# Q2 — Preventing burnout for the people left behind

- **Episode:** [203](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/203.md) (2025-06-05)
- **Type:** other
- **Tags:** burnout, prevention, workload
- **Time:** 12:42–20:50 (start 762s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/203?t=762](https://truthliesandwork.com/203?t=762)

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[12:42] Al Elliott: Okay, that makes perfect sense. And I think also, just most people know this, when you take some time off, you go on holiday, if you're enjoying your work beforehand, but you might be slightly burnt out, Oftentimes when you go on holiday, you're sitting there, you're having— by the pool or whatever, and you feel like you renew your excitement for it because you've sort of just given yourself a little bit of a break. But talking of burnout, I think what we're saying here is that it's cool for those people who are sitting by a pool somewhere hot, but all the people who are left behind in the office are kind of picking up the slack. Now, we know it's going to be their time soon, but still, is that not a risk of burning out the people who are left?
[13:21] Leanne Elliott: Massive risk. Absolutely massive. risk. And this is really rooted in, in old-school occupational psychology. It's called the job demands-resources model, which is really quite intuitive. It basically says that when demands outweigh resources, people burn out, which is, you know, kind of makes sense. So if people are covering the extra work, if they're having to respond to more emails, or they're picking up extra clients to look after, or they're making decisions they wouldn't normally have to, When those demands spike, but you're not providing the people any extra resource in terms of time, support, autonomy, or even training, then yes, burnout will become more likely
[14:00] Al Elliott: I know we've covered burnout a lot on this, but this is kind of like, sounds like a little sort of micro burnout. Uh, so what signs should we as leaders or business owners be looking for, for, to, to know that the, the, the people left behind might be getting to the edge of, of what they can cope with?
[14:15] Leanne Elliott: I think people tend to associate burnout, first of all, with exhaustion, and you might not necessarily see that initially. If it does show up, it might be somebody not looking as put together as they normally are, looking particularly tired, potentially being late. I think more than likely you're going to see cynicism, you're going to see resentment, you're going to see pushback when you ask them to do something, huffing, puffing, eye rolling, and potential detachment as well from work. So, maybe people who aren't as keen to organise the team lunch or stay after work
[14:45] Al Elliott: Mm-hmm
[14:46] Leanne Elliott: Or even volunteer for certain things within the business they normally would have, that's probably a sign that these people are starting to burn out
[14:53] Al Elliott: So, I think the key question here has got to be, what can we do? Because it sounds like, this sounds a little bit depressing to me because I'm like, I don't know what I can do apart from not let people go on holiday or just expect or accept that things are going to be, you know, levels are going to be dropping. Is there anything we can actually do as leaders?
[15:11] Leanne Elliott: There's loads that we can do, and this is a really good example of how We often forget that people and culture is also really closely linked to systems and processes and operations. So, this is actually really practical in terms of how you can manage it and really simple things like proper handovers. Like, you know, you, you actually set aside time in the diary before that person goes on holiday to hand over anything that they're working on, hand over any projects, know who they're handing over to and what needs to be picked up. And then with that, hand backs when they return, so they're not having to like trawl through 300 emails to get up to date. That should be the first thing that that person does on their first day back. It doesn't need to be particularly long. A 30-minute meeting is probably gonna be enough to catch somebody up. What works particularly well with that is if you have a buddy system, and it can be tricky to coordinate because you don't necessarily want to have a rule of, oh, if John's off, then Sarah can't be. But if you have a buddy system in terms of roles, Then it typically goes a bit easier because somebody will be so appreciative of a really good, um, handover to them. And, and likewise, the person coming back, that hand back, they'll want to do the same for that person in return when they're away. It breeds this kind of, um, civility and respect in the workplace, which is really, really helpful. One thing I think is super important is decide what your Organisational policy is going to be around emails, because there is nothing worse than coming back from holiday and feeling like you've got 2 weeks' work to catch up on, and you've got 1,000 emails to go through. One of the most brilliant out-of-offices I've ever seen, and I think it was maybe from somebody at a fairly— I want to say Metro Bank. I think it might have been one of the colleagues that we know at Metro Bank, and it said something like, this email isn't monitored
[17:01] Al Elliott: Hmm
[17:01] Leanne Elliott: This email inbox isn't monitored. I'm on holiday. This email will be deleted in 24 hours. If it's urgent, email this person
[17:08] Al Elliott: Oh, I like that
[17:10] Leanne Elliott: Yeah, so it's like, I'm not coming back to any emails at all. Um, and I thought that was a really smart way of kind of going, right, it's not just about who's going to monitor it and kind of put stuff on hold, it's going to be who's actually going to deal with any situation or query that is escalated to the point where we're going to have to get in touch with somebody else. I thought that was really smart because you know that probably 90% of those people will never forward on that email again. They'll just make a note to get back in touch when they're back. And I think the final thing as well is just looking at anything that can be trimmed within the organisation. Meetings, can you just reduce the number of meetings that you have over summer? Reporting, if people are spending ages on reporting, can that be reduced? And particularly now with AI, is there anything you can replace in terms of that automation? So, I think Looking at internal processes as well, and actually where people are spending their time can be a really helpful way to just kind of reduce that workload during these disruptive few months
[18:04] Al Elliott: Yeah, and I think AI is particularly good at taking a load of information and boiling it down to the important stuff. If you've got Google Workspace, then I think Gemini is now included in it, and it can actually start to respond to your email. I saw something this morning, actually, on X, a guy who'd created an entire workflow, a agentic workflow for his email. And essentially what it does is every incoming email, then it will put it into, does it need a response or not? If it needs a response, it'll draft a response and then send a Slack message to this person saying, right, these are in your drafts box to go and review that. And then if it needs a meeting, then it'll send the scheduling link. But, um, the prompt says something like, meetings are very rarely required. And so this guy had essentially just automated the entire inbox. Now, What about, Leigh, what about, so someone's away for 2 weeks and they're on a project. Um, the temptation is during those 2 weeks to CC someone in on emails. I'm sensing that's not a great idea
[19:04] Leanne Elliott: No. And this is where that handover and handback is so important. Like, I'm not, everything is going to be covered in those 2 meetings, those 2 conversations, everything you need to know about before I go and everything I need to know about when I come back. So you won't need the The CC'd in emails. Um, if something's particularly important in terms of having that audit trail, then maybe you'd request that certain emails get sent to you or that, or that you control that. I would like to be CC'd into any email from this person. But really, if the team is working well and that handover is, is in place, it's not really necessary for you to be CC'd in everything that happens
[19:38] Al Elliott: Yeah. And if you're a smaller business and you have control over what applications you can use, then something like Basecamp is a really, really good application because Not only does it allow you to have a little sort of catch-up thing, so it'll tell you what you've missed, but also it's just kind of like, we have a friend whose sort of tagline is anything but email. So do not send me an email unless you absolutely have to. And like you said, there doesn't seem anything more depressing than coming back to work and looking and seeing you've got 1,000 emails in your inbox
[20:07] Leanne Elliott: Yeah. And that's why a lot of employees are reluctant to take time off and why a lot of employees, particularly in small businesses or in In startup or scale-up mode, very few employees will take their full holiday allowance, which is really bad for our wellbeing and rest and recovery time anyway. And I think that the final thing I'd say on this is that leaders, it's really important that you model these behaviours too. Remember, holidays are only impactful if we actually properly disconnect from work. That means that if you are on holiday, senior leader, you are not checking your email, you are not replying to an email, you're not just calling the office to see if everything's okay. You are offline, because then that shows that that is the expectation of when you have time off, is that you are able to and have permission to fully disconnect