October 2022 CS Leadership Office Hours - Fighting Burnout with 1 Focused Hour

This week, Ryan Johansen joined Gain Grow Retain to share some tips on fighting burnout. “Do more with less” has long been a familiar status, but with COVID, a remote workforce, and economic issues beginning to be felt, stress justs keeps building, especially on our leaders.

Ryan shared his own journey to realizing a change in how he worked had to be made. As a new leader, he found work encroaching more and more into his life, preventing him from having the down time necessary to recharge and maintain that pace. He shared two things to think about:

• The way we think about work
• The way we work

Today he focused on looking at the way we work, sharing the benefits found by blocking out an hour each day to focus on a task. This time should be protected as much as possible, and distractions should be minimized. One of the big issues with how so many of us work is that we are constantly in a state of adjustment. We start working on a project and a Slack message pops up. We want to be proactive, so we jump over to the message and get that answered. Sometimes it is quick, but other times is requires some effort as you pull data, locate information, or reach out to someone else for an update. Studies show that even a single interruption can take time to overcome, and when the distractions keep coming, productivity can be negatively impacted by up to 80% and accompanied by an increase in your stress levels.

So, how can you work to help maintain a focus that allow you to reduce stress and increase productivity? Here are some practical suggestions:

• Block out the same time each day in your calendar
• Start your day focused on a single initiative
  • This allows you to make progress on something rather than feeling the hamster wheel syndrome…lots of effort, little to show for it
  • Make sure this is a large project or initiative so your time is spent moving the needle on something important that can otherwise lag due to the urgent needs you have to react to
• Do not check Slack or email during this time
• Take it a step further by placing your phone in another room (or setting it to Do Not Disturb) and blocking or closing distracting websites

So, seems like a lot of effort, but how does it actually help?

• Kicks your day off on a positive note (you can see your accomplishments)
• It is an exercise in focus – we all struggle with distractions leading to short attention spans. This helps you build that muscle
• Allows you to produce high quality work
• Helps you create boundaries which helps you become more effective
• Helps with the mindset that you “always need to be on”, which is exhausting and can be limiting

After sharing these practical tips and tricks. The attendees moved into small groups where they discussed the following questions:

1. How often do you get an uninterrupted hour currently?
2. What could you accomplish with an extra hour each day?
3. How could you make this work for you, your team, your company?

Breakout Session Key Takeaways

Potential Roadblocks

• Double booking
• Always running in ‘catch-up’ mode
• Personal events and family can have an impact, so you have to be mindful of this
  • Stress from work or from home is still stress
• Time zone differences
• Personality differences (DISC, Myers-Briggs)
• Feeling like you cannot say no, especially for new leaders
• The CS team can often be seen as the catch-all team, and all of the conflicting needs and priorities can lead to burnout
• CS is new enough that there is often a need to prove their value, leading to an inability to set good boundaries
• Unexpected meetings or problems
  • Categorize these types of interruptions
    • Identify the root cause of the interruptions
    • Create a process to help manage priorities
    • Restructure your slack based on topics and priorities

Potential Impact

• More time for personal development
• KPIs - more thoughtful execution, and time for reflection on how impactful it was and how to build on it in the next quarter
• Strong focus on a single initiative that allows for impact and movement
• Create a shared space where information is shared to reduce follow up emails or administrative tasks

Making it Work

• Develop KPIs that help set goals for this time block, allowing you to report on what is working and identify where improvement can be made
• Have to help Individual Contributors to put strategies in place to prevent burnout
  • Create no meeting days
  • Upper management models this behavior
    • No weekend emails to get a jump start on the week
    • Protecting their time block as much as possible
  • Encourage your staff to do this and share examples of you doing it too
    • One company encouraged staff to get outside for 15-20 minutes and created a channel for them to post selfies of themselves in nature. Leadership took the lead and modeled this
• Share accountability – encourage your peers to hold the line
  • Surround yourself with people you can open up to
• You owe yourself development time
  • Having no time is not a valid excuse
• With remote work being a big part of the norm, be sure you are thinking about the impact of things like meetings on others
  • Are your West Coast staff consistently joining a meeting before their work day starts to accommodate East Coast staff?
• Incorporate work wellness assessments
  • Use information gathered to select tools to manage your gaps and weaknesses
• Be sure to schedule your time in your calendar – if you don’t someone will book that time
• This is not a time to focus on the reactive
  • Good time to look at strategy
• Pick a single initiative per quarter and be sure to align with your boss
• Delegate! Allow your staff the chance to grow and shine
  • You don’t have to do it all yourself
• Make it a part of the culture of your team, and ultimately your organization
• Have a dedicated space for focus work
• Remove work apps from your personal phone
• Turn off notifications
• Use part of your focus time to plan your next day
• Schedule buffers in between meetings to allow preparation without stress
• Figure out how you personally de-stress and make sure you are building that into your outside work time

Success Stories

• Slack is used for information gathering or blockage resolution
  • No notifications
  • Strategies are crucial
• Cannot be understaffed, so this can be difficult for smaller or start up companies
• How does this work in the real world?
  • Churn happens, and the work is to prevent it in the future based on lessons learned
  • Management team who puts out fires
    • If you are only putting out fires, you cannot get anything done
  • Company attitude of proactive rather than reactive responses
  • Executive team is passionate about Deep Work – required reading for entire team
• End of day is scheduled with a close out routine
• Benefits
  • No one is burned out
  • Fewer personnel problems
  • Clients get better service from people who are happy
  • Strong retention