Feature Project — Avoiding Burnout
This year has been some type of year. On top of going to school year-round taking 12 units a semester, I started a new job in late August in a similar field as my previous one. I started at a digital advertising agency as a supervisor. I am very used to being on the client side of things, so switching to working for the client has been a eye opening experience. From the start. This job has been a tremendous challenge as I have been working 60-hour weeks on top of finishing up my bachelor’s degree at CSU online.
The goal of this project is to hopefully build my creative management team at work into a better functioning team than how it was when I started the position.
A description of the situation:
Here was the situation, when I started, there were only two people, and they got so burnt out that in my first week on the job, both people on my team quit. I was stuck with myself and one other guy who only had three weeks experience in the position. As time went on, upper management knew our manpower needs and struggles, so the search started for more workers as time went on. Now being in early October we have a team of five heading into the Winter season, so things might be more manageable work wise. The overall goal of mine is to lead this team without getting burnt out while still completing our tasks and fulfilling the needs of our jobs.
After talking to several of my team members, the overall issue that actually cause the burnout, is repetitive work. We all agree that if we could somehow find a way to lesson the amount redundancies in our daily tasks, that would make it easier on everyone.
Ket Message & Mantra:
My key mantra for this entire project is: Do what is Necessary. With jobs as busy as ours, it is inevitable that you will get ahead of yourself and become overwhelmed. The goal is to only do what you have to do to get by.
Tactics:
By using the LinkedIn Learning course above, “Avoiding Burnout”, I can assess the current workplace situation and come up with key elements that can help our team avoid burnout and feeling stressed. I think this lesson would be extremely beneficial for my team and can serve as guidelines to keep themselves in check.
Some objectives that I want to lay out are, structure, discipline and patience. Starting out with structure, I want to set the tone on my team that it is okay to fail, because in the digital media world, that is truly how you learn and pick up things. It is important to learn from mistakes. As for discipline, it is important to not get burnt out with the workload amount and to clock out of the job by 6:30pm each night. It is common for people at a agency to work very long and late hours, but I need to tell my team to keep that to a normal 40 hours a week. The last objective with myself and the team is patience, it is so important to be able to relax and not take everything to seriously. We need to remember collectively that we are working to launch ads on the internet, not launching space shuttles or saving lives in the emergency room.
List of Tactics:
- Check in with team on LinkedIn Learning course
- Set a foundation of open communication on the team
- Make sure that everyone does their job with patience and carefulness, it is important to work smart, not exactly hard.
Preparation
The preparation for this project starts with me analyzing the current situation with each member below me on my team. I need to dive deep into everyone’s specific situation and treat them like humans, have one on one conversations to get to know who they are outside of work. I need to be able to relate to everyone on my team on a level greater than the job.
Then I will each week, access how I think the week went in terms of how each team members behavior is on a Friday. I need to ask them how their work week went and what I could do better to assist their needs.
Timeline:
Week #1 — Ask how everyone on the team is doing and what specific things we can do to change the burnout mindset.
Week #2 — Brainstorm the feedback from the other members of the team and try to put them into practice
Week #3 — Evaluate the new practices and see which one’s work and which one’s need to be discarded.
Evaluation:
