HR Peep Show

Burnout Prevention

• HR Peep Show • Season 1 • Episode 4

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In this episode of HR Peep Show, hosts AnnE Diemer and Claire Baker, along with guest host Tali Ramo, discuss the pervasive issue of burnout in the workplace. They share personal stories, including Claire's harrowing experience as an executive assistant and Tali's challenges in nonprofit management, to illustrate the signs and impacts of burnout. The discussion introduces the PAC Framework—Purpose, Agency, Connection—as a tool for preventing burnout and creating sustainable work environments. The hosts discuss the importance of addressing both individual and systemic factors and provide practical tips for recognizing and mitigating burnout. The episode concludes with advice for individuals and organizations on how to foster healthier, more supportive workplaces.

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Burnout Prevention - Show Notes & Transcript


Acknowledgments

We’d like to thank participants from our Team TuneUp event series on this topic. While we didn’t use their quotes in this episode, the valuable discussion held there validated this is an important topic to discuss.

This episode was produced by AnnE Diemer and hosted by AnnE Diemer, Claire Baker and guest host Tali Ramo. It was edited by AnnE Diemer and Krista Lane. Music was composed for the Royalty Free Music Library by Rik Pfenninger. 

We also thank our friends who gave feedback on early takes of episode 1, and those we spoke to about making a podcast— especially Kamrin Klauschie, Kevin Landucci, and Jenna Lane for their invaluable expertise and advice.


Listener Support
Until we’re famous and sponsored, your support makes producing this podcast more sustainable. That can look like continuing to listen, sharing this podcast with colleagues, friends (or enemies who need it!), or buying us a coffee. 


A Disclaimer

While we hope you’ll take away useful ideas that help your careers and/or workplaces, what we share in this podcast is not advice specific to your situation. But, feel free to consult with us!

For this episode’s topic, although we mention it during the episode, this is also a reminder that we are not mental health professionals. Some resources below may point you in a more helpful direction– but again, are not advice.


Additional Reading

Materials we recommend, if you want to keep nerding out on this topic:


Transcript

[00:00:00] AnnE: Hi, friends! Before we dive in, I wanted to give a quick heads up that during this episode, we’ll be sharing some personal stories about burnout. If that’s not a fun topic for your brain today, feel free to skip this one. And remember, we’re not mental health professionals - just humans sharing experiences to try to make workplaces better.


[Intro music underneath voice] 

Welcome to HR Peep Show, where we pull back the curtain of life in Human Resources in the United States. I'm AnnE Diemer.

Claire: I'm Claire Baker and today we have a guest host, Tali Ramo.

[intro music fades slowly out during the next speaker’s voice]

Tali: Hi. Thank you guys for having me. I'm Tali. I have a background in national political organizing and program management, and I'm a big people management nerd, so these days, yeah, people management, everyone hates it. I don't, these days. I work with organizations on sort of the intersection of project management and people management, how they can improve their systems and build their skills to manage teams and their times so they can focus on the work. Not all the weird internal friction that can make it so hard to get work done and that we're gonna talk a lot about today.

AnnE: It's so good to have you here, Tali. We need your wisdom on this wild topic we're diving into today. Because today we're talking about burnout: one of the most insidious factors leading to lost productivity and disengagement on your teams. There are many types of burnout and the causes are both systemic and individual– and, so are those solutions. 

Everyone can do their part to prevent burnout in the workplace, and it's often easier and cheaper than to recover from. In this episode, we're gonna talk about how to recognize signs of burnout in yourself and others, practical tips to mitigate it, and tools to start the conversation. Whether you're feeling the early warning signs yourself or you're recognizing it in others. Let's get started. 

Burnout is everywhere in this world. And the folks on this podcast, well, we know it well. Claire, can you kick us off today by telling us about your experience with burnout?

Part 1: What is happening?

Claire: Yeah. So I started my career as an Executive Assistant, which is much more than just planning meetings. I was planning travel, putting on events, greeting guests, plating food, which is more drama than you think.

And I helped with a lot of things that are outside of the normal EA duties. Like I helped my boss write a book. And I used to get every email that went to his inbox. It was my responsibility to determine the action items, triage needs, anticipate problems, manage complex relationships, and make it all look easy, which I was not always successful at. I thrived for the first few years. It was exciting to feel like I was in the inside circle where things were happening and get to work with such elite performers, but it was also a lot of pressure. I was managing a lot of things that were out of my control and constantly coming up with a plan B and C and D so that I could act quickly when things changed.

