Well-Being Check-Ins: How To Prevent Staff Burnout

If your purpose is what you’re working towards, your values are how you’re going to get there. Everyone has well-honed bullshit detectors these days; these things have got to be lived to be believed. These are our values:

Innovation • Creativity • Adventure • Fun • Wellbeing

Innovation and creativity are what clients tend to buy us for. Adventure, fun, and wellbeing is what they tend to feel. Now, when people come into the business when new starters arrive, we do values based recruitment, which I’m sure most of you do, and I ask: tell me about the innovations you’re into, where’s your creativity, show me your spirit of adventure, are you fun to be with, and do you take care of yourself? We’ve got a real burnout issue in the creative media industry; it’s almost as bad as doctors and lawyers, probably because we sell our time. I don’t want anyone in my team to suffer burnout because you can’t be productive in that way and it’s really damaging to health overall.

One of the things we do to live and breathe values, particularly well-being, is well-being check-ins. These don’t cost anything, it’s just a conversation. We ask about four things: are you taking your holiday? We all need time out. If we don’t take time out we’re going to hit burnout, so at quarterly points throughout the year we make sure people are taking their holiday. We’re not robots - yet. We need to make sure we can recharge.

Are you taking your Propel days? I’d love people to nick this idea. We give people a day a month to go and propel themselves forward - so that’s 12 days a year. I’m not particularly interested in what they’re doing that day, although I’m happy to talk about it; what I’m more interested in is what happens when they come back into the business and how they can supercharge what we’re doing.

Thirdly: are you working with our resident coach? Like any high performance team, I believe that everyone has the ability to get better, so we’ve got our resident coach in the business. It’s totally voluntary to sign up, but if people aren’t working with our coach and aren’t taking their propel days, I seriously start to wonder and have a conversation with them about if they’re taking their own development seriously. Engagement isn’t all about being nice to people; engagement’s about challenge as well and making people see that they can be the best version of themselves.

Lastly, we have a health cash plan. Again, I don’t want to know what people are using it for but I want to know they know how to use it and they can keep themselves as well as possible.