.

Yeah, yeah.

And we've always discussed having this great culture and, you know, whatever it is, Friday, barbecue, you doing the grunt work, you taking the trash out, showing people, you know, this kind of stuff. So it's. I think that helps a lot. And the one thing, though, I would point out, I want to talk about what causes burnout, and some things I think we can do to help avoid it or address it when it does, if it happens. But one of the first things that I always ask the question of our managers and supervisors when there was other kinds of problems is, I would say, is this a one off or a systemic problem? You know, try.

Right.

Because if you jump through every hoop trying to address and create policies around a one off or one individual, I think you're doing a disservice to your other employees.

Yeah.

Especially if it's subjective. You gotta really be careful. Everything we're gonna talk about today is objective stuff you can put into place that everybody can take advantage of.

Yes.

And so I think.

But you're right though, like, don't just let one person drive the definition of this. Now, if someone brings up something, I always use what I call my resonate test. Right. And this is true of reviews that we get for the podcast. Right. It's anything where we get something critical or some suggestion. When those come. When those come in, I read them and it's fine. I've been publishing online for almost 25 years now, so I've learned to have a pretty thick skin about this kind of thing. Right. And I think even just running a business, you sort of learn this. Well when something comes in and immediately I feel myself reacting to it, like, oh, we need to do that. That tells me that I've been thinking about this for a while. It's rare that that happens. But if somebody identifies and perhaps articulates, I have yet to crystallize, Bam. I'm thankful for it. It's like, okay, great, yep, great idea, let's go do it. But you can't do that all the time. And you have to really learn to identify those things that are someone else crystallizing your thoughts for you versus someone else just venting and like, it can be both, but oftentimes it's just the venting and you know, you need to factor that in, especially when it's one of your employees. But you can't just react to everything. And you've got to.

I would suggest if you start to, you know, someone starts having some issues and you're trying to figure it out and help them at work is documenting those things. So if you see them arise in other departments and they may usually come up in different. They manifest themselves in different ways from different people. But it may be that it is happening across different employees or teams. But if you have taken notes and you documented, you're like, hey, you know what? We're seeing this. People are stressed about this or people are really like, I always try to judge the mood when I was walking around, when I walked in and said, hey, good morning. How's it going? And try to talk with everybody. Did people have a smile on their face? Did they look like they were happy when they came in? Did they? Those kinds of things are very telling to me is trying to read people. So you just want to ask yourself that before you start implementing programs and policies. You know, maybe somebody's just having a bad day. You never know.

Yeah, right. And, and, and that happens, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I like it.

So as, yeah, so as I was looking and researching for the show, you know, I came across this Gallup poll, 7,500 full time employees. And they asked them, you know, hey, why are, you know, what causes employee burnout, you know, in your opinion? And I'd love to go over them because I think they, they are, it's pretty broad, but I also think there's an underlying commonality with them that I want to discuss.

Yeah, let's start going through. Yeah, yeah.

So, you know, the first one was people, and this was number one, people felt that they were treated unfairly. And I want to say my own biases, I added the word felt because I have this word fair I always struggle with. Right. What really is fair.

But it's subjective to, I mean, subjective. It is subjective. There are degrees of it, of course. And you know, at some point we all agree, okay, that's not fair. Right.

Like, yeah, that's right.

But, yeah, yeah, but yeah, we all have our barometer there and they're set a little bit differently. Yeah, yeah.

And that was the number one thing that people that they felt caused, you know, burnout is they were treated unfairly.

Was there any articulation on that? Like, what was the definition of unfair? Because that would help.

No.

Okay. It would help.

Yeah.

Gallup's better at surveys than that. I, I, I'm, I'm linked survey in the show.

Yeah, we'll, we'll link it. Maybe I, I may have missed something in there. But, but I think that you could. The, the key here about being fair is you need to create these objective standards to avoid the perception of things being unfair.

Right.

