The hidden cost of how work is structured
Like nearly every problem that we believe to be logical, it is easy to place “burnout” into a box.
Most of us have experienced burnout at some point in our lives, whether in our careers or through other experiences where we push beyond our limits for too long; burnout is common.
Except these days, it is reaching epidemic levels, and nowhere is this clearer than in high-performance teams.
Recently, I was working with a small tech team in a larger company. On the surface, the issue looked like a process issue, and it was. The process was working against, not for, the team. But the deeper, more obvious issue was burnout. Every time I met with the team manager, he looked exhausted. His schedule was constantly double- and sometimes triple-booked with meetings beginning at 7 am and running sometimes into the evening.
He described wanting to create a healthy atmosphere where his team felt supported, but he was stretched too thin and too burned out to model the behavior he wanted to promote. Consequently, his team was highly reactive and was burning out too. It reached a boiling point when the team lost a talented resource, leaving the rest of the team to take on his workload during a hiring freeze.
Sometimes an extreme freeze will impact extreme heat.
Not being able to rehire immediately forced the rest of the team to examine the assumptions and processes they had been avoiding. It became impossible to avoid. A part of the process was examining how the way they were functioning was impacting the mental overload they already carried.
Calendar Burnout
One of the first culture changes we made was eliminating double-booked meetings on their calendars. In a world full of non-stop data and notifications, our minds need a break. Thousands of unread emails, hundreds of unread messages, and constant notifications are taxing your brain in unprecedented ways. A calendar may appear to hold several simultaneous possibilities, but your brain and body still have to determine where you are actually expected to be.
So, the new calendar rules became:
- Only one meeting scheduled at a time
- If multiple things needed to be on the calendar at once, they had to be prioritized and color coded, such as:
- Attending: GREEN – only one scheduled at any given time
- Optional: BLUE – only when required
- Free: GRAY – to denote that this wasn’t a priority, just something to be aware of
- It was encouraged that if you could not attend a meeting, you DECLINE and propose a new time. This went against the general company culture, and required a real team commitment.
- If a meeting needed to be reprioritized for another, the meeting that was deprioritized was either canceled or rescheduled immediately.
- Recurring meetings required an agenda with a focus on productive outcomes
This didn’t solve all of their problems.
It was just one small thing that was done in a series of addressing several larger issues, but it had a measurable impact on the morale of the team. The rules were developed collaboratively, and the most important thing was that the manager followed them too. The team felt ownership and also a sense of empowerment that they didn’t have before.
Sometimes the work itself isn’t what’s consuming all of our energy. The structure surrounding the work is. Although the brain accounts for only about 2% of our body weight, it uses roughly 20% of the body’s energy. The energy increase from individual mental tasks may be relatively small, but sustained mental load, multitasking, and stress still contribute to cognitive and physical fatigue.
Where is the structure of your work consuming more energy than the work itself?
Sometimes the greatest breakthrough isn’t finding a better solution. It’s seeing the real problem.
If you’re facing a leadership, organizational, or strategic challenge, the Perspective Gain Intensive™ is designed to help you uncover the assumptions, blind spots, and patterns that may be shaping your decisions.
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Source: https://bond.edu.au/news/how-much-energy-do-we-expend-using-our-brains
