Most Days Episode #5: Burnout Part 2 - Make Work Human Again

Burnout doesn’t always come from doing too much. A lot of times it comes from feeling stuck, unseen, and disconnected, even when the workload looks “reasonable” on paper. I’m Courtney, and I’m sharing what I’ve learned after 10 years as a CEO running a medium, family owned company with about 30 employees, including the policies that have helped and the ones that surprised me. 

We get specific about how leaders can reduce employee burnout by giving people more autonomy and making rules we’d actually follow ourselves. I talk through unlimited vacation and why it can lead to people taking less time off unless leaders model it, encourage it, and protect fairness. We also get honest about flexible work from home policies, why fully remote setups can increase isolation, siloing, and office politics, and how hybrid overlap days can rebuild real connection. 

Then we move into what I think is missing most in modern workplaces: “purpose in,” the sense that your coworkers matter and you matter to them. I share simple, non contrived ways to build relationships at work, like weekly bagels and coffee, small routines that give teams something to look forward to, cross training and shadowing to build respect, and even reading the same fiction books together. We close with a leadership practice I’m actively working on: celebrating wins through gratitude, handwritten notes, and peer shoutouts so the team doesn’t sprint forever without ever feeling progress. 

If you want practical leadership strategies, workplace culture ideas, and real world burnout prevention tactics, subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find the show.

Transcript

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Why Burnout Needs Leadership

Courtney 0:00

Hello and welcome back to the Most Days podcast. I'm your host, Courtney. On the last episode, we talked about burnout. And like I said, I'm going to talk about this topic quite a bit because it's something that I think is really important in this day and age in our generation. So last time I talked a lot more about burnout as it relates to you on a personal level, ways that you can fight burnout and why we get burned out. This week I want to talk more about what you can do if you're a leader or a business owner, or even if you're not, but you want to help others around you fight burnout. I have been a CEO for 10 years of a relatively, you know, small organization. I have 30 employees or so right now. And we're we're smaller, family-owned. I'm I'm in charge. Um, I don't have a board to answer to. I'm not a giant corporation. I can't pretend that I understand what it's like to work in corporate America. But I do believe that we all have agency. And whether or not we work for ourselves or we work for the man, we can make decisions on a daily basis that helps make the world a better place around us.

Autonomy And Fair Rules

Courtney 1:16

Some things that I do as an owner operator that I want to share. First of all, I think one of the reasons that employees get burned out is a lack of autonomy, a lack of feeling like they are in control. And while I, like I said, I believe that we're all in control of our own fate, uh sometimes that's hard to remember when you go work a nine to five. Um, it's hard to remember that that you have choices. And so as an as an owner, as a boss, I try and put a lot of those choices back on my employees. I also try and put myself in their shoes and I don't make rules that I don't want to follow. I I realize that can't always be the case, right? Like there's always gonna be some rules that I break because I'm the owner. Um that's just the privilege of, you know, the massive amounts of debt and stress. But I try and not make rules around the office and about their jobs that I wouldn't want to follow myself.

Unlimited Vacation Needs Modeling

Courtney 2:21

So one of those is I don't want to have my vacation limited. Sorry, my dog's gonna walk around the office. I also let dogs in the office. Um, I don't want my vacation to be limited. I want to take as much vacation as I want. And so we have unlimited vacation in our organizations. It has its pros and cons. I'll tell you. I think it um it got really popular a couple of years ago, um, you know, five, 10 years ago. And I think a lot of corporations pulled back on policies like that because it does come with complications. It takes a lot of trust, it takes a lot of um effort for everyone involved to maintain a feeling of fairness, I think is the the hardest part. So what ends up happening is um some employees take off a lot more than others, basically. And the ones that don't take a ton of vacation are the ones that should, like the ones that need vacation. So I found that I needed to actually force vacation on some people or like really encourage it because I was having the opposite problem that your fear, your fear is that they're gonna take too much vacation. And what ends up happening in most organizations is they don't take enough, they don't feel like it's owed to them. Um, they don't know how much to take, they don't want to take too much and piss off their coworkers. So it took a lot of um convincing to get people to understand that they should take more vacation. On average, I think most of our employees are taking four to eight weeks of vacation. We didn't used to track it, but we do now. And I didn't pull the numbers, but that's about what I saw last year. I, as an um, as a boss, had to start taking more vacation to show that it was okay, that it's like not going to be frowned upon in our organization to take vacation. Um that I think helped. But yeah, the biggest concern with that type of vacation policy is people wearing themselves out and burning themselves out because they don't take vacation. So kind of opposite of what you think would happen.