Is, is you, you have to quantify things when you can. And, and when I say that things like training, very important that it's objective. How are you going to get trained? How are you going to advance within the organization? What is the career path for everyone? Right, yeah, it's very important that everyone can look at your, whatever job they have and say, okay, this is the training I receive. Here's what I need to do here's how I can advance. And on the other side of that is your discipline policies have to really be objective as well.

Yeah.

And I found I've had a hard time with this because if I put a lot of value in an attitude and personality and if someone doesn't quite do something right. But I know they're such a, you know, they have great personality, great attitude, they help all other stuff. I have found myself giving them slack and having, and other people pointing out like, hey, you know, you can't let so and so get away with it. Like coming in late.

Yeah.

No matter how good an employee is, if you let somebody come in late and they have a, we open at this time and your job is that you're here at, you know, 8:30, whatever it is, if you have that kind of job, if you, if you have somebody coming in late and you just let that happen, it's very subjective and people start to think that's really not fair. Right. Yeah, that's not fair. And so try to think about objective standards. Any, any opportunity that you can. And you may have to ask your employees what are the objective standards that we have to apply to these situations and help build systems around that? You know, and I think that's, that's definitely, definitely reasonable.

So yeah.

Number two was an not surprising unmanageable workload.

Okay.

And you know, I understand that too. And one of the things that always has gotten me in trouble is not communicating about the workload enough and thinking that, well, I assigned this, they said okay and I didn't hear anything back, so everything must be fine. And I think that's a mistake. You know, you have to track progress. You've got to have regular check ins. You got to use some software to help keep things going and to catch problems early. Whether you use, you know, Slack or other to do other, you know, like Asana and other software things. Sure. To keep projects going.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, and, and the other part is you have to listen to your team and are you hearing things about, you know, hey, this stuff isn't getting done. I'm not getting this from this person in a timely manner. And that, that comes back to walking around and connecting with your, your group and hearing what's going on. Right. One of the things I also like on this one is do you have good data? Can you compare past results with current work? Like in my, you know, world, we were always repairing, refurbishing things and we kind of had an idea of the typical technician can do X number of Repairs, an hour or X number of refurbishments per day. And we would measure that, and we would. You. You could look at that objectively and say, is this person in that range? You know?

Yeah, right. Are they. Are they. Are they slacking? Slacking? Are they underperforming and what's the reason for that? It might be that they're just slacking.

Right.

But it could be something else. It could be, like you said, they're not getting what they need, and they may be feeling the frustration, perhaps even more than you would as the, you know, as the manager, so. Yep.

Yeah, that's a good point. And I think as managers or owners, we naturally think that, well, if there's a problem, they'll just come talk to me.

But that doesn't happen. No. No, it doesn't happen. No, because they don't want to be the squeaky wheel. Right? Like, I mean, if they really need something, they will, but otherwise, no, people absolutely just want to, especially working for someone like you or me, where they know us well enough that they know, oh, we're just people who figure out how to get it done when nobody else is willing to. Just, I always say, and I've said it on this show a bunch, bullheaded persistence. Right? That's the key to my success. Well, if I say that all the time, and I do, what do you think the message is that my team gets from that? Is it, okay, well, I should go to Dave for help every time I hit a stumbling block, or is it. No, he's gonna expect me to be bullheadedly persistent. And the reality is, I wish it would more of the former than the latter, but I know that the do as I do not do as I say thing is actually what happens. And I've noticed this with all kinds of people that I've had, you know, working with us over the years. The. The. The. My. My favorite one to share and. And he knows that I share this is Adam and it. But it's happened with every programmer I've had where they, you know, you. You get into this mode and you're like, okay, I want to just fix it. I'll figure it out. Because you kind of have to, like, you know, being a programmer and a. In that. In a. Or a technician, in that sense, you have to have some level of bullheaded persistence because you're going to run into things you don't know how to do, and you just got to start banging at it and figure out how to get it done. But two heads are better Than one. Three heads are better than two. Right. And so you need to learn where that limit is. Where you're like, wait, I've sunk a ton of time into this. I haven't gotten anywhere. Let me just tell someone else about it. Perhaps in the process of doing that, I'll come up with the answer. Or they will, right? You know, they'll see it a different way. And it's super important to check in with your team because like I said, if you're like me, they will follow you and just try to figure it out for themselves. And that is, that's a, I mean, it's a great thing to have in your team, except for when it's better the other way. Hey, can your business use additional cash flow to help it grow or just get through a temporary rough spot? If so, our friends and our sponsor at Business Capital Providers may be just the thing you're looking for. Over at Business Capital Providers, they specialize in funding small and medium sized businesses quickly and without the lengthy paperwork or strict collateral requirements. You're going to go to bcproviders.comsbs to find out how you can get funded for as much as $250,000 in as little as 72 hours. You must be in business for one year and produce revenue of at least 25k. All right, that makes sense. Quick and easy. There's a one page application. They want six months of bank statements. Well, if you've been in business for a year, you've already got the six months of bank statements. They offer fast results. Like I said, no collateral required. When banks say no, Business Capital providers say yes. So Again, go to bcproviders.com SBS to find out how you can get funded for as much as $250,000 and in as little as 72 hours. And our thanks to Business Capital Providers for sponsoring this episode. All right, so we've got three more things on this Gallup list to sort of dissect and then we've got some actionable things that you can do, actions you can take in your workplace to help perhaps mitigate some of that employee burnout. So let's go to number three on this list, which I believe, if I'm looking at it right, is lack of role clarity where people just weren't sure what was expected of them. That makes sense to me.

