8 top tips to save your team from burning out

Teams burning out because of a too much work load is a common story in the software industry. Yet if you take some easy measures you can easily avoid this without reducing your team’s productivity (actually increase it sometimes). Here are our top 8 tips that has worked for us and our customers over and over:

1. Manage the workload (obviously)

When the work to do fits with capacity, the team can effectively get their work done and still have time to rest and recover. Remember that a team’s time is not just about the task list, it is split between work in hand, coordinate and communicate, their need to take breaks, their need for professional growth and development among others. So your balancing act between the business’s need to get things done with a deadline and the team’s ability to take on workload has to be much more than a spreadsheet or a fancy project planning device. Apply your EQ and your IQ to find that balance.

When you fear your team’s burnout remember you can always say no - read this superb article on HBR to sharpen your skills of saying no - 9 was to say no busywork and unrealistic deadlines.

2. Let your team have work-life balance

We sometimes burnout when we focus only on work. You as the leader drive that focus. If the life of a coder is to sleep only a few hours and be back at work, with barely any engagement with rest of life that coder will only go down the path of burning out. Even if you are doing for selfish reasons of making the project successful so that you look good you will fail badly - your team will lose their productivity as they go along the path of burning out. Work life balance is the key to team’s ability to take on stress yet stay productive. Keep an eye on the team, even if there is no huge workload, if the sole thing they focus on is work. If they do, talk to them, make them understand that you are OK if they take a break and do something with their family or go play a play a ball game, etc.

3. Take care of life’s little tasks

Little things like filling out form, buying a plane ticket, doing the laundry all take up time of your staff. Without doing them life becomes stressful. If there is any way you can take care of some of them, it does wonders in freeing up your team’s time, reducing their stress. Sometimes this “taking care” is very low cost compared to the high cost of the developer having a “downtime” from getting these done to getting stress about not finishing them. Google offers laundry service, FB has bike repairs , maybe you can’t afford things like giants but you can do something else that makes slightly easier for your team.

4. Make vacations a must

Vacations are essential for software developers. It’s as important as taking a training on a new technology or finishing off the tasks at hand. Vacation recharges them, makes them look forward to coming back to work, helps them think about problems in a new way. Without this regular recharge, refresh and rethink a software team loses it’s edge and individual team members slowly burns out losing enthusiasm and productivity on the way. Vacations should be made mandatory by policy.

5. Set realistic deadlines

Some companies use the mantra like "think big" and set unrealistic deadlines for developers. This may sound great in theory (or in a youtube video about getting rich) but it is a guaranteed way to burn out your team in the long run. Software development is a creative process at the end and you can’t use these artificial work more motivational strategies to get more juice out of the system. It may work one time or two but ultimately it will fail.

The only sane and long term strategy is to set realistic, achievable goals and deadlines for the project.

6. Recognize contribution

Recognizing a teams contribution and achievements go a long way towards the satisfaction and self-worth that a hard working team needs for it’s health. Recognition is simple and honest way of rewarding hard work. And it helps the team come out feeling better about themselves and take them out of the frustrations of working too hard for nothing.

I’ve found many startup founders have an idea that if they recognize the team’s performance their team will become slack, instead putting stress on them, pushing them and reminding them that they failed or might fail gets them to work harder. This is one the biggest mistake that a founder can make. The constant stress and feeling of failure destroys morale and reduces productivity and eventually lead to a burnt out team.

7. Encourage physical activity

Plan on giving enough time with the work day for some kind of physical activity. Even a little time to go for a walk or play a game of foosball is a great help. A break from the computer screen helps refresh the developer's head and allow them to see new solutions. It also helps her stay fit and healthy which eventually leads to a much energized team. And biggest of all it helps avoid burn out.

At Kaz we are big fans of cricket, no work day is complete without our daily cricket match. In winter cricket sometimes is replaced by badminton or something similar.

8. Bring variety in work

You should aim to have mundane or easy project priority tasks mixed with challenging, creative work. This mix helps the developer stay interested in her work. Interest is everything the creative space, if a developer becomes bored with the tasks in hand it will lead to burn out. Doing the same task over and over destroys motivation. Yet, if you mix it with a different set of tasks you’ll see your team producing more yet becoming less burnt out. Paradoxical but very true.