That quickly turned into a lot of just generalized anxiety as my boss reached a new level in his own career and in my last year there, I took a lot of hits on both my personal and professional life. I was going through a messy divorce. My best work friend left the company. And I really just wasn't taking care of myself. My performance started to slip and I couldn't focus, so I couldn't make a decision. Every time I got an email, which was like every 30 seconds, my adrenaline would spike. I made a lot of mistakes, like really consequential mistakes.

My boss and coworkers saw that I was struggling and they made several interventions to try to help, but I was like, way too far gone. When they asked what they could help offload, I just hung onto my sense of control and I didn't know how to delegate to a deputy EA.

When I burst out crying at my desk and someone suggested that I take a walk, I literally could not bear the thought of being away from my keyboard for 20 minutes. And then one morning after a panic attack the night before, I spent what felt like 10 minutes staring into my sock drawer, and I literally could not remember if I needed to pick a pair of socks or just close the drawer.

I didn't last long after that, which was devastating for me because the job had become my whole identity. I was so enmeshed with my boss that he had a lot of upheaval in his life as a result of the abrupt transition.

Later, a colleague who helped facilitate my separation told me that she wished she'd advocated for a leave of absence rather than a managed exit. But the truth is, that wouldn't have done any good. It took five or six years and a lot of therapy for me to get over the trauma of that experience.

[00:05:00] AnnE: I, I feel that, and I am so sorry you had this experience.

I'm so sorry to everyone listening who has felt some or all of these things. Work shouldn't be this way. You know, like, we don't need to do this to ourselves. And despite the forces of capitalism that try to convince us otherwise, there are things we can do about it, whether we're employees who are feeling it, whether we're leaders or like us as HR and operations experts. Tali, I wanna turn it to you first because you know a lot about burnout from your own experience as well as your time as a manager at a large nonprofit. What are some of the signs of burnout that stand out to you from Claire's story?

Tali: A factor that Claire experienced and talked about so well, so deeply that I think causes burnout more than simply feeling stressed about work is the enmeshment and over-identifying with your job. And then this sort of like slow descent into codependency or perceived codependency sometimes. Similarly to Claire's experience, I was very enmeshed with my job and the organization that I worked for, so much so that I really struggled to have a sense of who I was outside of it.

And I think we're using a lot of psychological terms here because the experiences that lead to burnout closely mirror dysfunction in our actual interpersonal relationships.

AnnE: Totally.

Tali: An organization that doesn't actually need us as much as we feel we need them or as much as we feel they need us. So that kind of dependency, that kind of dependency and over-identification with your job turns really insidious when you start to lose more and more agency in your work. Claire described having to do a lot of things last minute or at any time, a lot of context switching between tasks, I imagine between who she was interacting with on behalf of her boss, needing to anticipate things that she had very little control over, and losing boundaries on her time.

Basically having to be quote unquote “on” and anticipating every possible need or scenario and responding immediately to those needs. Those are the kind of things that really activate our central nervous system, keeping us on edge and in a constant state of fight or flight. It's a perfect recipe for burnout because our bodies just aren't built to live like that on an ongoing basis.

It's why Claire was staring into her sock drawer, not able at all to make a decision about which sock to wear that day because she was in this state of fight or flight. This edge of her nervous system being just on all the time for way too long, and it just burned out every single, every single thing, every single ability to make even the most, like, mundane decision.

AnnE: Yeah, it's wild how much it can like creep into every aspect of our lives, especially when there's things going on outside of work too. Like, yes, we're talking about this in the context of work, but as you were talking about Claire, there was also life stuff going on, and I don't know, at some point you just run outta spoons, you know?

Claire: Yeah, for sure. Well, and I mean, the other thing is I don't think that my, well, I know that my position was not unique in that a lot of positions are expected to take accountability for things that are out of their control. And we know intellectually that we can't control these things, but you still wind up catching shit at work if something doesn't work out and somebody has to fix it if something breaks or whatever the case may be, whatever your job is. 

And I think that like taking accountability for those things that you can't control– I see a lot of people burning out at work because they're constantly trying to control things that are just, there's no reasonable way for them to control them, including like dysfunctional teams.