Yeah, it does. It does.

Yeah.

That's a. You know, I think it comes down to like having a great job description about what, what's expected of you.

Right.

And sure. Like we just talk about standardized onboarding. So everybody gets a similar onboarding experience. And the same with training, you know, making sure everybody gets access to the same kind of training. And, you know, do you really. I think you have to kind of almost overdo it in my experience. And it's different probably for every type of job, but you really have to. What are the detailed steps for you to be successful here? Right, yeah. And how.

You know, I guess I call BS on all of this because. Well, because what you're describing is a company where you have many people in roles that are clearly defined. Right. But I think a lot of small businesses where that's just not the case, you bring somebody in. Yes. What are you here to do? Sales, customer support or build a department to do something new that we've never done before? None of those steps that we just outlined are applicable because it's. I think they are up to the employee to come up with those. I mean, in partnership with management. But. Well, that's. Yeah, yeah. They aren't known on day one.

That's. Yeah. But if you say. And these are things you have to develop over time. When we were. And I was starting and hiring technicians and everything, I didn't do any of this. It was just like here.

That's what I'm saying is like, you, of course, these people, people that are forging the path with you, are forging the path with you. So you can't tell them what the path is with any degree of detail. You can just sort of try and get them to buy into your crazy vision, which hopefully they do. Right. But I think that's part of it is the trust me. Right, the trust me.

Well, those are particular kinds of people. But I would say as you build out your organization and you ask, you know, add departments and start hiring you, this stuff becomes even more important.

I'll give you that. Yeah, sure.

Yeah.

As the business.

Because.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

If you hire your first couple of employees and everybody's doing everything and wearing many hats, well, you're right. With them in the trenches, that's a different experience. And as your business grows, your magic that you bring to the. The table every day, you don't get to touch and to connect with those employees as much as you would like.

Right, right. Yeah.

And so that's where this objective stuff, I think. Yeah. I mean, I didn't have a job description in place when I hired, you know, my first few people that it just doesn't happen. Yeah, you can. But I'm trying to give the benefit of Looking back and saying, hey, this is how you have to do it. Objective data, ask tons of questions, talk with a lot of people, you know, and talk with people regularly. And I agree, you got a few people. But it's along the same lines of, like the E Myth. Your name or your employee number one, employee number two is going to be in all kinds of boxes on the org chart.

That's right. Right. Yeah.

And so it's. It's the development of systems over time that I think, because, like, if you. If you have only a few employees and you got a couple, I mean, you know, somebody burnout, well, you can manage that. That a little differently, and you're going to see it sooner. You can be like, hey, you need to go take a vacation or you need to get out of here. But as you build up, you know, where you don't see every employee every day, that's when I think this stuff becomes more important.

