Tag Archive for: Burnout

OP-Ed: Why Female Leaders Experience More Burnout and What to Do About It

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Jessica ThiefelsWhile COVID took a toll on all of us, women in the workplace are feeling the burnout effects at higher rates than their male counterparts. Data from a 2020 McKinsey poll found that:

  • 53 percent of women reported feeling job-related stress, compared to 46 percent of men
  • 37 percent of women felt exhaustion, compared to 31 percent of men
  • 32 percent of women felt burnout, compared to 28 percent of men

The disparity is even more obvious at the senior level. For example, 54 percent of senior-level female leaders felt exhausted compared to just 41 percent for men, and 39 percent experienced burnout with only 29 percent of male leaders reporting the same.

To counteract widespread burnout as a female leader, it’s important to understand the root causes of your work-related stress and find actionable ways to avoid it. Here are some strategies you can use as a female leader in the workplace fighting burnout during COVID and otherwise.

Understand the Relationship Between Mental Health and Burnout

Burnout is due to chronic stress, fatigue, cynicism, and lack of accomplishment, according to a study from Frontiers in Psychology. What’s more, the research indicates that burnout often shares commonalities with depression and anxiety.

With stress at the root of burnout, it’s vital that you not only be aware of how stress levels can impact your mental health but your physical health as well. You may not notice the stress if you’re used to it, but you might notice these physical stress indicators:

  • Tense muscles
  • Blood pressure increase
  • Increase in heart rate
  • Hyperventilating
  • Off-balanced digestion

In “How to Free Yourself From Stress”, HealthMarkets explains that the real trouble starts when this stress becomes chronic. They explain, “The constant physiological response wears us down, affecting several major biological systems. Our stores of energy drain. Our bodies produce fewer infection-fighting T-cells, so our immune systems become weak, making it easy for illnesses and diseases to push their way into our lives.”

Fight burnout: Use an app like Symple to track your daily mental and physical health. It’s easy to ignore stress when it’s become the norm for you. This small step will force you to focus on your overall health each day, which can point you to burnout before it becomes a problem.

Fight Back Against Social Media Fatigue

Female leaders are expected to write sharp industry articles on LinkedIn and promote themselves as the face of a brand on Twitter. Not to mention, it’s often a component of our personal lives. Yet, excess social media consumption can also lead to burnout.

The problem is that too much social media exposure is dangerous to mental health, especially for female leaders. Recent research has found that social media fatigue is a legitimate condition that can lead to anxiety and exhaustion.

As a modern successful woman, you’re constantly taking in the highlight reel of your peers and colleagues. To make it even worse, instances of “mom-shaming” for working mothers are on the rise since the start of COVID-19.

Fight burnout: How often do you mindless scroll on social media? Probably more than you think. Set social media boundaries so you can still show up where you need to, but walk away when you don’t. For example, you set a rule that you can’t look at social media until 10 am and then you put it away for the night after dinner. If you can’t stop yourself, let your phone do the work with an app like Offtime.

Untangle the Excessive Demands on Female Leaders

Based on the same McKinsey data, COVID-19 workplace shifts caused unequal challenges for female leaders, especially when compared to men. The pressures of household responsibilities, fear of suffering job performance, and lack of flexibility/work-life balance forced many women to scale down their careers or leave their job. One in three working mothers faced this decision due to limited childcare options.

It’s even tougher is when you’re the solitary female in your position. The report explains, “Senior-level women are also nearly twice as likely as women overall to be ‘Onlys’—the only or one of the only women in the room at work.” This circumstance sets the stage for microaggressions, criticisms, dismissals, and high-performance stakes, all of which contribute to female leaders experiencing burnout 1.5 times more than male leaders.

If you add childcare into the equation (working mothers currently spend 15 more hours on domestic labor per week than men), it becomes an impossible situation.

This is when it becomes important for organizations to play a role in helping women mitigate their burnout.

How Organizations Can Help Female Leaders Combat Burnout

You’re likely not the only woman dealing with this burnout in your organization—and in some cases, it takes the organization to make changes for you to be able to better manage the stresses put on women in the workplace.

