What Can Be Done to Prevent Burnout?

30/11/2024
6-minute read

As long as you don’t know how the brain works, you just think that some people are better off than others. But the brain is not actually designed to make us happy. Put simply, each of us lives in our own personal hell.

The brain grows unevenly throughout life. By the age of 25, the brain’s neuroplasticity begins to drop and our enjoyment of life begins to fade. When the brain processes incoming signals quickly, we feel good; when neuroplasticity decreases, we feel bad. At the age of 30, many people experience a kind of crisis: you are sailing on your favourite yacht, but life is no longer fun; you are in hell.

How burnout occurs

Burnout

The easiest way to explain burnout and its process is to use the example of a favourite song. You have a favourite song and you like it for a while, but over time it starts to annoy you. Music and lyrics are signals that our brain processes. At first it does this quickly and easily, but then it takes more energy to do so.

Burnout doesn’t just apply to work, it also applies to relationships between people.

When the brain is presented with a new signal, such as facial features or the timbre of a voice, it creates a response to process it. When you meet that person again, your brain processes signals from them using the response you created the first time. But if the signals hit the brain too often, the response is exhausted.

This is easy to explain at a chemical level. Neurons secrete neurotransmitters to carry signals. Each time a neuron is activated, neurotransmitters are used up. As a result, it becomes more difficult to process the response generated each time. This is how people you know suddenly start to annoy you.

Let’s get back to music. You’re already annoyed by your favourite song, but then you hear a remix of it. You may like the remix because it is a combination of familiar sounds and new processing. This is because your brain has to construct a new response to it.

So to prevent team member burnout, we need a system in which each member grows and becomes a source of something new for others. For example, master classes, personal development programmes, increasing the complexity of tasks. Training new employees is necessary not only to increase their productivity and make them better workers, but also to reduce stress levels in the team.

Flow

Everyone has a long-term memory and a short-term memory. Because of the characteristics of short-term memory, we can think about 4-7 objects at the same time. This explains why it is easier to perform the same type of action than different ones.

The day should be built on consistent switching between streams, not multi-tasking.

Objectives

People want to see that being in a state of flow helps them achieve something. That is why a company should talk to its employees about its mission and goals. If it doesn’t, people will feel unnecessary.

Progress

The employee should be able to see progress on both short and long term goals. This can be done, for example, by using progress reports from the previous week. Even if they are only a few sentences long, this will give a sense of progress.

It is important for people to know that the company is moving towards a long-term goal. Management should explain to employees that the achievement of certain milestones is due to their efforts.

Leadership

An employee should feel valued if he/she does a better job than others.

The way to do this is to break work tasks down into small parts where there is room for such people. When one person makes an effort, it motivates everyone around them.

Assistance

Equally important to feeling the value of the work is a sense of leverage. An excellent example of this is pair programming.

Switchover

As mentioned above, monotonous work exhausts the brain.

Employees should be able to switch to alternative tasks.

Google, for example, practices a day off - a day when an employee spends time achieving goals that are not directly related to work. This helps them return to work with renewed vigour.

Gamification

For some reason, gamification is perceived as something strange and foreign. Of course it is possible to work in the ‘old way’, but if you really want to prevent burnout among your employees, then think about it.

Gamification is a great way to trick the brain into perceiving a game as something fun.

A workflow, or a game-like element of it, helps people feel better about themselves and get more work done.

Convergence

Childhood plays an important role in our lives. Up to the age of 12, our brains grow by up to 90 per cent. This is also the time when our attitudes and preferences are formed.

Knowing about this period of your employees’ lives will help you understand them better and build the right interaction.

Respect

The easiest signals for our brains to process are thoughts about ourselves. As a result, we often overvalue our own ideas and undervalue the ideas of others.

To solve this problem, you need to get the experience of your colleagues into everyone’s head. This can be done by running internal masterclasses.

Pressure

Do you believe in freedom of choice? Choose between items A and B. If you chose A, did you have a reason for doing so? If you did, then you had no choice.

Cause and effect cannot be broken. Every action we take is predetermined.

We have internal pressures driving us to act and external pressures correcting us.

For this reason, if you are drinking with your line manager at a company party, it is not so important for you to gain his respect.

People always act under pressure from their environment. If you want to get results from a subordinate - put pressure on him. You can use personal pressure, reporting, scheduling, cancelling internal events (e.g. company events or team building events).

Praise

Every manager thinks he or she is a judge. But we all live in our own hell with our own stresses and problems.

Motivate an employee in any of the ways listed earlier in this article. Praise an employee, even if you have to reprimand or fire them. A person works better when he or she is on fire to achieve a goal. Only reprimands extinguish that fire. Motivation, on the other hand, fuels it.

Conclusion