Yeah, I wish we knew. I. As I'm going through this Gallup thing, I'm wondering just how relevant it actually is. Right. Like, what size companies were these people in? Because some of this stuff, I mean, it's like, these are all relevant, but.

It'S a good vehicle to have this discussion.

It is correct.

I didn't pull any of the solutions that they talked about out of that.

All I used from that was just the five. The list. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I just grabbed the list. I'm like, oh, this is. This is. Okay, cool. This seems to have some validity and credibility.

Yeah.

Let's use this to introduce things that we've. We've talked. I mean, we're going to be at our 400 show next week.

Yeah.

I guarantee you we've talked about every single one of these things before in. In one form or another. And so it's. It's kind of trying to put it together into a package. And I think, whether I. I think if you're a small business or a corporation, I think it's applicable. Yeah. You. Maybe it's not as officially executed.

Right, sure.

But in some way it. It. I think it's. I think it's helpful. Yeah, definitely.

All right, well, let's. Let's go through the other two. So we've got. Yeah, I was going to say the next one is lack of communication and support from their managers. Right.

Yeah. And, you know, managers can really suck. And you always mention. You always mentioned the Peter principal or often mentioned the Peter principal where, you know, you have a good employee and you keep moving them up until the point, you know, where they're not good anymore and then they stick there and that's often where a lot of middle management, you know, winds up. Right.

Well. And that's where a lot of entrepreneurs wind up too.

Yeah, that's true too.

I mean that this one may well be applicable to our audience here. It certainly is to me where like this is, this is one of the ones I'm super aware of and I know that I fail at it all the time, but. But I try to be better about it. I try to learn. I'm trying to educate myself about how best to support the folks that work for me and work on the team. And like I said, I'm not the best at it, but I'm trying.

Yeah, neither am I. Yeah, you get so tied up in the day to day. That's the thing, you don't stop really. The time I sit down to think and talk about this is when I prepare my notes for the show and I'm hopefully have surrounded myself with people that help point these things out and implement these systems to help people avoid. But if I walk around and everybody's joking around and there's humor in the workplace and I see smiles and I see people even eating lunch together and we have a Friday barbecue because there's been times where I would do a Friday event and a number of people be like, oh, I have to go, go somewhere, I have to go run errand, I have to do this after that. And I thought, well that's. There's something going on here when people don't want to stick around. When you're not.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Something going on. So you start asking questions and you figure out, well, yeah, people aren't as happy as you might. As you might think, you know, and that's. I love that, you know, and I don't want to oversimplify it but like the concept of, of cooking and food and cooking for your employees, if depending how big your company is, of course, or small, it's powerful because people relax, they put, they let their guards down a little more when there's food involved. It's a age old gesture that you know, you're cooking for them and bringing food to the. I mean it's massively powerful.

Oh yeah.

And allows you to get a sense of what's going on and hear people talking.

Well, you see them as human. You see each other as humans. Yeah, no, it's been a long time since I've had a company where everyone is in the same physical location. Right. Even the same physical state where I could do this. But when we could. When I was down in Texas, we had that computer nerds company, and we did a lot of these kinds of things, and it really made a difference. These days, what I really try to do is anytime we can get the team together, which is usually conferences, I break my rule at least once. My rule is never eat a meal with the same person twice at a conference. Right. You know, like, in that.

Okay.

Yeah. I always want to be getting to know new people. Right. Or at least catching up with people I know. But not the same people all the time. Right. Because it's super easy to just get caught in a rut and just, you know, hang out with the same people. But that's not. That's not how things get done. However, any opportunity I have to get the team together and just enjoy a leisurely meal together where we can, you know, maybe we'll talk about a little bit of business and then just sort of let it fall aside and we can talk about whatever people are interested in. Their hobbies, their families, all of that stuff, and just. I try to become the, you know, the host of the. Of the thing.

Yeah.