Consider using these strategies to recognize and counteract burnout for women company-wide:

  • Promote mental health awareness: Ensure transparency surrounding mental health benefits, I.E. therapy and other available resources. If your benefits plan is lacking, Eric Freedman, founder and CEO of eSkill, suggests circumventing financial barriers by exploring options such as telehealth counseling sessions or access to mobile wellness subscriptions. Companies can also provide mental health support with group meditation classes. Organizations including Nike, Google, and Sony have built this into their company culture.
  • Support working mothers: Assist working mothers in finding solutions for childcare or allow for more flexible hours for those who also home-school their children due to COVID. Don’t just to send an email or memo, but make changes that help women make these changes in their workday. What’s more, female leaders can lead by example by setting boundaries, like being offline at certain times, so their direct reports know that it’s acceptable to do the same. Check out this Fast Company piece, which highlights how other companies provide for the “patchwork of childcare needs” of their employees.
  • Get real: It’s important that company leaders don’t just talk about these things, but they take real action. This will look different for each organization, starting with getting serious about allowing for greater flexible schedules, getting realistic about workloads and where support is needed, updating paid leave policies, and even discussing whether female leaders’ pay is equivalent to the work they’re doing.
Female Leaders: Support Yourself and Others

Whether you manage women in leadership positions, shape your HR policies or workplace culture, or are a female executive, you’re likely experiencing burnout in some way. The first step to solving this issue is understanding where the root causes are and then taking real action to provide solutions. It’s time to put sustainable policies and processes into place so female leaders can do their job without an impossible burden on their shoulders.

Jessica Thiefels is the author of 10 Questions That Answer Life’s Biggest Questions, podcast host of Mindset Reset Radio, CEO of Jessica Thiefels Consulting and founder of the Femxcutive Personal Brand Coaching Program. She’s been writing for more than 10 years and has been featured in top publications including Forbes and Entrepreneur. She also contributes to Fast Company, The Ladders, and more. Follow her on Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Are You Being Sustainable? Avoid Burnout and Disengagement at Work

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Nicki GilmourBy Nicki Gilmour, Executve Coach and Organizational Psychologist (www.evolvedpeople.com)

Let’s talk about stress. We all have it, but it’s how we deal with it that matters.

Days can go past very quickly and the news cycle and social media only provokes our limbic reactions further. Are you getting good quality sleep? Are you actually benefitting from exercise or wearing yourself out? How is your stress level affecting your socio- emotional competencies at work? Or, in plain English, are you leading and managing less optimally than you could? Are your clients getting the best from you? Are you feeling mentally good about saying yes and saying no in the right ratio? What toll is it taking on your personal life?

Dr Karen Wilson and myself have developed a coaching program for high (insecure) achievers who say yes and more all the time and are very successful. But, we help you be sustainable in your behaviors, throw away the thoughts and actions that are holding you back and let you be human and great at the same time.

If you would like to enroll in our 16 week program that starts in June, we are now putting together that cohort. The cost is $4000 per person.

Please contact nicki@evolvedpeople.com telling us more about you.

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Burnout Isn’t “Their Issue”: Changing Our Behaviours to Benefit Us All

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By Nneka Orji

For many, burnout is a familiar concept; its association with emotional exhaustion and reduced motivation is widely acknowledged.

