How Do You Identify And Deal With Employee Burnout?

Hello everyone and welcome back. My name is Boss FISHER and I'm Ms. Naked Insider. And today we have Peter Natter.

It's good to be back.

Alright, Tears and tears. It's always enjoyable.

Yep.

So today's video is all about what is a silver lining to employee burnout. And just to give you some Numbers, in the US alone, the cost of health care is around between 125 to 190 billion dollars per year. So this is astronomical cost to the economy by and large. So employee burnout is a key topic. So I'm going to pass it to you. What is it? How do we define it?

Essentially, burnout is. There's another name for it that some people are more familiar with. It's called overwhelm, where people are just overwhelmed and essentially they see no way forward, no way out, and yet they're stuck in a situation. So literally it's an ever tightening spiral where people can literally implode inside of their dilemma.

Correct. So what's the real problem here?

The real problem is that it creates an anxiety. That anxiety then creates a lack of being able to chart or intelligently plot a way forward or out of the situation that they're in. And it's that very inability to see, to find the thread that will unravel this ball of wool that creates an anxiety, that recreates the anxiety. It's a self perpetuating nightmare because.

So I was going to talk about the sort of the emotion side. So what are the feeling per se? So someone has burnt out.

Most of the time people who are burning out or in overwhelm are very isolated. And whether it's intentional or whether it's real, they feel very disconnected from any kind of resources. They feel lack of support, they feel lack of capability, they feel lack of resources, they feel lack of everything, including their own internal capacity to achieve certain things.

All right, so the reason I asked is, you know you mentioned about self repatriating. So someone that feels emotionally or burnout or overwhelmed, how does that self perpetuating work?

We all know that when we have a really great day, we can, we can conquer the world. And it is a self, it is a self asserting emotion that allows us to say, well, we can handle everything. So something comes along, we go, yep, we've got this. We can sequence the events that we need to do to make that happen. And we make that happen with an overwhelm. That self esteem, that power inside of us to be able to rise above and say, okay, we've got the 30,000 foot view on this situation. So this is how we're going to proceed is gone.

Yes, correct.

So the more it's gone, the more it goes.

Correct.

This is the self effect of that.

Yeah, exactly. So in sort of in another format. So if they feel that they're losing control. Yeah. And it keeps them self perpetuating.

Yep.

So the more out of control.

Yes.

They feel.

Yep.

And that's cascading. Yes. So how do organizations identify it? Number one. And how do they see it? Maybe it could be the reverse, but yes, how do they see it? Number one.

So most organisations, or a lot of organisations don't actually recognize that somebody is going into burnout or overwhelm. They just see that somebody is not living up to what it was that they're supposed to be doing.

Yes, correct.

How do they respond to that? Most times people or organizations will say to people, well look, you're experiencing a problem doing this, so will performance manage you? Yes. Which is. Yeah. Well from the. From the person's perspective, that's so punitive, it's not funny. So guess what that does to self esteem? It just crumbles self esteem even more. Which perpetuates the overwhelm. Which just accelerates the process of the cascading process. Exactly.

And now they're even more out of control and they feel more unfair and it's just that negative emotion about how they get perceived about the organization.

Yes. Gets worse and the problem exists then how do people deal with that? So some people cave in and become reclusive inside of their own. Inside of their own cocoon and other people lash out and other people become quite messy or loud or explosive. Both outcomes of which is not an ideal situation in an organization that requires harmony.

Correct. Correct. And I think there are two others, certain situations. I think the first one is probably more likely that they might sort of drift into their own little shell. But at certain time something's going to happen because they will be asked questions.

They will.

So why aren't you performing? And they will be asked to. To all let them go.

Right.

And that's probably the most likely situation.

Yes. And probably the least effective outcome from something like that is meant to what.

Are the consequences to the organization themselves? We talked about the consequences to the actual individual, but what about the organization? What are they looking at?

So from an organizational point, if you have somebody who is actually cocooning down, their productivity is going to go way down. But we're not looking at an organization as just the individual and the amorphous thing called the organization. There are many eyes looking onto this situation. We're also looking at that going, well, you know, I have to work with this team member and this is how I feel about it or how I don't feel about it. This is the stance I'm taking here and management should do something about this or whatever. So it's not just the individual that's undergoing the overwhelm or the burnout, it's also the ripple effect around them on the team members that can have a very detrimental effect.

For sure. For sure. It is often described that if you see an organisation that's got a high employee turnover, does that equate to a situation where that organisation employees might be experiencing burnout or is it just completely separate?

Burnout is one category of why organisations go through personnel very, very rapidly. It could just be that a particular role has not been given enough resources or given enough time or something that is, that is lacking for allowing competent people to manage. Even though it might be a stressful situation to manage inside of that stress and bring that role to fruition. Every time there is something, those overwhelm episodes are a flag that there is something not quite right in that organization.

Correct. So what can organizations do?

