Dealing with Remote Working Burnout W/ Phil Strazzulla

For many of us, our homes have turned into workspaces since the pandemic started. And while employee burnout isn’t unheard of, remote working burnout seems to be an even more rampant problem that’s been on the rise since. Today, I talk to Phil Strazzulla of SelectSoftware Reviews about work from home burnout, and how we can help employees better cope with it.

One of the main consequences of the pandemic was how it accelerated the transition to remote work for a lot of businesses. While this is a positive change for a lot of companies in many ways, it has also had some adverse effects.

This rapid adjustment to the change in work setup has undoubtedly had an effect on employees in the form of work from home burnout, not to mention the additional stresses to the average worker – fear of the Corona Virus, the global recession, the war in Ukraine – these have all made coping with remote working burnout an even more challenging task.

All these factors together have indeed taken employee burnout to a whole new level. And as business leaders, it’s our responsibility to try and mitigate this.

Stay tuned to hear more of my conversation with Phil Strazzulla of SelectSoftware Reviews, as we dive deep into the problem of remote working burnout or work from home burnout in today’s increasingly digital workplace.


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CONNECT WITH PETER BOOLKAH:
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http://www.Boolkah.com
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ABOUT PETER BOOLKAH
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Peter Boolkah (AKA The Transition Guy) is the World’s #1 Business Transition Coach whose main passion in life is to work with talented and high performing business owners who are in the process of creating exciting, high growth businesses. 

Peter helps you to navigate and transition through the crucial growth pains that all growing businesses experience making it as painless and exciting as possible.

It is important to remember that businesses do not just grow and develop on their own, it is up to us and our teams to make this happen by making every day purposeful. 

As businesses grow some parts of the journey will be easier than others and most owners do not have all the answers. Starting a business is one of the most exciting things we get t

CONNECT WITH PETER BOOLKAH:
--------------------

http://www.Boolkah.com
https://www.facebook.com/Boolkah
https://www.instagram.com/pboolkah/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/boolkah
https://twitter.com/boolkah

--------------------
ABOUT PETER BOOLKAH
--------------------

Peter Boolkah (AKA The Transition Guy) is the World’s #1 Business Transition Coach whose main passion in life is to work with talented and high performing business owners who are in the process of creating exciting, high growth businesses.

Peter helps you to navigate and transition through the crucial growth pains that all growing businesses experience making it as painless and exciting as possible.

It is important to remember that businesses do not just grow and develop on their own, it is up to us and our teams to make this happen by making every day purposeful.

As businesses grow some parts of the journey will be easier than others and most owners do not have all the answers. Starting a business is one of the most exciting things we get to do and we all have aspirations of achieving great things. In fact Peter is yet to meet someone who started a business with the intention of failing.

Peter’s ultimate life goal is to inspire and empower over 100,000 Entrepreneurs to create long term thriving businesses resulting in the creation of 1,000,000 jobs.

So if you are scaling up your business, you’re in a bu...

