Burnout in the workplace is becoming more and more prevalent every day. Our “always on” culture is taking its toll, and the damage is obvious to see. Everyone is at risk: people from all walks of life, industries and cultures are struggling with more than just work-related stress: but full-on burnout.
Burnout isn’t just a mental thing- it can manifest itself in different ways, such as preventing sleep, causing anxiety, and in some cases causing actual physical pain. It affects people not only at their place of work, but beyond that. Clearly it’s a growing issue that needs to be addressed.
Robyn Vesey, organisational consultant for Tavistock Consulting, says the question of blame itself is symptomatic of a burnt-out workplace: “Blame is indicative of the problem in the first place: there can be an atmosphere and a system which is supportive of collaboration, sharing out the stress of the team and creating a sense of shared purpose and healthy interaction – or there can be one that leads to blame and people reaching a point where they can’t carry on.”
As with any strain of work-related stress, a lot of it is to do with workplace culture and the pressures and processes that individuals have to undertake on a daily basis. Perhaps it’s a constant stream of unrealistic deadlines, maybe it’s being understaffed and having to take on extra workload, maybe it’s nothing negative at all but a cumulative rate of success that you can’t possibly keep up for a long period of time. It can be a whole range of things, but one way to combat workplace burnout is to open up your team to greater communication, collaboration, and strategy insight. This is where team management software, like Wundamail, comes into its own.
One simple daily email to your whole team highlights where people are up to, who’s on track and who could benefit from a helping hand. The whole point of Wundamail is that it’s transparent - the responses are collated into one email and sent to everyone in the team to see. This creates the atmosphere of supportive collaboration, and sharing the stress of the team, that Vesey spoke about. The idea is not to highlight and shame those who are struggling, it’s to identify where the gaps are and share resources and collaborate in order to create a culture that works cohesively together so that no one is left behind.
By sharing collective goings on within the daily Wundamail, it also gives individuals the feelings that they’re contributing to a wider strategy - that they can see where the business is going and where they fit into that bigger picture. This sense of shared purpose, as Vesey stated, is a key feature that has been identified in combatted burnout within the workplace, and something that Wundamail is built to cultivate.
