Burn out in small business (Part Two)
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Acute burnout can impact anyone.
Having awareness of the early signs, can prevent habitual burnout and creating awareness and prevention strategies and systems are essential. As a team leader, or small business owner, what strategies can you implement today to help your team (and yourself) stay happy, fresh, and connected?
In Part One of the Burnout in Small business series, we discussed time-blocking self-care, revisiting core values, delegating and trust, building a support network around you.
However, at the end of the day, it starts with you.
Here are three more tips to keep your happy culture alive, and your team connected, and to prevent habitual burnout:
- Team huddles and sharing gratitude
- Celebrating small wins
- Time blocking
The daily huddle
Short. Sharp. Positive. Our daily team huddle is our go-to team ritual.
The scheduled team huddle is our best form of communication and support. The huddle connects the team and makes them feel a part of something bigger. It’s called community. We’ve been huddling for over eight years, on the daily. The key word here is daily. We always finish the huddle with expressing gratitude (something we’re grateful for).
Essential huddle points:
- Always standing.
- Has a daily rhythm.
- Time efficient.
- Engaging.
- Starts on time (well, we try!)
Our team huddle is organised, and the team leader always has the main points written down. Here’s a sneak peak of the structured huddle:
- We never solve problems in a standing huddle (that’s for “off pool deck”).
- Admin points. Always light-hearted, to the point and “short and sharp”.
- The important stuff – patient hand overs, seniors helping juniors with a patients’ treatment pathway, and prepare practitioners if there’s a new patient in their group.
- The last five minutes – we go around the group and share our gratitude. Living in the present moment is important.
As a society, I believe we are less emotionally connected than ever, and I want to try to ensure our young dynamic crew don’t get all the mental health problems that comes with loneliness and social media obsession. Studies have indicated associations between practicing gratitude and improvements in emotional wellbeing, and fewer symptoms of anxiety and stress. Practicing gratitude at work has also shown to correlate with greater personal accomplishment, job satisfaction, improved work wellbeing and reduced burnout. If you’re interested here’s one interesting study: Lanham, Michelle et al., How gratitude relates to burnout and job satisfaction in mental health professionals, Journal of Mental Health Counselling, vol. 34, no.4, pp 341-54. I’d also recommend reading The Resilience Project, Finding Happiness through gratitude, empathy and mindfulness.
Do you have a daily team huddle? Tell me about it!
Celebrating small wins
Life gets busy – if you let it. Two of our core values, is to go “above and beyond and don’t sweat the small stuff” – that isn’t just for our community, that includes our team, too. It’s a feeling.
Yes, it’s important to celebrate birthdays, celebrate engagements, celebrate big life wins. However, it’s just as important to celebrate the small wins, and take a breath. It’s the best part of our week, when we step back from our busy, important day, and create some time and reset (a “brain break”). Even if it’s just a coffee together on a milk crate.
Sometimes, we like to go off-site – no emails, no phones. This reset “feeling” doesn’t happen in a busy, stressful environment and without it, it causes habitual burnout in the workplace. It’s also called self-care.
Do you schedule time to celebrate the small wins, reset and breathe?
Time blocking
If I don’t schedule it, it doesn’t happen. Preventing overwhelm and being proactive and organised is everything when it comes to preventing habitual burnout in the workplace. We have a white board, Asana, Slack, a yearly calendar the entire team can see, and our trusty management booking system.
In order to keep the team connected, we have regular daily, weekly, monthly and three-monthly rhythms, which are all time blocked:
- Every day we have a team huddle where we share our gratitude.
- Every week we have a bake-off – where someone bakes a delicious surprise for the entire team.
- Every fortnight we have treatment mapping, where we share different patient’s treatment pathways, to make sure we’re not missing a beat. Sometimes off-site as a surprise.
- Every month we host a professional development session for the entire team where we have lunch together. There’s something special about being in a relaxed environment that bonds a group of humans.
- Every month we have a team coffee date together.
- Every two to three months we have a management brekky meeting off-site with an agenda and minutes.
Do you have a workplace rhythm? Would any of these tips help your team? Do you have any strategies to share with us? What are your daily, weekly, monthly rituals? When does your team celebrate the small wins?
Love, Kirra.