Hybrid Flexibility Without Isolation

Courtney 4:21

Along with unlimited vacation, we also have very flexible work from home policies. If you've heard me talk about my thoughts about work from home, then you know I'm not a big fan. Um I think 100% remote positions are leading to burnout. I think they hurt teams. I just in general don't believe that that's the best way for like 90% of workers, um, employees. However, I think flexibility provides people with a feeling of autonomy and a feeling of control over their own lives that's really important. And again, I don't want to set rules that I wouldn't want to follow. So I allow employees to work wherever they want. However, I very strongly encourage more in-office days than out of office. And most of our local employees, we do have a couple that don't live in state. Um, and so that's, you know, is what it is. Um, but most of our local employees are here either five days a week or two to three to four, two, three, four. Um we try like Tuesdays and Thursdays, we have most people in office. So we we really work to make sure we have times where we're all together. Um what I've noticed, because I used to have more remote employees uh in sales mostly. And what I noticed is that the remote workers and the, especially if they're all one seg segment. So we used to have four salesmen that were all remote. And the siloing and the politicking like got bad because it was like they have their team and we have our team. Um, that was a problem. Then also the ones that are, you know, on the same team as us, but are working remotely 100%, they just miss out on a lot. There's a lot of leadership opportunities. There's just a lot of humanity built into running an office, right? There's there's personal lives that get shared and there's birthdays that get celebrated. And, you know, we've we have a really fun office environment. And I understand that most don't or that some don't. Um, but I do believe that you as an employee or as a leader have a lot of um, you still have a lot of control over that, over whether or not your work environment is positive. I'm gonna get to that. Having flexibility, though, to work from home or in the office, I think provides employees with just a sense of ownership over their own lives.

Parental Leave And Retention Mindset

Courtney 6:46

We also have really flexible maternity and paternity leaves, um, which it can be difficult sometimes, I'll be honest. Like when someone's out for a long time, obviously it's difficult. Uh, maternity, I think all of us just took three, three months because I I don't know, it's just like what we did. I took less um with my second because he was weird. Uh, or you know, it's just a weird situation. So I was back and forth a lot. Um, but I think most women took three months, if I'm thinking about it. The men are the ones who vary, very much uh vary how much time they take. I've found some of the more seasoned dads uh will take like three days. Like, I want to be back to work. We have one who has four kids, and with his fourth kid, I think he was out for like three days. And his wife works for us too, and she works remote. And she was back online in like two days. They were like, Yeah, we've done this four times, we're fine. Um, that's great. I loved having them back. They didn't get burned out. I don't know how they're wonderful parents, then we'll have especially new parents where dad wants to take a lot of time and anywhere from two, three, four, five weeks, no one's really counting. Um, you know, the expectation is that you're communicating with your team to let them know how long you might be gone. But you know how maternity is, like in paternity, like you don't know when it's gonna start and you don't know how hard it's gonna be until you're in it. So having that flexibility, I've heard back from our fathers that it's it means a lot. Um, we have more men here than women. So, you know, I don't have to deal with Matt Leave as often, which I'm kind of grateful for. I love working with women, but maternity leave is rough. Um, me and my COO uh both went on maternity leave almost at the same time. We overlapped a little bit. Um, or we there was some I went first. I had my baby in August and she had hers in October. So there was months, there was a month at the end there where we were both out, and um that was hard on our CFO who had to carry the weight. Um so yeah, I'm I I think giving really flexible leave for parenthood is really important. Parenthood is freaking hard, man. And like, especially if you're just starting. And not only you've got maternity leave, paternity leave, like obviously that's hard, but we allow for a lot of flexibility in you know how it is. How many times are you gonna call out sick from daycare, right? How many times are you not gonna be able to drop your kid off because they've got a runny nose? It's constant. And if you're not flexible as a boss, I just I realize that you have to set boundaries and like have rules, especially in the corporate world. But I think employee retention is a lot more important than like day-to-day employee productivity. I would rather say, take today off, stay home with your sick kid, check in from home, whatever, than draw this really hard line and have them burn out and quit. I see when I hear people talk about quitting the corporate world, like the balancing of raising children in corporate life is the biggest hurdle. So why don't we make more child-friendly workplaces? Like we we we have babies in here, dads that bring in babies because you know, mom had to go to work and daycare was closed. I have always dreamed of opening a daycare in our company, and I haven't done it yet because it's a lot of work. Um, but I would love to be able to offer that solution. I think if workplaces could be more child-friendly and just parent-friendly, they would see so much less burnout. And, you know, you got to get people through those first five years, and then you kind of get your employee back a little bit, right? Like once school, once kindergarten starts, once first grade starts, your life becomes a lot easier. I've seen that with the parents of older kids, how much more, how much they heal from age two to five. Um, I'm waiting. My youngest is gonna turn two in August. But I know it with my first, she's about to turn four. It just gets so much easier. Every year it gets easier. Um, it's harder in other ways, but as far as your physical and mental capacity for work, um, it gets easier. So for me, it's about I want employees to be around for 15, 20 years. So I just gotta help them get through the first couple of having babies. And uh it's hard, but it's worth it. So anyway, those are my thoughts on time off and flexibility.