Telling less stories of my own and just listening and making sure that. It is hard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very hard for me especially. But, you know, just listening and making sure that no one, not even me, monopolizes the conversation. And it, you know, everybody gets a chance to speak and everybody's comfortable and all of that stuff, because it really is helpful. I mean, it. It makes the team more productive. It makes everybody happier, generally speaking, to. To be able to just hang out and. And at a. The nice part is at a conference or a trade show, no one is going home to their family that night. Right. Everybody's just sort of away and detached, so there's none of the normal life pressure pulling people. I gotta go take care of my kids. Or the things that we all have to do. We've all sort of carved the time out already. And that can be a nice way to do this. Even if you have a remote company or a mostly remote company where you can't, you know, cook for people on Fridays.

Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's. That's my lived experience. But I know you. You do, you know, online stuff, get together, talk with everybody, and. And then when you do get together for events, it's same. Same, but just different. Right?

Yeah, that's it. Yeah.

It. It allows you a. A window into people that I think is really great and important, and it Helps you in trying to help other people if they get, you know, burnt out. And you know, the last thing on this list was time pressure that people, you know, they, they feel burnout from. And that, that's a tough one. You know, I think that they're unreasonable. What do they call? Yeah, let me make sure.

Yeah, it's unreasonable time pressure.

Yeah, pressure.

Okay.

Yeah. So I think the first thing you have to do is define what unreasonable is with, with, with the, with the person. If you're going to talk projects and you're working on things or you're launching a new product or buying another company and all this kind of what, well, what's unreasonable and what is reasonable. And each employee probably has a different sense of what that is or a measurement. I guarantee you, as the business owner has a different idea of what that is. So I just think communicating and trying to, you know, you don't have to meet in the middle. I still like setting deadlines, but you know, maybe people just need some, some training on managing their time as well. I didn't write that down here, but as I was listening to you talk, you know, maybe there's tools that you can help or can you send them to a seminar or a class or an online training? You know, I'm not that great at time management, but I just work all the time. That's how I've overcome it, failed at.

It terribly today, yesterday. Yep, yep.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I also like the concept of building in like I call them, like pressure relief valves, if you will. Is what happens when you start to see things go sideways or smaller deadlines not being met. Because I don't think you should. I think you need to build in check ins.

Right.

So it's like, okay, this, let's. Especially for longer projects. Oh, it's a six week project. Whatever. You got to know what's going on each week. And if you start to see things, maybe you need to add resources, you know, maybe you have to assign another team member to it. Maybe they need to get a contractor to help or maybe some tools haven't been applied correctly or they don't know. Maybe the employee doesn't know about them. I think it's a great place to start to have the discussion about timelines and how to, you know, deal with that.

Yeah, pressure. Yeah, I like that. That's good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So those are my, that, that's, that's my take on it. The underlying thing, as I mentioned in the beginning. Excuse me. Most of this stuff revolves around Great communication.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, for sure.

Yeah.

And I think that is just a terrific thing to remember and something to work on and focus that to help you get, get past a lot of this stuff.

