Beating Burnout Blog Series

 At the start of the year, it’s commonplace for us to all make our resolutions for change, whether it’s to lose weight, to find love, to advance our career, or the ever elusive, to find personal fulfillment. After the last year, it’s no surprise that a lot of people out there are questioning their jobs and career choices. Due to the economy, many of our workers have been shouldering the workload of 2 to 4 people for over a year now.  They're constantly worried about the next cut to come and whether it will be their job on the chopping block and, frankly, the stress of it all is making them extremely tired.  It's a perfect storm of necessary conditions for a blazing wildfire of burnout.

Maybe you're seeing it with your own teams or even in yourself. Here are some signs to look for:

• Your employees have so much apathy that they sound like the goth kids from South Park ("Whatever.")
• Eye rolling is such an often occurrence in your office that you're surprised when it DOESN'T happen
• Jobs are getting done, but instead of being completed throughly and with a lot of thought, the end product looks like it's held together with paper clips and chewing gum
• You wait to have your coffee until AFTER your morning staff meeting, because there's no point in getting a buzz on until you get the Debbie Downers out of your office and on their way for the day
• When you wake up in the morning, you're actually praying that someone on your team will call in sick, because, despite the increased work load for the day, it's less emotionally draining than actually having them there.

Amusing as my examples may be, some of you out there are nodding at the screen right now.  As a manager, what can you do to fight burnout in your team members and in yourself?  Over the next few Wednesdays, I'll give you several different ways to rejuvenate passion for our industry in my Beating Burnout blog series.

A job is like a relationship.  You're going to fall in andout of love with it over time.  What's important is that you really like the core of what you're doing, because that's what will get you through the rough stages.  Just like new car smell, new job passion will fade over time.  You'll slow down, become annoyed with the day to day stuff and apathy will creep in.  But if you can just remember, every once and a while, to touch that part of your job that made you love it in the first place, you gain a bit of the motivation that it takes to keep you from burning out and divorcing your career partner.  That memory touch of the initial career infatuation, that is the goal of this series.