Human Capital: Burn Out Signals and Prevention
Lately, I have been seeing a lot of patients who are losing their morale, motivation and drive in the workplace. These are generally the folks who are the most effective and efficient in their organisations.
Mind Over Image Consulting's work as a wellness consultant in one of the fastest growing midsize company's, where our therapists go every fortnight for one on one counselling with the employees who volunteer to participate. This is done as a provision from the company into their employee wellness programme. Most companies outsource this as they realize that the employees prefer the confidentiality of an external provider. We provide monthly workshops on emotional health resilience and mindfulness training, apart from the normal skill development workshops and then to monitor each employees output and assist and guide them towards increased performance.
This is the story of Zoya, a super achiever, vibrant, a woman in the Media and Marketing Team. She attended all our workshops but only came in for a one on one session once. Considering that our therapist is at her corporate office, we had just seen her once. Most employees who chose to come usually come in every fortnight for at least five to six turns as we work on individual strategies and skill development.
She was an interesting candidate, chatty in the beginning but after three months of group interactions, her attendance had started to dwindle and when she did come in she wasn't as participatory as before. In our quarterly assessment of all our clients in collaboration with HR, we found Zoya level had dropped. From being one of the most competent and versatile executives in the company with an extremely bright future who was always at the forefront, fast-tracking her way to becoming the Head of Department to now avoiding conversations. I was concerned about the change.
It was time for the MOI intervention. We asked her if she would be comfortable coming to our Wellness Center. At the Center, we did our usual feedback session and she highlighted apathy and tiredness as her major symptoms. After our conversation, the therapist flagged it as a typical burnout. Zoya felt extremely tired both physically and emotionally. She felt that she had slowed down and was feeling completely inept.
I asked her she'd ever heard of a burnout because what she was describing was a burnout. She said she had but went on to say she was just probably depressed. According to her the process was slow and she really hadn't had any warning signs. She had just found the work she had been designated to her wasn't really fulfilling her and that to her was bad enough because she usually thrived under pressure and loved new challenges. But lately, she was angered by the inefficiency of her subordinates, the stupidity of the peon and even the incapability of the barista at the coffee shop!
We just started therapy and simultaneously they had the employee assessment at work where the HOD bought up the lack of productivity and poor performance and highlighted Zoya's growing list of incomplete projects. This assessment pushed her over the edge of detachment and she came to me the next day with a demand (and approval) to quit her job.
We needed to buy time to get her over the hump of the burnout (which sometimes reads as depression but from experience we realised the difference). The company sanctioned the leave and Zoya gave her consent to us to work on her. It took us 7 sessions of reprogramming for Zoya to get back to her original self and 3 more to drive her to her peak performance.
Zoya was the ideal client, happy to go along with the modalities we wanted to use. Starting her off on the integrative therapy model we used Neurofeedback (a brain training 'biofeedback' that we run on our EEG machines) with a combination of CBT, NLP, Mind-mapping, hypnotherapy and sound therapy. We altered her food and her thoughts and delivered back a motivated woman ready to take on the world.
We gave her a prescription for life, and this prescription is for all of us in the workforce, so take heed, because chronic disease and illness have a starting point which is related to STRESS. It is imperative to give yourself the nourishment of your soul.
So here are the steps:
" Write down all the situations that cause you stress. Be mindful when they present themselves to you.
" Learn the skill to say no. Especially to the situations that cause you stress.
" If the situation is one that you can't avoid, try to take your time in the interactions and prepare yourself to be professional rather than personal.
" Stick to a healthy work-life balance. Make sure you have good nutrition, that you are getting enough sleep and ensure that you are exercising.
" Learn the art of delegation to reduce overload.
" If your work requires you to take on heavy projects, make sure you inter lace them with lighter ones.
" Don't forget your friends and family. Hang out with people who you don't work with. People who don't require you to dawn on a guard.
" Stimulate your brain by learning new things, whether that is in thought or action.
" Fresh perspectives are the key to keeping you stimulated and allowing new ideas to evolve and develop.
" Don't keep judging your own performance.
" And definitely check the need to be an over achiever.
I hope all the overachiever's out there understand the risky pattern they are prey to. The more you do, the more is given to you. You feel excited initially about the recognition, but then recovery after a stressful job isn't given to you because you, well, you're a superstar!
For all the CXO's out there take heed and spread the work around, because your one star may fade away in not such a distant future if we keep piling up her desk.
_20241010140125_original_image_2.webp)
_20241010001905_original_image_2.webp)