How can organisations prevent employees from burning out while maintaining productivity? The answer is not a simple one, according to burnout expert Leanne Spencer, but athletes provide a notable lens for understanding the intricacies of performance models.
Spencer, an author and keynote speaker who has built a career helping company leaders and teams with wellbeing strategies, explained that a company’s expectations and those of an employee often are discordant with normal levels of functioning.
“If we think about a community of people who are really good at managing their energy, performing when they want to, understanding the value of recovery, it’s athletes,” Spencer said in an interview with FM.
Anyone can push through to get things done in the short term, she noted, but such an approach largely isn’t sustainable. One word Spencer urges leaders to consider when assessing the sustainability of their performance culture is cadence. In other words, what is the pace at which we do business? Practising cadence, according to Spencer, is when we try to anticipate when people are going to need their energy.
“An athlete will anticipate when they want to perform, get ready, and there will only be small changes that could have a big impact on their ability to perform,” Spencer said. In that model, expectations are clearly defined, and there’s also room for recovery.
An employee’s compulsion to work harder and take on more work is often a way of demonstrating worth, Spencer detailed in The 12 Stages of Burnout.
“There’s a necessity to deliver at a certain level, [which could trace back] to childhood origins, the way you were brought up, your perception of your manager’s expectations, the reality of your manager’s expectations,” Spencer said.
But, she added, the less room we leave for that period of recovery, the more our capacity to perform diminishes. We need to develop an awareness of when we are at capacity and “respect red flags”. If we’re feeling a lot of friction about doing something, we could be in the perform phase when we should be recovering.
The power of connection in a digital world
In an era of widespread digitalisation and remote work, the importance of community and connection has resurfaced.
We’re starting “to appreciate the value of what we get by being around other people in terms of creativity, innovation, productivity, and performance”, Spencer said.
Community and connection alone won’t prevent burnout, she said. Ultimately, it’s imperative for companies to find ways to become more in tune with their employees and find ways to centre the sustainability of people within environmental, social, and governance goals.
The impact of open conversations on work culture
Normalising conversations around mental health sets a powerful precedent.
“There’s nothing more powerful, I don’t think, than a CEO or a leader actually talking about mental health in a normal sense or what they do to energise, what they do to have great energy, mood, and motivation,” Spencer said.
If a leader is an effective communicator, if they have resilience, if they have empathy, then that’s a strong start to changing culture, she added.
When leaders demonstrate the same values they expect of their employees, it’s easier for workers to open up about their struggles. Good management increases psychological safety straightaway, empowering employees to say, unafraid, “I need a bit of support.”
Forward-thinking companies, Spencer said, have started to realise that seeing people as business-athletes allows for business practices that inform better planning and pacing to manage energy levels accordingly.
“I think if businesses start to think about the cadence of their business, they’d be a lot better off in terms of managing burnout. Because in a lot of ways, business is a lot more predictable than we think.
“Of course, there’s things we don’t see coming that we have to be resilient and prepared for as well. But it would take a bit of a load off people if we were able to tell them when we definitely need them at full capacity.”
— To comment on this article or to suggest an idea for another article, contact Steph Brown at Stephanie.Brown@aicpa-cima.com.