Purpose In Coworker Relationships

Courtney 11:18

The second thing I think that bosses can do a better job on also comes down a lot to being in office, but building relationships internally and externally. So in my last podcast, I talked about purpose in and purpose out. And I didn't actually explain purpose in. I explained purpose out as connecting our employees with their, uh, with the end user, with the customer, how important it is to show them or to to feel a connection to the customer. Purpose in is feeling to me, feeling a connection to your coworkers. I think that you can that you can have purpose in and still hate your job. So I think you can not be happy with the work, not be happy with the management, not be happy with corporate, and still find purpose in inside your job, whether it's a coworker or your just own satisfaction with what it is that you do, your own um pride in your work. I've worked in jobs where I, you know, when I was younger, where I didn't like the job, but I loved my coworkers, or I just loved like two of them, or even one of them. My best friend worked there. And that's, you know, high school, college stuff. But I really believe that if you're stuck in a situation where you can't leave and you don't love your job, you don't believe in the purpose, you don't trust management, you feel like you're serving the man. Is there no one at work that relies on you that you trust and you have friendship with? Like friendship and humanity are are important. And I've seen comments like, well, it doesn't matter, this is work, friends. Well, so like make the best of what we've got, right? But being a human around other people, around other humans, I think is like a lost art that we're we're missing. And I I might not be doing a great job of expressing what I mean, and I'll I'll have to come back to this, but communicating, working with, solving problems with other people can be very gratifying if we allow it to be. It goes back to shifting perspective. If all you focus on at work is that you're working for the man and you don't like your job or whatever, then that's what you're gonna see. If you focus on the two other people on your team that rely on you, that need you, that hey, their daughter's dance recital is tonight. I hope you, I hope you have a good time. I'll cover for you next week when you want to go on vacation. If you focus on those friendships and those relationships, I think you can find joy in any anywhere that you are. That's why I think work from home can cause a lot of burnout because it's it's really hard to establish relationships through a screen. As a manager, I think you can encourage this in some ways. And if you're not a manager, you might still be a leader, right? You might still be on a team where people look to you for guidance or answers. And I think there's ways you can build relationships on your team that are like not so contrived. You know, we don't need like corporate trust falls and camps and all those things. I think there's ways you can do it, not as contrived. So a couple ideas I have.

