We all know someone who has taken a total of five paid time off days in the last year. While dedication certainly pays off, burnout is real — especially as many tech professionals adjust to working from home for the first time.
At the following companies, managers help their direct reports reduce stress by encouraging them to actually use vacation days, even if it’s to spend an entire day sitting on the couch.
“No one will respect the boundaries that you set until you do.” Devin Hauser, vice president of delivery at The Marketing Store, said.
To make the days spent working increasingly productive and enjoyable, leadership at the customer engagement agency and across Chicago have carved out time for virtual team bonding and provided stipends for employees to make their home offices feel that much homier. And it’s paid off.
“As long as the proper expectations are set, we understand that employees taking some time to themselves can ultimately set them up to do their best work,” Evive Senior Account Manager Christopher Ross said.
Monitors and headphones aren’t the only items that can make remote employees feel like their office environment is comfortable and functional. Employee Enablement Professional Kelsi Rohrmann says that’s why the stipend Upwork offers to those not in Chicago or San Francisco extends to houseplants and decorative items. And she and her peers should know — Upwork prides itself on making remote work accessible and safe.
What examples do you set as a leader to ensure employees feel empowered to create and uphold healthy work-life boundaries?
For remote work to work successfully, communication is key. We strongly encourage employees to set working hours on Google Calendar and adhere to them, as well as block off time when they are taking care of family responsibilities, focusing on heads-down work or even just taking a lunch break. It’s important to be transparent with your team and manager about your availability. And in turn, we expect our employees to respect others’ schedules.
Companywide, we have implemented what we call Customer Wednesdays. Every Wednesday, there should be no internal meetings, allowing time for our employees to focus on customer-facing work or heads-down time for our non-customer facing teams.
Say a remote employee came to you and said they were feeling burned out or overworked. How do you address the situation?
The first step to addressing employee burnout is to be proactive versus reactive. We encourage our managers to do this in a couple of ways. First, we ask them to review team PTO quarterly to see if people haven’t been utilizing our unlimited PTO benefit. Second, we ask them to check in with team members on a personal level at the start of one-on-ones, support them in…