AnnE: Absolutely. And I feel like this is when companies, managers, leaders, whoever start talking about the bandaid solutions, this is when they say, “oh, we've brought in a medi-, meditation coach today, and there'll be a meditation from 1 to 1:15 because we know you all have been feeling really tired and we wanna make sure we're supporting your mental health.”

I say this as an HR person who's done that before, 'cause like, it's better than nothing. But some of those things really just do feel like bandaids rather than talking about the actual core of where it's coming from, which I feel like is what you all have touched on, which is that balance that those power structures, all of those things that keep it going, like a 15 minute meditation or a subscription to a meditation app?

That's great. And, it's a bandaid on a gushing wound.

[00:10:00] Claire: Yeah, if you're looking at the Headspace app to answer, like, your organizational problems, man, you got some work to do.

Tali: Yeah, I totally agree. I think that. Yeah, like, those things are nice. And to a certain extent too, and I say this, you know, from the employee side, not the HR side. Like I recognize, I think employees recognize that there is only so much that, you know, HR or the organization or leadership or whatever can do in that vein.

Like, we know that it's a bandaid. But to think about things that could actually prevent it or help people recover from it while making sure folks have the support that they need is pretty much what folks need to do. And I know I'm gonna talk about that a little bit later, so I won't. I won't get ahead of, of myself there, but

AnnE: No spoilers!

Tali: I think you have to, I know, no spoilers, but you have to like, you just have to acknowledge the reality.

AnnE: Absolutely.

It's such a pervasive narrative and it affects everyone. We're talking about it in general now, but I wanna transition to [transition music starts under voice] start thinking about what is it like when leaders experience burnout? Because it does happen to everyone, and some of those trickle down effects can be significant. 

Part 2: Leadership

[transition music ends]

AnnE: Burnout happens to everyone. Even leaders. Especially leaders? I don't know. And burned-out leaders can be bad for the organization because it can be expensive and also create so many other problems. I worked with an incredible director who had spent her whole career working tirelessly for missions that she felt really passionate about. As she moved up in the industry, she was praised for her late nights and her ability to go above and beyond.

Claire: Eek orange flag.

AnnE: Orange flag. Not good. And when she was named director for the department, she immediately got to work making necessary changes that she thought were important. But her team couldn't keep up with her pace, so then she took things off their plates and did them herself. The department did get a lot done for the first few months while she was leading, but at the same time, there were a lot of other things that were missed. 

Oftentimes when someone's burnt out, their focus narrows and for this leader, managing her team internally didn't make it into the frame. Cross-functional communication between departments became non-existent. Resentments built up between the department leads that no one was addressing, because normally that would've been the director's responsibility. Her team was frankly falling apart at the seams, and the director was ignoring it because she couldn't make space in her brain. This type of overwhelm is so common in a burned-out mindset, and she knew she was burnt out. Her friends, her family, her colleagues, everyone had told her, but she told herself she didn't have time to address it.

She just needed to push through.

Unfortunately, pushing through… not the right solution by not addressing her burnout, she fell deeper into it and her focus continued to narrow. She did ask for some help. She brought in Krista and I as HR consultants, but by our estimates we were about six months too late.

So the work that we had to do with the team was much more expensive than what we would've done if we had come in a little bit sooner.

Many members of the team left because the work didn't feel sustainable. The director's burnout is not solely responsible for all of the issues, but addressing or even preventing her burnout could have helped the team avoid at least some of these costs and just created a healthier environment overall. 

It's so hard to look at a situation like what I described with this leader and be like, here are the things that should have gone differently. Because there are so many factors like you, you can't do that.

Claire: Like if only there were some kind of framework that somebody in this group had used to help prevent burnout on their team, and they could maybe tell us more about how aspects of that showed up in our stories. Tali, do you have any ideas for how we could manage this on our teams?

Tali: Yeah, yeah. There is a framework that, uh, clearly the three of us have talked about before, and that we've discussed in other, other spaces that I've used to help prevent burnout on the team, but also as a, like, as sort of a just best practice. 

So it's called the PAC Framework, and PAC is an acronym, it stands for Purpose Agency and Connection. This was developed by one of my favorite people management training organizations, The Management Center. And this tool is critical when teams are in a place of transition or uncertainty, uh, but could also be critical to burnout prevention, like we've been talking about.