Transcript

0:00

(upbeat music)- Hi, Peter Boolkah here, and welcome to today's edition of "The Transition Guy." Now, joining me today in the studio is Phil Strazzulla, founder of SelectSoftware Reviews. Hello, Phil.- Hey, Peter, thanks for having me.- Now, thank you for coming. Now today, one of the things that I want to talk about, and we've talked about this a lot on the show, is remote working. And I know that your business has been remote work since the get go, but there seems to be an uprising in sort of burnout happening from people working remotely. And there's a lot of things being cited, whether it's people's inability to switch off, things being far more condensed while working on platforms such as Zoom. What is your take on sort of burnout in the remote workplace? And more importantly, what can we do about it?- Yeah, I think it's a real problem. I think it's happened because COVID sort of happened and all these companies that weren't equipped to be remote all of a sudden were. They didn't have the right SOPs, best practices, etc. I think if you look at companies that are remote first, and a lot of these companies have actually codified what they do to build the right culture, like Zapier for example. So if you're out there, you're an entrepreneur, definitely check out some of their materials because they're extremely illuminating. They've done a good job of setting up boundaries, of establishing good norms for communication, which helps, and just sort of recruiting the right people as well. So I think this sort of pandemic which made remote work happen too fast for many people and too many organizations, plus the stress of the pandemic in general, plus all the other stuff going on, Ukraine, Russia, etc., looming recession, it's all sort of exacerbated our mental health to make it a real problem. And I think it's on leaders to figure out how do we from our organization make sure that our people are not getting burned out because, one, there's sort of a moral implication there where we wanna take care of your people. But two, I think there's a business implication as well where if your employees are burnt out, they're just not gonna be impactful. I'm a huge believer in deep work. And if you look at their research around deep work, people are four to five times more effective when they're in a state of flow in deep work. And that's relative to kind of normal state, let alone the burnt out state where somebody is almost completely ineffective. And we've seen that on our team.- So a question for you because you touched on a couple of interesting points. Number one, pandemic, probably most companies weren't prepared for remote working. They were thrust into remote working. Do you think when companies are out there that are remote first, do you think they take a totally different approach to perhaps what a remote home office really needs to look like? What is the environment that a employee they've taken on board, what's their environment like? Do they look at it in that kind of detail as opposed to your now remote working, enjoy life from your kitchen table, so to speak?- They do. So there's a great book written by the guy that runs Acceleration Partners, which is a remote first company. His name is Robert Glazer. He also has a really phenomenal newsletter as well called "Friday Forward," which is kinda these inspirational Friday emails that he sends out. But highly recommend the book if you're running a remote first team, and there are specific tactics in there that you can look at. So one thing is to define a workspace. And a workspace for you could be a chair, like if you live in a studio apartment, maybe it's one chair in one corner of the room where that's your workplace and that's a physical thing. There are routine that you can go through that you should set up to enter and exit your workday so you know maybe that when you shower the morning, now you're work Phil. And then when you start to make dinner at night, now you are regular Phil. And you really shouldn't try to cross those up too much because it can lead to burnout. The other things recommended are just sort of normal mental health habits like eating, sleeping, doing exercise, meditation, having a good social group, things like that.- Which I suppose, during lockdown, a lot of those things were quite difficult because lockdown by sheer nature means that you wasn't around people. I just, I'm just thinking whether, because we are now literally when you think about it approaching 2.5 years of remote working for so many. I mean, isn't that enough time for companies to get right?- I don't think so, unfortunately. So there are obviously companies that are more agile than others, but I'm mostly in the HR space. So my business, we write a bunch of stuff for HR people. And what's really interesting is that prior to the pandemic, we had this incredible 10 year bull run where the rates of unemployment went down below where they'd ever been before and they held there for a very long time. And of course they're back there now. And the most basic of things that you think companies would do from a talent acquisition perspective weren't done. They didn't have a mobile optimized career site. They didn't have an easy apply flow. They weren't responding to candidates fast enough, etc. And so even though this was a bottleneck for companies' growth, they just didn't do it because it was new and quite frankly they didn't have the right leadership in place to make those changes. And I think that the same thing is happening with remote work, and it's also exacerbated by the fact that leaders are burnt out and there's just a lot of things that change for almost everybody's business, whether it's supply chain and distribution channels, customer relationships, the way that you recruit talent. All of this change meant that some of these fundamental things weren't really worked on and thought of. And also there's only a few dozen companies really pre-pandemic, maybe it's 100 companies that had really figured out how to do this at any sort of scale. And even the ones like Zapier, they're a couple hundred people, you know what I mean? They're not the EMIs of the world. They're not the McKinseys of the world. So I think it was really challenging for companies to adapt to that. And then also for that to trickle down to the managers to establish those norms in their teams so that people aren't checking their email before they go to bed and stuff like that.- Which is interesting because quite a lot of people are doing that. What advice would you give people where perhaps the home environment isn't necessarily conducive to remote working, but that's the only option they've got? So maybe they're in a bad relationship So actually the karma in the place isn't great to begin with.- It's really, really challenging. You're never gonna be at optimal performance if that's your situation. And if you're in a bad relationship, remove yourself from that relationship and move on with your life, as hard as it is. You just gotta do it eventually. It's gonna happen, whether it's now or 10 years from now and you've got more tied up with each other. If it's something that's more temporal, like for example we have a newborn at home and there's a lot of crying, there's a lot of sleepless nights, you just kinda gotta make the best of the situation. And it's little things chipping away. It's little wins. It's doing things for yourself. It's making sure that you have the right habits and are staying disciplined about the stuff that you can, focusing on things you can control. Whenever you're in a difficult situation, it's sort of cliched, but you gotta just make the best of it.- And how easy, should I say, or what steps can people take to really put boundaries in place with their partners, with their significant others? Because the reason I ask that is a lot of people, and I've heard stories about this, were working from home, it's, "Well, can you do this for me please?"Can you do that for me please?" And there seems to be quite a lot of interruption."Could you just get the washing for me?" And it's like a lot of people cannot make the distinction that actually just because you haven't left the house doesn't mean you're not working.