# Recommendation 5 — Start the conversations

- **Episode:** [21](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/21.md) (2023-01-13)
- **Type:** other
- **Tags:** burnout, communication, conversations
- **Time:** 54:51–59:00 (start 3291s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/21?t=3291](https://truthliesandwork.com/21?t=3291)

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[54:51] Al Elliott: So all really good stuff. Another recommendation to help prevent burnout comes from Sally and her colleagues. When they— remember that we said she did the State of Workplace Burnout Report 2023? Now, they claim that leaders can create a competitive advantage by adopting people-first policies. So we asked Sally to explain a bit You know, there's some—
[55:12] Leanne Elliott: I think having the starting conversations, so talking to people about how their mental health is doing. So sort of having these opening up conversations about how we're actually doing as human beings and not segmenting our lives into sort of professional and personal. I think it's, you know, encouraging people to be their whole selves, their full authentic selves at work. I think also looking at things like the very basic things like how is email used, how are tools like Slack or other communication devices used? How much time are we spending in meetings? And asking people also, I think, to sort of, for example, to take stock of what their tasks are for the day. And then at the end of the day, having a look and saying, what impacted me? What stopped me from being able to do what I needed to do? And really looking at work in a very sort of basic way and seeing What is stopping the flow? Where are we having interruptions? And how can we reconfigure work to be more effective and efficient? And that can be— that might be workflow, that might be decision-making hierarchy. It sort of really depends on the size and the nature of the organization. And I think also, we touched on this in the study as well, the importance of creating an environment of psychological safety. That is a space at work where people feel that they can comfortably take interpersonal risk without fear of consequence is a really big one as well. So, you know, that obviously has implications for the willingness to take risks and innovation and really beautiful things that can happen in the workplace. But I think it also really directly contributes to our capacity to thrive at and through work and thereby avoid burnout as well. We've presented 5 recommendations there for you in terms of how you can help prevent burnout within your organisations. 1, reflect on your own behaviour as a leader and think about investing in leadership development. 2, invest in your own wellbeing. You need to put your mask on before you can help others. 3, develop your managers as coaches. Have those open conversations. Discuss with your team what burnout is and how you're going to address it. 4, measure it. Measure the state of burnout within your organisation. Measure the state of wellbeing. If we know where we are, we can plot a path of where we want to get to. And finally, number 5, focus on the work environment. Forget these fancy interventions— sushi Fridays, mindfulness at lunch, meditation Mondays. They're not going to work if your work environment is not nurturing wellbeing and supporting people to thrive. Start by focusing on the work environment. So, what can leaders expect to see if they adopt these recommendations? What turnarounds have others experienced in terms of employee wellbeing and performance? Sally provides us with an example. So, I've been working with a couple of companies in, um, the Netherlands, and, um, one has, uh, gone through a shift where they've actually shifted to a 4.5-day working week. And the recommendation— so they'd seen our study and they really wanted to sort of change the way they were working. And it takes really evaluating, I think, their own sort of company values that they had espoused. And they were starting to see that they were drifting away from these company values. They'd set them probably 5 or 6 years earlier, but the lived experience people were having just wasn't correlating with the values. So they've seen, you know, an uptake in in quality of work, they've also seen an uptake in employee wellbeing, and even just sort of morale in the workplace. So it's, it is something where I think that it's surprising, actually, how fast you can start to see results in these kinds of situations