So it can be used in moments of great need or just anytime as a general best practice.

And so the leader in, in AnnE's story was so zeroed in on doing the work that she didn't leave room for maintaining the foundation of her team, the actual people that were responsible for the organization's previous success. So what she could have done, you know, was utilize this PAC framework as a tool to bolster her team's professional development.

This could have brought them along with her to her higher level of performance, eliminating the need to take on the work herself, and which really, uh, just doubled down on her burnout and made everything worse and started burning out everybody around her. 

It's funny because you started this section by saying it's so, what did you say? You said, “it's so hard to look at a situation and be like, ‘here's when what you could have done differently.’” Because I'm gonna name some things that she could have done differently. 

AnnE: That’s awesome.

Tali: But not like the only way.

[00:16:03] AnnE: No, I think, I think that's great. I want us to be naming things that she could have done differently and holding space for the fact that like these situations are always complicated and it's not like there was a short checklist of things that would've been different, and then everything would have been perfect and bubbly and wonderful.

But I like that you're giving us a framework to actually like break it down and kind of see the bigger picture of creating sustainable orgs. Because this doesn't feel like a bandaid to me. This feels like more of a foundational solution.

Tali: I think this is what I was getting at earlier when I was saying that the solutions have to do with how you do the work, right? If the work is the thing causing burnout, the intervention has to do with how that work happens. And, uh, you know, hindsight is 2020, of course. So really, this is really to show what can be done differently for anybody listening to this moving forward. 

[00:17:14] AnnE: So, walk us through this framework. You said it's Pac P-A-C, the P is for. Purpose. That's definitely not something I feel like the leader lacked, but I don't think she leaned into it in the way that you want us to. Tell us more about “P is for purpose.”

Tali: So when thinking about Purpose and in this, with this tool, so the, the notion here is that the leader could have asked key questions to guide her team to reconnect individual and collective actions to a meaningful goal or outcome. So the leader, obviously, like we said, had a lot of drive, really understood her purpose, really wanted to get the work done.

And so much so that she kind of stomped all over her team who could have continued to do the work. And like, let's imagine that she didn't see enough drive from her team. She was like, oh, you won't do it right, or you don't have the, the drive to do it as well as I could do it because I'm so driven by my purpose.

I'll just do it myself. So an intervention here, uh, is that she could have asked her team what is meaningful to them. And this requires curiosity and it requires patience, but it's critical to help your team see how their contributions fit into the whole and feel driven in their work.

So everyone needs to have that underlying purpose to be motivated to do the work, but also to be fulfilled by it. Right? So we're talking about burnout prevention, for that leader, but also burnout prevention for her team. 

So, for me as a manager in my last role, I would be sure to include emotional check-in questions for my direct reports in our individual weekly check-ins and in our team meetings, prompting everyone to share something they were proud of that week or a moment of impact that they had. The goal being, reminding everyone of why they do their work. I worked somewhere that was extremely mission driven. Everybody was obsessed with the mission, obsessed with the organization that we work for, and had a clear reason to be there. But even so, it grinds on you. So being reminded of why it matters is really critical to keep the motivation in, in more like in smaller ways, in more bite-sized chunks.

[00:19:42] AnnE: I feel like what I'm hearing is you can have a purpose, but it shouldn't just be in the back of your mind. You should regularly engage with that purpose. As a manager, you brought it up with your team on a regular basis, and it wasn't like you needed to tell them, oh, this is what we're doing. We all know what we are doing. 

But it helps to reengage with it. It helps to remember the bigger picture. It helps to remember what we're working towards and actually saying it out loud and engaging with it, rather than just letting it sit in the back of your head because then you can lose touch with it a little bit.

Tali: Yeah, exactly.

Claire: Well, and I mean also you both have come from kind of mission-based organizations, but like there are people in the world who work at Trello or the IRS or, you know, like any number of jobs where you could sit there and be like, “what is the meaning of this?” But you just, it does not have to be, “I am changing the world for justice and good.”

It can be “I am a customer support manager and I listen to this person who is having a hard time with our thing and I solve their problem.” Or you know, “I shipped a piece of code today that I'm really proud of” or, you know, whatever it is that you do in your job. I don't know what people do for work.