- It's really hard. And I think especially the person who's asking you to do that stuff, they're asking you because there's something that needs to get done, but they also, maybe they're bored. Maybe they miss you. Maybe they are spiteful that you're not contributing to this part of the household, etc. And so I think you have to have a conversation to understand, "Hey,"why do you keep asking me to do this stuff," in a very empathetic, open minded way? And then just say,"From my perspective,"I'm trying to be super efficient."When I'm in that room or I'm in that chair,"I'm in that space"I'm on the third floor,"I'm trying to get as much done as possible"in the smallest amount of time as possible"so I can come back and we can make dinner together,"so I can take care of the kids,"so I can do X, Y, Z,"take out the laundry, etc." And so it's one of those sort of classic relationship problems where very quickly you could say,"Why do you keep asking me to do this stuff (laughs)?"- And I've noticed, I've heard stories. People have told me that it's led to full blown arguments.- Yeah.- Because people basically associated going to work, you left the damn house. Now people are not leaving the house.- Right, right. And so it's just about really hammering home in an empathetic way,"Hey, when I'm doing the work,"I need to be focused, dialed in doing the work."Otherwise, every time you distract me,"it takes me 15 minutes to get back to where I was." And that's actually what the research says. There's lots of stuff out there. I mentioned the deep work stuff earlier. That's a lot of what it is, right, is how do we get into these flow states? And they take 30 minutes just to get into them, let alone stay in them and actually get the work done. So you just need to have your partner understand that, and go the extra mile when you're not working to show that you're still contributing to the other stuff that needs to get done for your household.- Interesting, interesting. What other advice would you give people remote working, things that they should consider? Maybe resources they need to consider where they need to educate themselves. Because from what we're talking about, I think there may be some new skills that need to be acquired to be able to remote work. It isn't just like going to an office, it's far deeper than that.- Yes, a couple of things. One, so definitely check out the literature that Zapier, Acceleration Partners and other companies have put out there. Two, what's really interesting for Acceleration is probably the key thing that they look for in hires is somebody who appreciates remote work. And if you appreciate something, you're just gonna enjoy it more. So really think about what are the things you're so glad? I looked out my window and there's a highway, and I'm really glad I'm not on the highway sitting in traffic. I'm really glad that if I wanna go grab a coffee down the street and maybe work from a cafe for a while, I can do that. If I wanna get a workout in, if I need to take a nap or something like that, I can do stuff like that. So I think that's really important. I think from a leader's perspective, you have to understand that remote work, just like every other aspect of the company, is something that you need to learn how to do really well and then evangelize and set up those norms for the rest of the organization. So you should have a document on how do you communicate within a remote work infrastructure? Especially if people are in different geographies and different time zones. What's the right response rate for an email? What about Slack messages? Do we wanna set up an environment for deep work or not? I think you just need to really think about how other people are struggling, and getting excited about helping them and seeing that their lives can be a lot better with the remote work because they're ditching the commute, they're ditching the time and economic stress that that puts on you, and they're opening themselves up to lots more opportunities.- Do you think there's potentially an argument that may be an employee was working for a really great company, and it was fantastic when they were in the physical environment, but actually the experience virtually hasn't been so great and that maybe sometimes it's no longer appropriate to work for that company and you need to go and find another company to either work for, or actually sometimes you need to move that employee on because the circumstances has changed and actually that person is not best suited for the new playing field?- Yeah, and there's lots of people that never wanna work remotely. They're extroverts. They maybe are prone to depression. They just can't concentrate at home. They're always procrastinating. Actually, when I first started working remotely, I procrastinated a lot. And a resource that I used was this app called Focusmate where you're matched up with another person for 45 minutes and you basically create a social contract to get something done together, and then you do it. And I did six or seven of those per day for a couple of months, and all of a sudden I sort of built those habits and I was able to do it on my own without the app. But there are lots of people that just are not going to be good remote workers and they don't want to be. And so if that's the case and your company is staying remote and there's no opportunity to go in the office, you should move on. And if you're a manager and you're seeing somebody struggle, you should obviously try to help them, but it's hard to fight nature, and some people just naturally don't wanna do it.- Yeah, and also we're seeing quite a lot of that happening right now. And actually companies are keeping people on out of guilt.- Yeah--- They feel.- Because there's two job openings for every unemployed person in the Western world right now. So somebody can go get a better job at better pay. Don't worry about it.- But it's interesting how people sort of react to those situations, and they think they're being kind to the employee. No, no, we'll keep you trapped in that position where you're not happy, but as opposed to saying,"No, it's okay to move on."- Yeah, no. If you wanna be really nice about it, you can give them a month to transition out or something like that. Depending on the country, it might be longer. In the U.S., that's nice (laughs). In South Africa, that's illegal. But yeah, so, but I think you're totally right. And you just gotta have somebody transition out if they're not happy.- So if people love what you're talking about today, want to sort of connect with you and have a conversation, what's the best way of sort of following your work and reaching out to you?- Yeah. So I have a blog, philstrazzulla.com. Two Z's, two L's, the only person in the world with that name. You can also find me on LinkedIn. If you're looking at HR software, check out our website selectsoftwarereviews.com. And yeah, I think LinkedIn's probably the best way to kinda follow me and connect.- Yeah, that's becoming a lot more common now. That's becoming a lot more common where people are going onto LinkedIn.- Yeah, LinkedIn's a great, I mean, it's a horrible platform in some ways. There's a lot of spam. There's a lot of bugs. But you can, it's actually an effective networking tool if you use it right.- Yeah, and there's always gonna be spam everywhere.- That's true, unfortunately.- It is unfortunate, but that's just the nature. That's just the nature of things.- Yeah, exactly.(indistinct) with the spammers.- Yeah, well, listen, thank you so much for being a great guest. If anything's resonated with you today, you're looking at remote working, it's not quite working, you wanna look at strategies, head over to boolkah.com and get in touch. If you liked today's episode, please like it, share it with others so that they can benefit, and also subscribe so you don't miss future episodes. And always remember, failing to learn is learning to fail. Please stay safe. Phil, you've been awesome. Thank you so much.- Thank you, Peter.