Your team is feeling overwhelmed by change. How do you prevent employee burnout from increasing workloads?

Assessing team needs is foundational in preventing burnout amidst increased workloads. It's not just about workload quantity but also the quality of support and resources provided. Open communication plays a crucial role; it ensures team members feel heard and valued, fostering a collaborative environment. Prioritizing tasks helps maintain focus and clarity, reducing stress and enhancing productivity. Ultimately, promoting a healthy work-life balance and monitoring workload adjustments are key in sustaining team morale and preventing burnout during periods of change.

In assessing needs, I'd recommend focusing on capacity. Being overwhelmed (i.e. high org change saturation) by change means you either have low ability to absorb change or you haven't built up enough change resilience (ex. maturity, culture for change, previous successful change transformations) to support future changes. In assessing needs, start with core people analytics metrics like employee engagement results, retention rate, internal mobility, and skill development, among others. You're understanding of these components will paint a picture of individual burnout and its impacts on key workstreams.

We share the PVC (purpose, value, capacity) model for helping teams set priorities. It works well but then you encounter the lack of prioritisation occurring 2 or 3 levels up, which trickles down. The reality is your role as a leader requires managing up to help stem the flow of new “initiatives” for your team and helping them set their priorities (most people are never taught & spend their lives in the urgent/important perception trap) to support them making decisions on where to spend their energy. Equally you setting a clear vision of what is most important to work on each week gives clarity to stop people being overwhelmed by the seeming endless to do list during change. Finally, accepting that during change, some BAU needs to stop.

With an understanding of your people and org capacities, priorities should be set based on your portfolio of work and the magnitude of change each workstream/project brings. In a vacuum, if each project had its own spotlight, we could simply focus on that one project to completion and solely rely on how the magnitude of change of that one project would impact end users. But we know in this age of transformation, many changes are happening at once. So we must know the magnitude of change across stakeholder groups and see how that impact layers across a portfolio. This will allow strategy and planning teams (or a transformation office) determine where to allocate resources or accelerate/decelerate projects accordingly.

Un café. Un café compartido. Una pregunta. Una pregunta abierta. A veces eso es todo lo que se necesita para saber cómo apoyar a tu equipo. No hay mensaje más poderoso que el estar dispuesto a despejar la agenda para escuchar a alguien hablar sobre las cosas que necesita.

Additionally, Structured Breaks has proven to be effective by Implement structured breaks within the workday schedule, such as using the Pomodoro Technique, which encourages regular intervals of work followed by short breaks.

The same metrics/measurement approach you use to track your change projects can be used for your team. With any change project, at Propeller we tend to anchor on a build that starts with sentiment, leads to engagement, and ultimately leads to behavior changes. Similar, organic, less structured approaches could be used w/ your team to ensure that the sentiment of their work (purpose) and engagement in the work (energy) remains at the right levels to drive the project objectives.

Teams vary in dynamics and responses to increased workloads, necessitating adaptive leadership. By staying responsive to feedback and adjusting strategies accordingly, leaders can effectively mitigate burnout risks. This approach fosters resilience and empowers teams to navigate change with greater ease, maintaining productivity and morale.

Is the team overwhelmed with: - the change itself - the information about the change? Our ability to take in, absorb, digest and make sense of lots of information is limited. So we can become 'overwhelmed' with the information about change when it involves: - emotion - workload and - information. That's a mess that any brain will struggle with. Before you jump in to create more and more information or more meetings or more workshops to get clarity, consider (and ask about) the kinds of overwhelm people are experiencing and THEN plan your strategy or response.

Assess capacity, capability and work design before you increase workloads. To NOT do so is a psychosocial hazard waiting to happen. No pizzas, fruit bowls or positive reinforcement fixes these kinds of hazards and risks!

In a situation where both change fatigue and burnout appear to be issues, it’s helpful to try to tease out exactly what is happening, so you can target your response to the right drivers. Change fatigue is a product of faulty engagement and implementation strategy, whereas burnout is a product of workload allocated beyond what can be managed within available resources and capacity. They’re different things, created by different dynamics that are in the control of leaders, so if you have both happening together, it’s a signal that organisational leadership is in crisis. If that’s the case, stop. Hit the pause button, reassess priorities, resources and strategy, then regear the plan and proceed with greater caution.

We should first recognize the key triggers that cause change burnout and proactively mitigate over-stressing the teams. These include: *Poor overall change roadmap – creating the feelings of wandering in the desert or scavenger hunt *Unclear change strategies – not working smart *Poor change management planning - scope, timing and pace *Inadequate change understanding – uncertainty about change impacts at a personal level *Not defining what is not changing – creating perception of everything is unstable *Being unclear about the skills required – lack of pre-training creating sense of being ill equipped *Leadership not engaging close enough – risking unrealistic expectations *Ineffective communications to create trust in the change