Tali: Yeah. I also, this is making me think too of, in the, uh, like less ref-, referring to the mission of an organization, be it nonprofit tech, whatever. But more so something that I really drove my burnout, I think was uh, not seeing how something that I would put like every molecule of my being into, and at the time everybody, you know, on my team, leadership, whatever, was like, “this is the highest priority we will ever see, now more than ever” if I never hear those words again. But it was like the most important thing. We put everything into it, and then you would just move on to the next, like it was.

AnnE: And then the next important thing is the most important thing ever. And it's “the time is now and you have to do it now.” And it's like, okay, so we never stopped? There's, what's actually important? If everything is urgent, nothing is urgent. 

Tali: Yeah, exactly. And it just kind of felt like it became hard to really believe that the purpose of the work and what I was putting into it was meeting any particular goal. So it was, what I see also in this, in this first, first letter of, of this framework of, and P, is for purpose, is also like questioning that process, right?

Like you can't keep letting that happen because eventually your staff is gonna stop connecting with the urgency and feel like what they're doing has absolutely no purpose at all. And that is like recipe ingredient number one of burnout is “what I'm doing doesn't matter.”

AnnE: Absolutely. And I feel like that leads us to the second letter in the framework, “Agency.” So we've got our purpose. We need to know what our why is. We need to engage with it, we need to talk about it. And then we have “Agency.” What do we need to know about agency as part of this framework?

Tali: Yeah, I, it's important to focus on your sphere of control, which is another way of, you know, talking about agency, especially when it feels like so much of it is out of our control. This leader could have reflected on what was in her own sphere of control or what should have been in her own sphere of control: managing her team to success, communicating with other departments, et cetera, and what should be within her team's sphere of control. 

She also could have given her staff, the agency to decide what they could and could not handle, and ensure that her team felt empowered to do the work that they were responsible for, instead of removing it from their plates and destabilizing their sense of their own workload and contributions, while also taking on an unsustainable amount of work for herself.

She kind of like took the agency away from everybody in the equation. And we do this all the time. It, you know, again, this is not a, not meaning to go after this, this leader more just as an example, right? Where if you take away the agency of your team to deliver the results that you're looking for, what are they there to do?

Right? And what really stood out to me about this story that I just kind of alluded to is like she was focusing on the wrong thing. And I think this happens with new managers all the time, if I can get on my soapbox a little bit, is that people who are really good at their jobs get promoted to managers, but then their job as a manager is not actually to do the job that they were just doing before their- they were promoted.

It's helping ensure the other people who are doing the job can do it well. So the things that this leader was not doing were what had all to do with communication. So she, you know, stopped communicating with other departments, which led to a lot of confusion. She wasn't really engaging with the team that she had.

So, and just taking work from them essentially. So that was kind of taking away their, their contributions and their purpose and, and everything and took away their, their ability, their agency to say what they could or could not do. 

So they couldn't meet her expectations also because she wasn't giving them the ability to do so.

[00:25:14] AnnE: absolutely. Just a recipe for burnout across the board, both for the leader and kind of creating that environment for her team, too.

Tali: Yeah. And so speaking of, you know, her relationship with her team, I'll get to our last, the last letter of, of our framework here, “C for connection.” To be resilient. We need others we can count on

AnnE: Yeah,

Tali: managers and leaders need to build authentic relationships and cultivate connections across our teams.

Otherwise, you know, it just won't happen. Nothing will get done. So the, the leader in your story, AnnE, really put herself on her own island and kept hacking away at the shoreline, shrinking it down more and more by deprioritizing her own team and the relationships with other departments.

Leadership isn't about doing all the work yourself. It's about creating the circumstances and environment where others can thrive. And to do that, you have to build connections. Everyone builds connections differently, especially in a professional environment. So being intentional about how you're building those connections is really important.

But this leader couldn't do it because that was not a priority, right? She was just thinking about what she needed to get done. So when you do prioritize connections with your team, with other leaders across departments, whatever, that is what keeps the work moving, because together, you know, we can do a lot.

And I don't, I didn't hear from your story that, that this leader was really investing in connection.

