For managers at Google, keeping projects on track is of the utmost importance. But in addition to missed deadlines, they must also watch out for something else: signs of burnout on their team.
“You don’t need to be able to diagnose that a person has depression or anxiety or whatever the case may be, but you have to be able to recognize when somebody on your team is struggling and know how to direct them in a way that’s safe and effective,” said Sohini Stone, Google’s chief medical officer for global employee health, during Coins2Day’s Workplace Innovation Summit on Monday.
A Gallup poll found 76% of employees experience burnout on the job at least some of the time. Burnout comes not just from the number of hours worked, but also from “how you’re managed and how you experience work during those hours,” the research firm wrote. One of the factors most highly correlating with employee stress, it added, is a “lack of manager support.”
Conversely, when employees receive better support after a change in company culture, “it leads to not just improvements in mental well-being of the workers, but improvements to the bottom line,” said Leslie Hammer, Ph.D., director of the Oregon Healthy Workforce Center at Oregon Health & Science University, who joined Stone onstage.
Google, for its part, is well aware of this dynamic. Not only does it train managers to support employee mental health, Stone said, but each year it gives them feedback on their performance—not from their bosses, but from members of their teams. The feedback, which is separate from an annual performance review, is meant to help managers understand what they can do to better support the employees who report to them.
Google also provides internal sites where managers can see what’s expected of them in this regard, Stone added, helping them figure out how to respond to team feedback.
Google also trains managers to form social connections with their team—such as during the first few minutes of a meeting, for example.
“We very intentionally spend time working with managers to think about how it makes sense for their specific team to incorporate these moments throughout the day, throughout the week, and throughout the year,” Stone said. The idea is that when there’s a crisis, “you already have that bank of goodwill built up with each other to be able to then work together quickly and effectively.”
Hammer, who has done extensive research on occupational stress and how to promote workplace well-being, added that giving managers “behavioral nudges,” such as teaching them how to improve social connections, “has led to profound impacts in workplaces.”
Such tactics become all the more important when managers lead geographically dispersed teams, Stone said, adding, “The reality is that most of us are working with people in different parts of the country or in different parts of the world on a regular basis.”
She noted that one employee’s burnout can affect not just them, but cohesion within their team.
“Ultimately burnout is a symptom of something that is going to affect the person’s entire well-being,” Stone said. “It affects how they’re connecting to other people at work and what those future relationships look like.”