Managing Burnout in the Pandemic-Era Workplace

Conventional wisdom seems to dictate that the widespread move to remote work since the pandemic began would boost employee morale. Who doesn’t want to cut out the commute or work in their pajamas, right?

But research shows that the opposite trend is taking hold. According to Gallup, fully remote workers (29%) now feel burnt out “very often” or “always” at a higher rate than on-site workers (26%). The polling agency reported that employees with high levels of burnout are 63% more likely to take a sick day, 13% less confident in their performance, and 23% more likely to visit the emergency room. The online employment platform Monster documented that 69% of remote workers are experiencing burnout and 59% are taking less time off than they normally would.

Deteriorating work-life balance and disappearing boundaries, distance learning due to school closures, the difficulty of self-motivating and self-managing while working from home, and the lack of face-to-face interaction are just a few of today’s prominent workplace challenges.

Stemming the Tide of Burnout

How can you manage this rising tide of burnout within your team? Typical recommendations include:

Allowing employees to work more flexible hours, in acknowledgment of the scheduling irregularities caused by the pandemic.
Encouraging employees to take a regular lunch break, which often goes by the wayside while working from home.
Making clear to employees that they are not required to check email during the weekend or outside of regular business hours on weeknights.
Regularly checking in with members of your team regarding their personal and professional wellbeing.
Organizing social events, such as virtual happy hours or, to the extent that team members are comfortable, safe in-person gatherings outdoors.
Providing employees with access to resources that promote mental health and self-care.

Managing burnout could also entail a more sophisticated understanding of stress.

Reactions to Stress: Fight, Flight or Flock

“Two common and well-known responses to stress are ‘fight’ or ‘flight.’ But a lesser-known view from science is emerging which shows that under stress, there is actually an alternative stress response: ‘flock,’” says Megan Marcus, founder of FuelEd, an organization that works to develop emotionally intelligent educators as a means to alleviate teacher burnout. “What this means is that — in the face of stress — if given the opportunity to connect with people who feel safe and familiar, they are less likely to ‘flee’ or ‘fight’ and more likely to ‘flock’ together as a way to cope with stress and self-regulate, staying at their organizations or companies, growing and thriving, instead of fleeing or fighting.”

Accordingly, the more you work to build community within your team and focus on the power of relationships, the more your team will be able to come together and avert burnout — even if the overwhelming majority of those relationship-building efforts take place virtually.

When it comes to the work itself, companies can address burnout by changing the way they use the technology platforms that have been wildly popularized during the pandemic.

Overcoming Zoom Fatigue

Indeed, the infamous phenomenon of “death by PowerPoint” has a new counterpart, “Zoom fatigue.” Although Zoom and other videoconferencing tools do enable team meetings to feel as “normal” as possible during these times, more than a year into the pandemic, many employees are burnt out by the prospect of a workday completely occupied by back-to-back virtual meetings. Zoom meetings often feel like lectures in which team members are passively listening, waiting for their turn to speak, and talking over each other.

Yet Zoom contains features which can enhance employees’ experience by creating more interaction, such as breakout rooms, which allow for more intimate discussions. Another type of virtual tool, online whiteboard platforms, can foster interaction and facilitate stronger workplace outcomes by helping meeting participants organize their ideas.

According to Mitchell Shack, co-founder of the Centauric consultancy, having a Zoom account these days is almost as common as having a bank account. But if it’s only used to host virtual meetings and dump information, companies are missing out on an opportunity to engage their staff and create more of a “normal” workplace environment. “Businesses of any size can successfully adapt to the times by using videoconferencing to share information with groups, and then by infusing virtual meetings with the missing link of virtual whiteboards that foster interaction, involvement, and impact,” Shack says.

By working to gain a deeper understanding of virtual burnout, and then implementing best practices that promote employees’ personal and professional wellbeing, you’ll find that burnout doesn’t need to be an inevitable part of life for your team.