Well-Being Check-Ins: How To Prevent Staff Burnout
Burnout is a real issue in the creative media industry. To help prevent this, Nikki Gatenby introduced well-being check-ins. Nikki is the co-owner and managing director of Propellernet, a digital marketing agency that's been named as one of the top 10 Best Places to Work in the UK for six years running.
In this two-minute video from the 2018 Happy Workplaces Conference, Nikki shares the four questions used to prevent burnout – are you taking your holiday? Are you taking your Propel days (their day a month to innovate)? Are you working with our resident coach? And do you know about our health plan?
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Well-Being Check-Ins: How To Prevent Staff Burn Out
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.
The thing about burnout is that it not only jams productivity, but also tarnishes overall health. This puts it squarely at odds with Propellernet’s company values, which are innovation, creativity, adventure, fun, and wellbeing.
To safeguard these values (and the final one in particular), Nikki started doing regular well-being check-ins, centred around four key questions:
- 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,” says Nikki.
- Are you taking your Propel days? “We give people a day a month to go and propel themselves forward. So that’s 12 days a year.”
- Are you working with our resident coach? “I believe that everyone has the ability to get better, so we’ve got our resident coach in the business. 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.”
- Are you taking advantage of the health cash plan? “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.”
Related resources
- 11 takeaways from the 2018 Happy Workplaces conference: read Henry’s blog about all the big ideas discussed at the 2018 Happy Workplaces conference
- Take The Happy Challenge – Henry’s challenges managers to make no decisions for three months
- 8 Principles From Some of the Best Workplaces on the Planet – Pim de Morree looks at eight trends from some of the world’s most engaged workplaces
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About Nikki
During her time at Propellernet, Nikki has overseen its transformation from a small, Brighton-based digital marketing agency to a globally operating powerhouse. She has led a team that has tripled margin, quadrupled revenue and generated ten times more profit. And she has proved beyond all doubt that putting people first creates genuine business success.
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