Burnout

Image via Shutterstock

However those most vulnerable to burnout are more likely to take a “not me” approach, assuming that burnout is something which others suffer from. However, with studies such as that commissioned by Virgin last year which found that just over half of full-time employees in the UK have suffered from anxiety or burnout, individuals and business leaders can no longer see burnout as an infrequent occurrence to be dealt with by someone else. The scale of burnout and its implications – including low levels of engagement – now calls for a much more concerted effort to ensure work environments and organisational cultures mitigate against the risk of burnout and allow all employees to thrive throughout their careers. It can’t be seen as “their issue” – it impacts us all.
Someone who has taken burnout very personally is Arianna Huffington – founder of Huffington Post who recently set up Thrive Global. Following her burnout experience in 2007 as she was setting up Huffington Post, she took a particular interest in the impact of burnout on her life and the lives of others. “For far too long we have been operating under a collective delusion that burning out is the necessary price for achieving success. This couldn’t be less true.” In her recent interview, Arianna talks about the importance of sleep (and nutrition and exercise) in achieving a healthy and successful lifestyle, and some of the key changes organisations need to make to ensure that mitigating burnout doesn’t sit solely in HR departments but with each business leader and every employee.
It isn’t just a nice to have; being able to manage the risk of burnout and perceptions of burnout directly influence an organisation’s ability to recruit (particularly millennials) and impacts the bottom line. According to Gallup’s recent survey, 24% of German employees interviewed felt “tired or burned out” and 12% said they had dealt with mental or emotional stress including burnout and depression in the preceding 12 months. As a result, employees are taking sick days and working less effectively which Gallup estimates to be costing German employers 9 billion euros in lost productivity each year. With economists highlighting the increasing global productivity gap, business leaders and policy makers should be addressing all aspects negatively impacting productivity – including burnout. Where employees felt that their organisations cared about their overall wellbeing were less likely to feel stressed and burned out, and therefore likely to be more engaged and more productive.
Looking beyond productivity at diversity, another top agenda item in leadership discussions, addressing burnout is also an important aspect when considering workforce gender diversity. Last year Cosmopolitan surveyed over 750 women; with over half of the respondents saying they “obsessed over work” even after working hours and a third (71%) suffering from anxiety and panic attacks at some point, the survey suggested that today’s female workforce had become “generation burnout”. However this isn’t unique to women; research published in 2010 in the Journal of Vocational Behaviour challenged the widely-held belief that women are more likely to suffer from burnout than their male colleagues. Instead the research found that women are more likely to be emotionally exhausted, while men are more likely to be “somewhat more depersonalised” – both signs associated with burnout.
Burnout affects our colleagues, our organisational cultures and our economies. Surely we should each be doing more to challenge the status quo? Yes working effectively and sometimes longer than we would like is sometimes necessary, but it should not be the norm.
We can all play a proactive role in changing the association of unsustainable hours with success. And we do that by spotting the signs of burnout – in others and in ourselves, speaking up to ensure we change the culture and ensure the well-being of our colleagues, and role modelling the right behaviours.
1. Spotting the signs
It’s important to know the signs you should be looking out for and how you identify those colleagues most at risk of burnout. While not all burnout leads to employees quitting, the behaviours demonstrated by those burned out and those quitting are similar. According to Timothy Gardner and Peter Hom, following detailed research on the topic of quitting, there are 13 key signs to look out for – including decreased productivity, reduced focus on job related matters, and expressing dissatisfaction with their supervisors more frequently than usual.
While most of us complain from time to time about tiredness, exhaustion and significant disengagement are very different. By being aware of these 13 behaviours (and more), we are not only better positioned to support the burned out individual in what is a challenging period, we are also able to be more cognisant of the impact his or her behaviours impact the rest of the team.
2. Holding up the mirror
Of course it is much easier to observe these behaviours in others, but we must also be able to spot these behaviours in ourselves. Particularly for top performers who always want to give 100% and sometimes see themselves as invincible to the stresses of work life, it is important to pause and ask if one’s pace is sustainable.
3. Speaking up
Once we have identified the signs of burnout, we must take action and the first step is to talk about it. Ignoring the real challenge of burnout and hoping that one good night’s sleep will address the exhaustion is far from realistic. By talking with colleagues who have been affected by burnout, we are able to address it head on.
Arianna Huffington first started speaking up about burnout after her own personal experiences and has since reached millions of employees – and students who will go into the workforce. When asked about why she has been so proactive in getting the message out to millions of people, Arianna talked about the importance of changing perceptions for the next generation so they are able to associate success with sleep-rich careers.  Sweeping it under the carpet will only lead to the next generation emulating poor behaviours.
4. Being a role model
Finally, role modelling the behaviours is critical. Talking about burnout and how we want to change it will have very little impact if each and every one of us doesn’t commit to changing our behaviours. This isn’t easy – bad habits die hard. However, if we are to enjoy fulfilling careers over the long term, and ensure the next generation of leaders have healthier lifestyles, then we must respond to this call to action.
 
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