How do you know when burnout is creeping in?
What if there were a simple framework to spot it early?
Could this change how we approach wellbeing for ourselves and our teams?

Burnout often starts subtly, like a small snowball rolling down a hill.

Left unchecked, it quickly grows into a much bigger challenge for individuals and teams.

Kristine Watts – an experienced HR Leader, Women’s Coach, and Strategic Planner – shares a powerful framework to recognize the early stages of burnout and prevent it from spiraling. She speaks comprehensively about burnout, what it looks like in individuals and in teams. She addresses the different drivers of burnout in individuals and teams.

For individuals, it could be coming from work or life – usually some kind of misalignment around values, purpose or what’s important to them. For teams, it is often a signal of something larger – structural or cultural challenges like high workload demand, high pressure deadlines or lack of adequate recognition.

She offers a visual of a snowball and the framing of Green, Yellow and Red as a way to determine where an organization or individual might be on the scale of burnout. Kristine speaks about how workplaces can mitigate burnout including implementing an employee listening strategy, looking for root causes and not bandaid solutions, providing peer support groups or ERGs and equipping middle managers to provide coaching for their direct reports. Finally, for individuals, she talks about burnout cannot be solved with a week’s vacation and need not be solved by wholesale life changes but rather through little changes in habits, patterns and behaviors. She offers some quick, small, easily implementable practices that anyone can check in with themselves at any given time.How does your organization prevent burnout? We’d love to hear your perspective. Feel free to drop a comment below.

Watch the Kristine’s interview here on our Healthy Workplace Culture Youtube Channel. Subscribe to the channel while you are there.