What can we do to prevent teams from burning out🔥?

Aiko stepped into the room. Sweat drops from anxiety ran down her cheek. Another consecutive deadline was missed. “The team is probably mad…” she thought and her heart was pierced imagining the damage inflicted on others. She did her best, pushed herself and pulled everybody else above the limit but the goals were just too overwhelming. “Now everybody is hyper-stressed. Not only that — people are depressed by the failure!” was part of her inner remorse loop. She has to explain the situation in front of them now. The tension was so crunching that she barely had any sleep and when she did there were nightmares filled with people getting laid off and their dreams shattered.
Aiko couldn’t stand the pressure so she stopped, put her paperwork on the table and said: “I quit”. She turned and walked out of the room defeated, her body aching with pain and grief.

If only she knew that the team was happy! They were grateful for her efforts! They wanted to celebrate, instead, she left them speechless…

What can we do to prevent such situations? How can we continuously build resilience and create environments which improve, not destroy our mental health? The culture of never-ending hustle is a quake for our emotional climate. Burning out teams and people are strong cues and signals that something is wrong but we should not reach that phase in the first place.

Thoughts like these entered my consciousness when I stepped up to a task to build a long-term team, in a short period, for a big project which should be rolled out to a lot of users. The pressure began to creep in and the only way to relieve that was not with meditation or isolation. It was by introducing healthy team dynamics that supported empathy.

The most important one for me was the notorious check-in process. We tailored it around emotions (after all we were building a product that increases emotional intelligence). The problem with normal verbal check-in is that a consecutive check-in can influence the next person. So we started using a tool we were building called Mood Meter which had “multiplayer” features and simultaneous anonymous plotting of emotions.

We incorporated it into our weekly calls. It took us around 10–15 minutes per call to sync emotions for a team of 7–9 people. Everybody from the team had to plot himself in the begging of our call and when everyone is ready each person had to explain his feelings in front of the group. This created safe space for exploring how team members felt. This way we could see a bigger piece of the “iceberg”. It was a magnificent experience because we were able to understand the nuances of what may affect our productivity and act on that.

In short, what can we do to help teams? My lesson learned from 1 year of doing rapid continuous development and improvement: Do not wait the team to “bleed”. Share your healthy habits and inspire others to not go into the abyss.