AnnE: Yeah, I don't think so. Like all of these things could have shown up. They just didn't. And so I love the idea of having this Purpose Agency Connection framework almost as like a checklist in my head because it's not like a one-time thing, like, “okay, we've set up a couple policies that are related to this. Now we're good.” It's, you have to keep engaging with it. You have to keep thinking about it and understanding the impact of each. And also how they intersect. Like I feel like Connection intersects so much with Purpose because you want to know other people's purpose, too.

You want to figure out how those overlap and that's gonna make you feel that much more engaged with the work and understand the big picture more. And Agency, you wanna feel like you're having impact on that purpose. Like you have a purpose, but you have to be able to do something, like all of these interconnect so much.

And it's not, it's not just a checklist, but it can be used as one. If you're starting to see those elements of burnout come up, whether it's in yourself or in your team, you can look at those elements and say like, okay, how have we been engaging with our purpose recently? Does my team feel like they have agency?

Do we feel connected as a team, as departments, as whatever? And that can give you kind of a starting place to address those aspects of burnout that are creeping up.

[00:28:10] Tali: And I think that, going back to the fact that we're, we are talking about, you know. Uh, burnout in, in leaders and in leadership roles. I think that you have to spread the work around. You have to trust your team, and when you trust your team and when the work is more evenly distributed, when you have more realistic expectations too, to go along with that work being evenly distributed, you know, theoretically all things work out, that takes some pressure off of the leaders. So it prevents leader burnout in that way by doing those things.

AnnE: By creating a more sustainable work environment for your employees, you're making it a more sustainable work environment for everyone, including leaders. Absolutely.

Tali: exactly.

Claire: And I mean, at the risk of being obvious, like leadership means working through other people.

AnnE: Yes.

Claire: So it's not about whether you can do the work, it's about whether you can get other people to do the work as well or better than you would've done it.

I just wanna reiterate that it's not a badge of honor that people are burning out. Like that is not something you should be proud of and putting in your job descriptions and glorifying on LinkedIn and having like, a picture of you like sleeping in the corn- corner of the office or something.

Like, that's not cool, bro. Like, and don't expect that of other people.

AnnE: and especially not modeling it as leaders too, because leaders set the tone for a whole organization. So if leaders answer emails at all times, and if leaders are complimenting people who are working extra and if leaders are taking work from other people, therefore removing their agency, that sets the tone and that means there's going to be more burnout within an organization.

And yeah, [transition music fades in under voice] we can't keep playing into that because it's already not sustainable and I can't even imagine if it gets worse.

Part 3: Individuals

[transition music fades out]

[00:30:21] AnnE: For the last section of the podcast, we're gonna hear another burnout story and I think it's really important to hear folks' stories when it comes to burnout because it helps remind us how pervasive this is and can help us identify it when we're seeing it. Like you really hear it through people's stories and people's lived experiences.

So Tali, we are so glad to have you today for so many reasons, and one of those reasons is to share your story of your experience of burnout, and we'll see what we can learn from that.

Tali: Thank you, AnnE. Yeah, so my burnout story goes all the way back, starting, starting in 2016. At the time, I was working as a local community organizer for an affiliate of a national health advocacy organization, when I applied for a job with my orgs’ national office. This gave me the opportunity to help craft the training resources that a network of hundreds of college students and local organizers could use to run hyper-local campaigns to advance health access on their campuses and communities.

It was an absolute dream job. I worked really hard to get it, and when I got it, I worked really hard at it. About a year into the job, my manager announced that she was leaving. She'd been with the organization for years and she wanted to be promoted to a director, but was facing heavy, heavy internal resistance. 

Tired of fighting, she left for a director role at a partner organization. There was a lot of change after that. They hired someone to take my old manager's place– with the director title she had been fighting for in the first place. 

Claire: Boo.

Tali: This person was out of touch with the needs of our team, agreed to overly-ambitious goals that set us up to fail, and worst of all, frequently committed microaggressions against staff of color on our team. 

AnnE: Boo. 

Tali: I was promoted to manager for the first time and found myself smack in the middle of their often tactless leadership and my colleagues– now direct reports– frustration and pain. I spent countless hours managing up, down, and sideways just trying to keep it all together.

It was a lot of emotional labor.

