The Leadership Lounge

Increasing employee engagement while managing workplace stress and burnout

Khalid Asad, MS, PCC, Executive Coach

A growing body of research supports the connection between leadership behaviors and employee engagement, stress, burnout, and turnover. How you lead impacts employees' wellness and performance.  Changes in how we work and our attitudes about work resulting from the pandemic have highlighted the need for organizations to address workplace wellness. Leaders and their teams have felt the effects of integrating their work and home lives, which blurred boundaries that once provided some semblance of balance between the two.

Disengagement, stress, and burnout appear to be at an all-time high. Generationally, 84% of Gen Zs report burnout along with 74% of Millennials and 47% of Baby Boomers (Forbes, 2022). And based on McKinsey research, 25% of Gen Zs, 13% of Millennials, 13% of Gen Xs, and 8% of Baby Boomers reported feeling emotionally distressed with low levels of...

What’s your favorite thing to do when you are not working? I love a great movie or eating a bowl of nutty coconut ice cream. Identify your favorite thing and reward yourself for having a productive week. Some of the benefits of rewarding yourself include:

• It keeps you motivated – you look forward to your reward when you succeed
• It’s an affirmation that you are doing something well. This serves as fuel to keep going
• It’s a goal setting habit – positive reinforcement and rewards are the best ways to train yourself and reinforce good habits and practices

Before wrapping up your day, take some time to reflect of how things went:

• What were you able to accomplish?
• What did not get done?
• What contributed to your success?
• What were some of your barriers?
• How do you feel physically and mentally?
• Your daily debrief allows you to identify and reinforce your productive habits.

To determine if your week was productive, use the same reflective process as you did at the end of each day during the week. This will give you a broader sense of your overall productivity. Take this opportunity to think about your upcoming week and incorporate lessons learned in planning forward. 

 Check out the PPI Leadership Lounge on 12/3/21 for the next tip: Rewarding Yourself.

Depending on your role in your organization, you should be thinking and functioning at a higher altitude versus operating in the weeds. When you operate in the weeds, you may be literally disempowering someone else. Ask yourself, "Is this where I need to be?" or "Am I doing someone else's work?" Spending too much time in the weeds can prevent you from seeing things at a higher level or the bigger picture. Therefore, you are not leading from a strategic or systems perspective, and you reduce your chances of accomplishing the important goals you established for yourself or your team.

Tip #4: Build Periodic Breaks into Your Schedule

In our effort to be productive, we may feel pressured to chain ourselves to our desk and press forward to get things done. This is not only unhealthy, it’s a recipe for stress, burnout, and failure. In a 2011 University of Illinois study,  researchers concluded that the human brain’s attentional resources drop after a long period of...

Distractions (also called "Time Robbers") refer to anything that takes our focus away from our goals or the things we’ve identified as important. They can appear trivial or not time consuming, but the reality is they add to an enormous amount of wasted time. For example, social media can be very engaging as it allows us to connect with others or express ourselves. While there are benefits to engaging in social media, over-engagement throughout the day can distract us from our work and decrease our productivity. It may be helpful to schedule specific times you want to engage or impose time limits on your engagement. The first step in reducing distractions is to identify what distracts you and limits your productivity.

List up to three (3) things that distract you during the day and identify at least two (2) strategies for reducing each. At the end of the week, note any benefits you gained by reducing these distractions.

Check out the PPI Leadership Lounge on 12/1/21...

Have you ever reflected on your week and asked yourself “Did I get anything done?” if you answered yes, you’re not alone. Many leaders face this challenge as they are often pulled in multiple directions or spend much of their week working on "things" or putting out fires. As a leader, your productivity not only impacts you, but it also impacts your team and in some cases your entire organization. 

Over the next several days, I’ll share seven powerful tips for having a productive week. As I share them, you may recognize the ones you currently practice and others in which you need to improve or that are most important to you and your unique situation.

Tip # 1 Ask yourself "What do I want to accomplish this week?"

This is a much different question from what do I want to do, which may lead to the trap of engaging in unfocused busy work that won’t contribute to your overall goals or the bigger picture. Asking what do I want to...