When I first started my career, the idea of someone burning out was unheard of. If someone had said they felt burned out or used similar phrasing, people would have laughed and told them to get on with it. Now, I’m old, but I’m not that old. It wasn’t that long ago, and while things have thankfully moved on, there is still much that people don’t widely understand about burnout. So let’s get into how resource burnout is a preventable problem.
Understanding that burnout is real and providing people the opportunity to recover is great, but preventing it from happening is even better. To implement preventive measures, you must first understand not just what it is but also what causes it.
Burnout – physical, mental, and/or emotional exhaustion along with related symptoms – rarely results from a single factor. Heavy workloads, stressful roles, negative cultures, and a lack of control over work situations often contribute to burnout. These factors frequently impact high-performing teams.
The High-Performance Problem
High-performing individuals often join teams assigned to deliver the most strategically important, largest, and most complex projects in an organization. When these individuals come together, they form teams capable of achieving levels of performance they previously thought impossible. Such is the power of collaboration and teamwork.
Organizations quickly become addicted to those performance levels, and understandably so. Leaders keep those teams together, assigning them critical initiatives that drive organizational success. The teams know the future of the organization rests on their performance, and that often motivates them to push even further in pursuit of excellence. As the team members work more closely together, productivity increases, collaboration deepens, and their solutions grow more innovative. Over time, the organization becomes increasingly reliant on these few strategic teams
The cost of high performing teams
But this reliance comes at a cost. The constant demand for peak performance creates immense pressure. Concerns about potential problems or failures linger in the back of team members’ minds, threatening their confidence. Sooner or later, the team begins to feel taken for granted, pushed too hard, and undervalued – even if that’s not true. Perhaps not everyone feels this way, but as soon as one person loses motivation, the rest of the team follows.
The descent into burnout begins, and the effects persist. Team members rarely regain full motivation and engagement, at least not in their current format or with their current employer. Meanwhile, the organization suffers because it has lost a key strategic delivery team. Critical initiatives face delays at best. Recovering from these setbacks is never simple.
No one wants these situations to occur. However, many organizations operate in ways that make them almost inevitable. Without reliable, consistent resource information from an integrated, enterprise-wide project portfolio management (PPM) solution like Sciforma Vantage, organizations end up managing resources blindly. This lack of oversight creates an environment where burnout becomes almost guaranteed.
How do you take steps to improve this environment? How do you make resource burnout preventable? That’s what we’ll consider in the next blog post.
More about resource and capacity planning, resource allocation, and demand management:
- What is the difference between capacity and utilization?
- 5 IT Resource Allocation Tips & Best Practices
- Resource Leveling vs. Resource Smoothing: What’s the Difference?
Andy Jordan
Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras based management consulting firm with a strong emphasis on organizational transformation, portfolio management, and PMOs. Andy is an in-demand keynote speaker and author who delivers thought provoking content in an engaging and entertaining style. He is also an instructor in project management-related disciplines, including PMO and portfolio management courses on LinkedIn Learning.