By the spring of 2019, I started to notice a shift in myself and my relationships. I felt beaten down and easily frustrated by even small challenges at work. I would lose patience with my colleagues, direct reports, and local staff organizers that I interfaced with daily. I felt hopeless and began to wonder if anything I did even mattered to those around me and to the broader movement. I battled these feelings on and off for years, pushing myself to be the best I could be for my team and for the mission. One day I finally broke down and felt like I couldn't do it anymore, that maybe a break would help, but I was terrified of what would happen to the work and to my team if I stepped back.

If I couldn't handle it, could they? Was it fair if I backed off? Wouldn't that make it worse for them? 

I remember talking to my partner about it, but really sobbing to my partner about it, and they hugged me and they said, “you aren't able to do the work and support your team if you are so exhausted yourself. What are you able to give them now? Are you really helping them if you aren't your full self?”

The only solution for me was to take a leave and try to recenter myself and my values and figure out what to do next. This involved, of course, rest and taking a step back from the work, but also disentangling myself from the organization, disentangling my identity and figuring out who I was without them. And it took a long time, I'm still working at it, but that's what I needed to do.

It wasn't just a break. It was really saying that I am a whole person separate from this thing and figuring out who that was.

[00:33:57] AnnE: And that the whole organization, program, team, et cetera, can't fall on one person's shoulders. Ideally, anywhere we're working, we can all take a step out for a second if we need to, because it can't all be relying on one person. And that's not to say you weren't deeply important to the organization. 

Tali: I think what it really also tells me, and I think what happened next, even after my break is relevant here, my organization did layoffs anyway. 

They thought they, you know, the organization leadership for a variety of reasons needed to shrink the staff. So that really proved that they didn't need me the way I thought they needed me, that the work would go on without me because I was laid off in the end and it did go on. It looks different, but the work goes on and it's painful. The work I did made a huge impact and if I were still there, I would make some impact, but it was not like “the end all be all,” right? Like things do move forward and, and people adjust to those changes. We had, we, my team adjusted when my manager left and then the next iteration of my team adjusted when I left. And it's a bummer because I love them as people, but the organization didn't, didn't need me to the extent of like the pressure I put on myself about it.

Claire: Well, and I think sometimes like we burn out because we're doing our job in spite of the organization around us rather than because of it. And, and you're just constantly fighting that resistance and that's what, what burns you out. But if it wouldn't go on without you because you don't have the support from the organization, then why do you owe them that of yourself?

If they don't appreciate it and they're not willing to support it and it's coming at such a cost to you, then you know, maybe you should take that heart and put it somewhere where somebody's not going to resist it, but they're gonna amplify it and enhance it.

[00:36:18] AnnE: Yeah. I think the other thing that's standing out to me, hearing this story, especially right after we talked about the PAC Framework (Purpose Agency Connection), it's not like you were lacking purpose in this job. You had such a sense of purpose in this job, whether it was the work that the nonprofit was doing on a national scale, whether it was what was happening on college campuses, or whether it was protecting your team and enabling them to do their work.

You had such a sense of purpose, but– it doesn't work without also that agency and connection. And those are the pieces that were cut off. So really that framework is so important to have because you need to have all of the pieces of it. And I feel like this story really emphasizes that. 

So often, I think especially in nonprofits, but in tech companies, in in other mission driven organizations too, we think like if you just know what you're working towards, like that's going to be enough and it's really not. There really does need to be more than that. 

Claire: As we keep reiterating, we want organizations to get ahead of creating a burnout culture at work. But at the same time, we know folks are going through it right now. And having been through this yourself, Tali, what is your advice to individuals recognizing the early stages of burnout and working towards healing?

Tali: yeah, I think first I wanna say, you know, none of us are mental health professionals. I'm not a mental health professional. I'm speaking from my experience of burnout personally and burnout in others around me. But I'll say that I think that while not the the the solution, uh, or the thing that like resolves it, it is important to take time off, like to take, whether that's just regular vacation or if you need something more extended or really just like using a weekend, really intentionally, take a step back and ask yourself some of the hard questions about how you're doing and what you are and are not getting at work and also outside of work.

And if you can't name anything that's filling your cup outside of work, that actually might be a good place to start. As someone who had to really, like I said, disentangle my identity from my job, I had to very intentionally focus on what I do outside of work hours: hobbies, things I wanted to learn, books I wanted to read.

