Burnout and Psychological Safety

Burnout and psychological safety

There are many causes of burnout, both systemic and individual, but we know that low psychological safety means we’re unlikely to be able to ask for help or raise concerns, which increases the likelihood of employee burnout.

There’s a strong link between psychological safety and burnout in employees in the workplace. I mean, there’s a strong link between psychological safety and just about anything in the workplace, but the connection between psychological safety and burnout is particularly strong. If we don’t feel safe to ask for help, admit our mistakes, or raise concerns about workload, it’s going to contribute to an environment where we risk burnout, a situation where we feel overwhelmed, overworked, and unable to look after ourselves as a result. Acknowledging the role of psychological safety helps us to recognise that burnout is preventable, and it is not an individual’s responsibility to simply be more resilient.

In an environment of higher psychological safety, we are more able to speak up and say to our friends and colleagues things such as:

• I made a mistake.
• I need some help.
• I can’t take on any more work right now.
• I’ve got stuff going on outside work that’s affecting my ability to concentrate.
• I’m feeling overwhelmed.
• Please be patient with me.

And in groups that possess the dynamics that foster psychological safety, team members are much more likely to step in, support, help and discuss these issues, which helps to prevent or recover from burnout.

This paper by Michaela J. Kerrissey, Tuna Cem Hayirli, Aditi Bhanja, Nicholas Stark, James Hardy and Christopher Peabody shows that psychological safety and feeling heard are both statistically significantly associated with lower burnout. Psychological safety exhibited a statistically significant relationship with less worsening burnout during crisis.

This is a great report from Infinite Potential on burnout, its causes, characteristics, impacts, and what we can do about it. The report surveyed 2065 people across 40 countries, in various job levels, and highlights some key points:

• Prevalence and Impact: Burnout is a significant issue affecting health and wellbeing, productivity, and innovation capabilities in individuals, organisations and society at large.
• Burnout as a Syndrome, Not a Disease: Burnout should be seen as a syndrome that results from chronic workplace stress that hasn’t been successfully managed, rather than a disease.
• Preventability: Burnout, despite its current prevalence, is preventable. Organisations and leaders are encouraged to identify sources of chronic stress and experiment with solutions.
• The Role of Organisations and Leaders: Organisations and leaders can play a crucial role in preventing burnout by creating environments in which employees can thrive.

It offers these recommendations:

1. Foster Organisational Support: Leaders should foster a climate of psychological safety, engagement, and belonging within their organisations. They need to build skills such as empathy and bias awareness, demonstrating vulnerability, learning from failure, and recognising and encouraging contributions.
2. Ensure Workload is Manageable: Leaders should design jobs with manageable workloads. This requires regularly checking in on team capacity and pushing back on stakeholders where necessary to ensure the team’s workload is sustainable.
3. Advocate for Burnout Prevention: Leaders should prioritise burnout prevention and act as advocates for this within their organisations. 

This article in HBR, called “Managers Are Burned Out. Here’s How to Help Them Recharge,” by Rebecca Zucker specifically discusses the issue of burnout among middle managers. Middle managers often feel pressure from both ends – executing strategy from above while coaching and developing their teams below them. Without receiving good support, development or empowerment from senior managers, they often end up feeling exhausted, stressed and burned out. Rebecca suggests six strategies for leaders to help recharge burned-out managers:

• Recognise: Show concern and recognise the individual’s efforts and positive contributions to the business. This helps them feel seen, understood, and cared for.
• Reconnect: Facilitate opportunities for personal connection amongst managers as a group to counter feelings of isolation and create a sense of being “in it together.”
• Re-assess, Re-prioritise, and Re-distribute Work: Conduct an audit of managers’ workload and focus their effort on areas that will make the biggest difference in achieving the organisation’s goals. 
• Revise Team Agreements: Empower managers to help solve the problem of burnout by creating Team Charters and agreements about how the team works together, creating new norms that can help create a sense of agency, not urgency.
• Regularly Check In: Carry out 1-1’s with managers on a regular basis to see how they are doing and how you can best support them.
• Relax and Reset: Encourage managers to take meaningful breaks from work to restore their energy levels and help them reset, both mentally and physically.

Both these pieces emphasise the role of leaders in preventing burnout, the importance of manageable workloads, and the need for organisational support. The key point for me, as with psychological safety, is that burnout is not an individual responsibility to manage on our own – it is a symptom, or an outcome, of the way our organisations are designed and how they function, and it is preventable. In part, it can be prevented by fostering an environment of greater psychological safety.

New Date! Online Practice Masterclass 21st August

Unfortunately one of our clients had to postpone a series of workshops scheduled for August, but the upshot is that we now have some extra time! So we’ve decided to schedule a bonus online Practice Masterclass Workshop for the 21st August at 2pm UK time.  This session sold out last time so register and find out more here.

New stickers!

I think designing stickers is one of my guilty pleasures. We have two new fun designs available to buy now. Alternatively, you can get your hands on some by attending a workshop, or promoting the psychsafety.com newsletter and/or workshops on social media (such as LinkedIn). If you let us know you’ve done this by emailing stickers@psychsafety.com (and include your postal address) we’ll send you some for free!

This week’s poem:

Still Here, by Langston Hughes

I been scarred and battered.
My hopes the wind done scattered.
Snow has friz me,
Sun has baked me,
Looks like between ’em they done
Tried to make me
Stop laughin’, stop lovin’, stop livin’–
But I don’t care!
I’m still here!