How to Prevent Burnout in Virtual Teams
Workplace burnout is a big problem, and it can especially affect virtual teams.
In fact, work burnout is reportedly at an all time high, impacting the performance and overall well-being of employees. Anxiety, depression and chronic exhaustion are among the key symptoms of virtual burnout.
Preventing Burnout in Virtual Teams
Offer Flexible Schedules.
Virtual teams allow us to break the mold of the traditional work week, enablingemployees to adapt schedules to their needs. This may mean working a split shift to help with the kids, or maybe it means they work Tuesday to Saturday. When an employee can work within their optimal hours, their output will be much more impactful and sustainable.
Cut Back on Meetings and Zoom.
While meetings are important, they aren’t always urgent or necessary. If your team is spending more than half of their day in meetings and working after hours to complete their work, this will lead to overwork and burnout!
Preventing burnout through effective meetings starts with scheduling. Identify the meeting’s purpose, timeline, and importance. If it can wait, let it wait. If it can be an email, send an email. Sometimes a collaborative Google Doc can also work just as well—if not better—than a meeting.
Zoom fatigue is real and can quickly become a leading cause of virtual burnout. A best practice is to have phone, or audio only, calls when possible. This small shift can have a deep impact on your team’s stress level.
Check out this guide to ensure your meetings are effective!
Respect Offline Hours.
Before you can respect your team’s offline hours you need to respect your own. There will always be an email to respond to or a project to work on—but they will still be there when you come back! Maintaining a set schedule allows you to keep your boundaries and supports overall health and wellness.
This isn’t just limited to your start and stop times either. Determine set blocks of the day to take a break, and when that time rolls around, take the break by physically moving spaces to give your brain and body time to shift. If your phone is a distraction or temptation, leave it at your desk.
When you stick to your offline hours and set strong boundaries, it will be easier for you to respect other’s offline hours, and they’ll be able to respect your hours too!
One other note on offline hours: Virtual teams enjoy flexible work schedules which may include different online hours. This means that preventing burnout in virtual teams across time zones or varying work hours may get tricky. The answer could be as simple as delayed or scheduled send. There is almost nothing as stressful as getting an after-hours email with an actionable request. Our brains will jump to thinking about the request, processing it, planning and becoming distracted from what we are doing, all of which leads to virtual burnout.
Have Wellness Days… or Weeks!
A robust vacation or PTO offering is a great way to increase morale, productivity, and team engagement—but there’s another way to take this further. Think through how many times you have taken a week off only to come back to an overflowing inbox, or a to-do list that instantly increases your stress. Sometimes it feels like all that relaxation was for nothing.
When an entire team takes a day—or even a week—off together, that stress is gone. When the whole team is offline there are no overflowing inboxes welcoming you back. Everyone hits pause and no one comes back frantically catching up. One team implemented a mandatory summer recovery break each year in addition to their PTO. This not only improved work quality, productivity, and morale—but it also helped to remove the stigma of taking time off!
Have Fun!
Life is stressful, busy, and unpredictable. Another great way to prevent burnout is by fostering opportunities for fun and shared experiences. Many in-person teams adopted Casual Friday with relaxed dress codes, team lunches, and other fun activities. Just because you aren’t going into the office doesn’t mean you can’t have casual Friday!
Have fun with Zoom by coming up with themes or challenges for some of your internal meetings. Combat virtual burnout with crazy hats, fun backgrounds, show and tell, and jokes of the day. It seems silly and simple, but it is the little things, the laughs, and the bonding that break up the pressure of the day and relieve stress.
Where to Start
It’s common to face virtual burnout and feel overwhelmed. The good news is that preventing burnout starts with the small choices you make for yourself. Do you struggle to unplug after work? Starting today, turn notifications off on your phone and don’t check your email until you are next online! Take a day off, set your OOO message and do something fun. Take 30 minutes to go through your calendar; how many meetings can you switch from Zoom to a phone call? Every small bit of joy will help you in the long run!
Feeling the effects of burnout yourself? A great way to ease that long to-do list is by utilizing an Executive Assistant. Partnering with an EA is a strategic way to remove the tedium of your everyday tasks; they’ll keep you focused and free up your time so you can shift your attention to your most important work!
33Vincent has many other resources to help you maximize your time and communication with your executive assistant.