Uh, beyond that, I think if you're comfortable, uh, having a conversation with your manager, showing them this PAC model, this this tool and asking if you can have some conversations around it in your check-ins, this is like my bread and butter. I love to talk about these things because I think there are a lot of ways that even a weekly check-in can be a game changer. Doing it differently. First of all, having one. Second of all, doing it differently in a way that checks in on these things: Purpose Agency Connection in individual check-ins and in team check-ins.

AnnE: I agree. I think a little bit of manager training can go a long way here, but for individuals, if you are comfortable sharing what you're feeling, what's going on with your manager, hopefully in that format that Tali’s talking about of a regular one-on-one, I think that can be really helpful. And I think that can also get ahead of potential issues that could come up because your performance is going to suffer if you are experiencing burnout.

But if you tell them ahead of time, if you get ahead of it, then you, we can avoid a Performance Improvement Plan type of situation. And instead just making work sustainable. Because I feel like so many times as HR, I've been giving someone feedback on their performance, and then as I'm doing that I'm realizing, oh, this isn't really a performance issue.

This is a burnout issue. This is an expectations issue. And so I want managers to be really aware of that as well, is if you are seeing performance issues, have a conversation about it. Because there could be more to it than just a performance issue and we can fix it without doing the deep shaming that can come with Performance Improvement Plans.

[00:40:38] Claire: And also just being patient with yourself. And I feel like I am probably the worst person to be making this point. But being patient with yourself and acknowledging that like you cannot do everything and that prioritization is part of success because the most successful people in the world are not folding their own socks. The most successful people in the world delegate, like ordering lunch.

But acknowledge that you can't do everything and work it into your practice to let things go and let things come off of the to-do list and just be in control of which ones do. 

And then I think just also as somebody who has spent quite a lot of time and money in therapy, just recognizing that burnout is a mental health injury and with any injury, you're not just gonna pop a couple of Advil and be better.

AnnE: Absolutely. I think that's really well said. And if individuals are listening to this and thinking. I understand how to deal with my burnout, but I wanna affect long-term change within the organization. Oh, that's an intimidating question, but do we have recommendations for how they can do that, considering they have a little less power than leaders, but they still can affect change?

Claire: I think you can start a conversation about it. That is an opportunity for leadership that anybody in an organization can, can take up.

Tali: I agree. Just make some noise about it, 

AnnE: Yep. Yeah. 

Tali: Be a little squeaky wheel about boundaries about establishing norms that work for everybody's working style. Because I think that over time those things become like how it's always been done, right? So that manager that I said left. A year after I started, something that she established with our team was we had agreed norms of when we would email each other and how we prefer to communicate and all these kinds of things. That built a culture within a like three person team that eventually became a five person team. And then some of those team members joined other teams and then they brought those norms to those teams because they literally were working with other people. And then people got promoted and then they kept establishing it with more and more people. And eventually that makes an impact. That can take years. It could take weeks. So talk to everybody about these things. Incorporate some of these questions around Purpose, Agency, and Connection in your check-ins and make it okay to talk about burnout prevention through having enough time off, setting realistic expectations and you know, all the things that we've, we've talked about today.

And if you need some help, that's what we're here for. We're here to help.

[00:43:49] AnnE: Absolutely. I think that's what I wanted to finish on, is like individuals, managers, leaders, everyone already has plenty on their plate. Your in-house HR probably has enough on their plate. This is what we do. We are external resources. You know, Tali can help train your managers and help get some of those management processes into place.

We run organizational health assessments to see, okay, where you're at and where do you want to be going? What are some of your areas of strength? What are areas of improvement, and what work needs to be done to help you get there? And it can be really helpful to have that outside perspective as well, because sometimes you're just lost in the sauce of it all.

Burnout is everywhere and the band-aids aren't stopping the bleeding. Organizations can get ahead of it, but it won't happen by accident. If we can support your team to transition to a healthier, more sustainable workplace, please don't hesitate to reach out to us.

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That's it for today's episode of HR Peep Show with your hosts, Claire Baker and AnnE Diemer. Thank you to Tali Ramo for joining as our guest host today, and, though you didn’t hear her voice, thank you to Krista Lane for her audio editing support.

Stay tuned for future episodes covering both hot takes and practical advice to build sustainable, people-driven companies.

To view transcripts and full credits, or find out more about us, go to hrpeepshow.com. 

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