Where do they start recognizing it first? It's very easy to be in our own cocoon, competent in what we do and looking over our shoulder and saying, well, you know, there's something I wish so and so would have got the report or had the result on my desk. So I can now keep on moving with that. And as I said before, most people, most organizations will respond to people with that by saying, well, there must be something wrong. We need to performance manage you.

Correct. Okay, so if they do recognize that there's a situation, but they might apply the wrong remediation.

Yeah.

So that's not going to help. What are the other options? I mean, what else can they do?

So one of the most clever ways of addressing that is to actually take a stance of mentoring. I like the idea of mentoring because it allows a steadiness. It puts stability of emotion into a situation. And if you can chart out, say the first three steps of a solution and get somebody to focus on just those first three steps, there might be 20 other steps left to go. But let's just focus on those first three steps, see how you go, the sense of achievement, of being able to meet that goal and then come back and say, I've done that, by the way, I now have a visibility how I can go forward for the next five steps. Great, let's do that. The concept, the personal stance of being able to be a mentor to that person allows them to chunk down the problem, to take the problem from a huge, massive problem, to single individual steps, and allows them to move forward and find their own way as well, too. And that, you know, you could almost see mentoring as a compassionate act from.

A corporate point of view, for sure. Then there's a situation where, for example, some organizations that are very much sales pressured or results pressured. And so management and executives are looking at their employees and saying, well, we need results now. We don't really care about you being mentored or, you know, feel free to get mented, but we still need results. Right now, it's becoming quite a difficult situation for that individual.

So there is a conundrum in a lot of circumstances where people say, you need to slow down to speed up.

Yes, yes.

And that basically says, okay, let's just slow down, focus on the basics, and do one thing step at a time. The pathway to achieving a goal is actually achieved faster by taking it step by step than trying to do everything all at once. And the process of mentoring and being able to show people the pathway forward actually takes that principle and puts it into action.

Yeah, I think I agree with that. Having said that, who takes responsibility within organizations to do that, to do the mentoring? Because you don't have a designated mentor in an organization.

Well, it would be the person who has the ability to make a decision on how that role should be handled and also who has a certain amount of responsibility, perhaps senior to that person that's being mentored. Somebody who has more experience, somebody has more authority, somebody who has the ability to teach. Essentially. This is how we're going forward now. A lot of organizations say, well, we employ people for their competency. Yes. But their competency in your organization may not always match up. So they have a competency in their role, but not necessarily in how the organization wants to achieve that.

How important do you think it is during the interview process when they're applying for a job in that organization to understand whether these such values within the organization for such thing as mentorship from.

The perspective of the hire?

Well, the hire and the individual. So, like, if you were looking to join an organization.

Yes.

It might be of an important value to know whether they have mentorship within.

An organization as a candidate. Absolutely. You know, how do I know how to operate in your environment?

Correct.

I've come from an environment that has a culture X.

Correct.

Let's just say we come from. From Japan.

Yes.

As a really extreme example, there is a. There is an organizational value system there at play that is different to many of the organizations that we have in Australia, so.

True.

So that's about a very valid question. Yeah. How do we, how do we proceed forward?

So I know I wrote an article about this. It's called, you know, should organizations should have a chief employee officer? So someone that manages the welfare of employees.

Yes.

Your perspective.

So. Absolutely. And in a very large organisation, the distance between the chief employment officer and the people on the ground doing the actual work can be quite distant.

Yes, correct.

So there has to be a pathway, there has to be a chain or a track so that the, the policies that are implemented at the higher end are actually implemented on the shop floor, so to speak.

Okay, excellent. So what is the silver lining here?

Absolutely.

Because that's how we started.

Absolutely. And the silver lining is immeasurable. There's two reasons or there's two things that come out of it. If you mentor someone, when you mentor somebody, you can have two outcomes. You can either have the outcome that this person is successful in what they do and that they have now skill that can be a benefit to the organization for years to come. So you have now enabled a resource, a person to become a valuable element of your organisation further down the track. Even if that's not the case, keep in mind that it's not just that one person that's at play. There are many eyes around.

Yes, correct.

So the people that are immediately around this person that is being mentored will see, ah, there is a certain amount of caring and compassion. This is an organization I really like to be with. So there are many other eyes looking at what's happening with this particular individual.

Correct? Correct.

Yeah. And that's absolutely two silver linings for one.

Two silver linings. And great. So that, that's it for this video. It's great. And look, you know, we're talking a lot about different sort of behaviors and, and this is what's really interesting is that people have dynamic behaviors, dynamic values and beliefs and so forth. So not to put people in a box. And it's being basically to take the best out of them and giving them the best resource.

Yes, absolutely, absolutely.

So with that we're going to come back with more videos about behaviors and allow you how to, to help you navigate these, these challenges.

Looking forward to it.

Thanks, Peter. And thank you. And again, you'll find more accompanying information below the video. And if you want to reach us again, you know where to get us.

Thank you.

Thanks, Peter. And thank you.