Yeah. Well, I've got a lightning round type thing that I want to go through with some burnout mitigation tips. Things that I've actually tried over the years with my companies that have succeeded sometimes. So sort of feeding off of this last thing, the unreasonable time pressure. Well, there's the obvious, let's give people time off. Right. You know, and that can be vacations. Sure. But also if you've got, if you know that you've got a time of year when things are maybe a little softer or not quite as crazy and maybe even when they are finding a day, a midweek day to give people off, go, you know, shift to a four day work week for a little while or longer term. We've done it before for a month or two here or there. I think we did it for a six month period once. And I like the midweek day break, the Wednesday off because it gives people the ability to come in and burn hard and then you get a break and then you burn hard for two days and then you get a break. Right. The three, the three day weekends are nice but by the end of the fourth day everybody's sort of checking out anyway. Whereas if you've got two on, one off, two on, two off like that, I really like that. And it's worked well for the teams when we've done this in the past when things have just been nuts and it's like, okay, we need a pressure, like you said, a pressure relief valve. And if you can't do that free time where, and I don't mean time where they get to not work, I mean time where they get to work on whatever they want. And this can be, I think it needs to be at least a half day and if it is going to be a half day, I think it needs to be a morning so that they're not spilling into it with the work that they're doing otherwise. But if possible, make it a full day. Right. And maybe if you can't afford a full day out of each person every week, maybe make it an every other Tuesday kind of thing where you come in and you work on whatever you want to work on for the business. And of course this doesn't work with every single job title and all that, but if you've got a, especially with a small business, it can, and it can really help Grow, because as I said before, your people define their own roles and sometimes sort of forcing time upon them to do exactly that can be really helpful for the business. And it makes it fun because generally speaking, when you give people that free time, they're going to do something that they enjoy, that they see themselves excelling at, that they're comfortable doing, and maybe experimenting a little bit, and that. That can be a good thing. I like the concept. Yeah. Yeah, that's good stuff. Yeah. There's. I have. I have two other things that we've done here. Well, one we've always done, and that's the work from home days. Right. If you are bringing people back into the office and you're finding burnout, you know, if you need people in the office for some reason, fine. But, you know, maybe pick, you know, three days a week where people are in the office and two days a week where people are at home. You know, it's something like that to, to eliminate the pressure of the commute, the, you know, and all of those other things. Obviously, you've got to make sure you are prioritizing productivity when people are working remotely. That's got to be part of your culture. Otherwise it's going to just fail, and it doesn't work with every business. I get that. You know, the. The last one is something that I learned from a company my dad worked for years ago, a company called the Danbury Mint. They make all kinds of collectibles, right? And I'm sure you've experienced some of their things like Christmas ornaments and like, they made a series of the James Bond cars and things like that, just all kinds of collectibles. Their whole culture was they never made a bad hire. They only ever made a bad job assignment. And they would. When they realized somebody wasn't doing well in a certain job, they would move them around until they found a good home. Now, this was a company, I think it had, I don't know, somewhere between 100 and 200 employees. So they had enough room at the company to actually do this kind of thing, you may not be able to. To be quite so generous in your company, but if you can allow people to mix it up, even if it's for a short period of time, like, say, okay, hey, look, I know the two of you are completely burned out and swamped. If it's possible, have them swap jobs for a couple of weeks and then come back and share what they've learned. Now, not everybody can do everybody else's job. I get that. But if you've got that opportunity. Think about that. Because there might be some things that can really work there for you.

Yeah, that's great.

Yeah, I love it.

There's a lot of this stuff and yeah, this good culture thing. Listening to you talk, the last thing I'll add to your lightning round. One thing we did that made our people feel more in control is we gave everybody. I mean, our technicians were all using tools, but we did it for everybody. But we kind of gave them a mini budget, if you will.

Okay.

Because, you know, departments get budgets, managers have budgets to do certain things. But you give each employee a mini budget, like technicians. Hey, if there's a tool that's under a hundred bucks or less, just order it and we'll reimburse you. Because they lose things, things break. They don't want to have to ask. You know, whatever they burn through gloves, they do. You know, this kind of stuff, you're going to spend the money anyway. But give everybody an opportunity to have a mini budget to make their workspace better. You know, if they want to buy whatever the quartet, you know, that we really like that, you know, sits on your desk. It makes people feel like, okay, they're willing to invest in me. And it doesn't need to be a lot of money. It's just the opportunity to spend some money. Not have to ask anybody permission to make your work area or bring in tools that you need to do your work better. It goes a long way to making people feel like they belong.

Yeah, they belong. And they can sort of control some level of their own destiny. Yeah, I like it, man. Yeah, this is good stuff. Yeah. Folks, thank you for listening. We remember we said at the beginning, email us feedbackusbrain show if you have any ideas for avoiding burnout. Share those. If you are feeling burned out and you want to bounce some of this stuff off of us also. That too. We love hearing from you and we would love to be. We would love to help. So come check it out. Feedbackusbrain show and yeah, keep living that charmed life. Would you check out our sponsors? Shopify.com SBS bcproviders.com SBS See you next week. Thanks for hanging out.