How do you prevent employee burnouts? Manage wellbeing without privacy intrusion

Maximizing autonomy is a well-regarded technique, but I wonder what the downsides are, and whether it's still worth it anyway?

I guess I would recommend some self-compassion, first of all, because this is a historically miserable time and you are muddling through the same as everyone else. The pandemic may not be the time in your management career when employees seemed happiest.

I think you're right that direct asking sometimes doesn't work. Furthermore, it's easy to confuse private outside-of-work issues for hidden burnout. I have begrudgingly revealed personal problems because it seemed like the best way to stop my manager sleuthing and keep my job safe. I then had to put on a fake smile for all the free advice and unsolicited personal stories I got. The only catharsis was my manager's.

So if "inbound" info seeking can be dangerous, I guess that leaves companies with "outbound" burnout interventions, like surprise days off and "optional" happy hours. Also tricky. Events might make an organizer with power feel good but if they're upsetting the forced attendees, the organizer will be the last to know. Maybe it's best to seek a lot of anonymous feedback on these "rewards"

Third possibility after detecting or relieving burnout is preventing it. This means managers modeling boundaries and self-care. Take needed sick days and do not "excuse" yourself by confessing what you're sick with. Shut the laptop at 5pm and set an overnight away message. Remind people to make plans to use their benefits. Refuse some emergencies.

Sadly, trust is more easily destroyed than built. The management team needs to be honest about which way accountability flows in the company: does it just go from managers to underlings, or do underlings regularly and safely point out problems? Skip-level meetings might prevent people from creating hidden "rules" inside the company ("this team stays til 7", "yeah that employee is abusive but we accommodate them because they're good at programming and our team works on critical systems", "don't talk to anyone outside the team without telling me first")

Sounds like you are a good manager for caring about this issue. Best of luck

First recognize “burnout” also leads to suboptimal work output. People too attached to work will become bad at prioritizing what’s most important to work on. It also encourages a “hero” mentality from this employee, which might lead to resentment from other employees.

So it’s both employee mental health and org health.

At Shopify we have a culture of “protecting each other’s downtime”. I think thats super important for a remote company to fight burnout.

How do you do this?

Set a really strong example with your own downtime. If you have weird working hours make it clear when those are and only work then unless you need to.

Keep public slack channels or other work comms quiet outside work hours. Don’t DM unless absolutely necessary. Council employees to disconnect by NOT putting slack, email etc on their phones and disable GitHub email notifications. Actively tell people too chatty outside work hours to take some time off.

If people DO get a big idea over the weekend, encourage them to try strategies like writing it down and try to encourage taking breaks and developing outside interests.

If they DO just need to work on the idea or a deadline, try to encourage them to run silent” and not spam public channels or other employees outside work hours. Encourage them to also set the tone with work boundaries.

Under all of this is hiring the right people. If you have a few star performers and one or two bright stars, you’ll setup a situation where only a few people care about their work. They’ll feel pushed to work a lot to maintain quality. Surround them with great people that also want their downtime, then it can work out.

In my opinion, burnout happen when people that care, work in mismanaged/misaligned projects. People that get burnout are very often the best employees, but they are forced to work on impossible deadlines, without enough control and support or within a team that just do not care.

In most organization, middle management is not accountable. An incompetent manager can make a trail of failed, unfinished and walking dead projects, get promoted and move to another company. Same with principal engineers/architects that create impossible to maintain architecture and move on. What is left is an organization that is often without enough resources in critical sections and new managers starting re-write projects siphoning more people.

What is needed is better ways of managing middle managers without another layer of management. There need to be a ways to have safe feedback loop that can remove incompetent managers and promote good one.