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Updated March 23, 2023You’re reading an excerpt of The Holloway Guide to Remote Work, a book by Katie Wilde, Juan Pablo Buriticá, and over 50 other contributors. It is the most comprehensive resource on building, managing, and adapting to working with distributed teams. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, 800 links and references, a library of tools for remote-friendly work, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.
Burnout is a warning sign of a toxic work environment. The response should be to focus on making the environment less toxic.Dr. Christina Maslach, burnout researcher and expert*
Christina Maslach, a social psychologist at UC Berkeley, has found that professional burnout results from a systemic combination of exhaustion, cynicism, and professional or organizational inefficacy that drive a feeling of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment.
Remote workers are at particular risk if they are overworked, isolated, and struggling against communication structures optimized for an in-person team. Remote employees are also more prone to job exhaustion because of tacit pressure to ‘prove’ their contributions. In an office, as long as you are physically present, your manager and co-workers are unlikely to wonder whether you’re really working. But when someone isn’t co-located, an unproductive day can trigger fears about whether people will think they’ve been watching TV instead of working. Research shows that remote employees work a full extra day per week compared to their co-located counterparts.*
importantAvoiding burnout is not solely an employee’s responsibility. Burnout is a systemic problem that is largely driven by an organization’s culture and stressors in the work environment. It is incumbent on leadership to establish, model, and maintain a set of values and associated practices that prevent burnout in their workforce.
Maslach shows that there are six determining risk factors for job-related burnout. The factors and tactics to deal with each are detailed in the table below.
| Burnout Risk Factors | Counter Measures |
|---|---|
| Operational workload. When the amount of work is unreasonable, people eventually become exhausted. Remote employees are more likely to work longer hours than in-office colleagues. | Combat this by setting clear, reasonable expectations; providing training so employees can keep up with skill demands; making sure necessary resources are available; and enforcing reasonable work hours so remote employees can unplug and relax. |
| Control. Employee engagement lags when people don’t have the capacity to influence decisions that affect their work and to exercise professional autonomy. This can be exacerbated by an “out of sight, out of mind” phenomenon for remote workers. | You can combat this by asking remote employees for their input on the work they do and on larger company decisions, and by showing that you take action on employee feedback. |
| Reward. Insufficient recognition and reward (financial, institutional, and/or social) increases individual and team vulnerability to burnout, because it devalues both the work and the workers, and is closely associated with feelings of inefficacy. | You’ll want to review compensation regularly to keep up with the market and/or expanding job responsibilities, ask remote teammates how they like to have successes and victories recognized, and follow through with recognition. |
| Community. When job-specific relationships are characterized by a lack of support and trust, and by unresolved conflict, there is a greater risk of burnout. Remote workers and their colleagues have to make conscious efforts to establish rapport and build trustworthy relationships. | To counter this, you can find opportunities for disengaged employees to help others, which reduces apathy and cynicism and builds community. You’ll also want to create a psychologically safe workplace and provide mechanisms for people to connect socially via chat, forums, or other methods. |
| Fairness. When decisions at work are perceived as not being just and equitable, then cynicism, anger, and hostility are likely to arise as people feel they are not respected. For remote workers, a lack of direct visibility can lead to feelings of isolation and a lack of respect compared to their in-office peers. | It’s imperative to communicate decisions transparently and in writing, sharing as much context and reasoning as possible. Additionally, have (and enforce) a company code of conduct and deliver performance feedback regularly and consistently. |
| Values mismatch. When there is a gap between individual and organizational values, employees will find themselves making a tradeoff between work they believe in and work they feel they are being forced to do, leaving them feeling unappreciated or not valued. | You can screen for values in the hiring process by sharing the organization’s values clearly. You’ll want to reiterate and model the company’s values on an ongoing basis thereafter, and to make sure that severe cases of values mismatch are clearly and swiftly handled (up to firing if necessary). |
Source: Holloway
importantWhen you hear your team using words like “burnout” and “stress,” don’t immediately assume that the pace of operations or sheer workload is the problem. The first step is to ask questions about whether they feel lonely, disconnected, or under-appreciated, and whether they feel that overall, their workplace is “fair.” If remote workers lack community bonds and are not near the axes of decision-making, they’re more likely to have less control over their work and lower quality social relationships—two major factors that predict burnout—even if they have the same workload as their in-office peers. Building community and ensuring that remote workers have the context to make decisions about their own work as much as possible are vital to reducing the risk of burnout.
Other concrete steps to be sure you are taking to minimize these risks:
Ensuring that workers are able to unplug and set boundaries. You can recommend that people turn off at the end of their day (local time), and not check messages during dinner because a colleague just came online.
Setting clear, achievable goals. Ensure that they that are realistic and, to the extent possible, make processes predictable, so that employees can commit to sustaining a meaningful life outside of work.
Taking vacation days. A minimum vacation policy is especially helpful here, to encourage workers to fully recharge and reconnect with the joys that make life meaningful. Model this as a leader by taking vacation yourself, and not checking in while you are away.
Having a documented team agreement. This helps ensure people don’t feel required to respond to messages at all hours of the day and night and that they have a predictable cadence of communication they can rely on.
Practicing gratitude. Talking about things you are thankful for actively fights burnout. At the fully remote company Aha!, people take turns wearing a hat, while everyone else shares gratitude for that person, in a ritual that they call “hatitude.” Brian de Haff, Aha! CEO, shares that “gratitude helps us pause and recognize how important small acts of kindness are—even when we are not physically in the same building.”
Checking the team’s burnout risk. Have people on your team (yourself included) take a burnout risk test, which focuses on the main risk factors for burnout.