Low Pressure Rituals That Connect

Courtney 14:37

We have weekly routines in my office. Um, it used to be Wednesday afternoons. Um, we would all get together and have a drink, and it wasn't required. It wasn't mandatory. Some days it would be three people, some days it would be 30. Um, some days we'd make it bigger, like if someone was in town that we wanted to hang out with. Um, for my first, they surprised me with my baby shower on a Wednesday afternoon. I thought I was just coming for Wild Wednesday. We used to call it Wild Wednesday, and it turned out to be my baby shower. So uh it's a chance to celebrate. We don't talk about work unless we want to. There's no agenda. We do it at the office, though. So the people who are still working can come and join, go back to work if they're gonna work after. Once we became parents, more and more of us became parents. We had to, we were leaving work early and earlier. So Wednesday afternoon stopped working because most of us were had to leave to go pick up kids. Um, so we changed it to Thursday mornings. And I've actually been enjoying that more. We drink coffee and eat bagels. It's actually Thursday morning as I record this, and bagels start in 12 minutes. Um, so I've only got 12 minutes left to talk. Uh, we hang out, eat bagels, drink coffee. Um, if you follow my personal Instagram, you've seen the goofy stuff that happens on Thursday mornings. We've gone outside and thrown baseballs, see how fast the guys can throw. We've played with tape measures and there's they're just random. Um, but again, those like build relationships, right? We're I realize I'm speaking from uh a place that's it pretty easy to build relationships because we're a small family-owned business. Um, a lot of our employees have been here for 10 years, but I still think there's nuggets maybe that you can learn and apply uh to any job. So let's say you're just on a team of three, you hate your boss, you hate your job. Maybe every Friday you bring your two coworkers coffee. You don't need to say it out loud, you don't need to make it a thing. Just text them and say, what would you like from Starbucks this morning? And then do it every single Friday. Give yourself and the people around you just these little nuggets to look forward to. It it changes things. I don't know why, I don't know the science behind it, but it changes things. Um do, you know, same thing you could do with lunch, or it tends to revolve around food and drink, right? Um, routines. And that's because family sits together for food, uh, sits together for meals. And so treat it more like a family. You know, works for me.

Cross Training To Build Respect

Courtney 17:03

I also think uh cross-training, forcing yourself and other employees to learn each other's jobs can really, really help with communication. At my company, there's not a lot of jobs I couldn't do if I had to do them. Now I it I we I used to be a team of two, and now I'm a team of 30. So, like obviously, when we were a team of two, I did most of the jobs. Um, I'm trying to think if I had to, I could probably do most things, not well, right? Not as well as they can. But when I speak to them, they know that I know what I'm asking for. I'm not when I say, hey, can you fix this or make this better, or I need you to get this package out faster. Like I know what I'm asking them to do. I've had to do it. I think that matters a lot, not just for a boss, but for other coworkers. I think sending for us, we send people down to the warehouse. And you gotta pack boxes and print labels and learn how that works. Wrap palettes up. I've never wrapped a palette, actually. That's that's embarrassing to say. Since we've shipped pallets, I've been out of the warehouse. Um, but I gotta go wrap up a palette. That makes me feel really bad, actually, that I've never done that. It looks not fun. It's very loud. Um so getting your employees to try out each other's jobs, I think really important. Shadowing, it also can lead to advancement for some, right? If you've got a graphic designer who shadows a videographer, maybe they can learn. And maybe then next year you've got a graphic designer who can also do videography, which is always very helpful. Uh, we do a lot of that too. Um, we publish a magazine, and most people who design for the magazine now start it out as just something else, and then, hey, I'd like to learn how to do that. And then we taught them. So now when they ask the head designer to make changes, they know what they're asking for. They know that it's difficult or easy. And that's just develops mutual respect in relationships that I think is really valuable. Okay, so the last thing, oh,

Books And Shared Culture

Courtney 19:07

you know what? I want to go back real quick on the bonding thing. A little trick. And it's not a trick, it's just something I genuinely enjoy and it's worked. Um, I read a lot and I recommend books to other people quite often. I have found that it really helps grow my relationship with employees and relationships within employees to read books together. Now, this doesn't have to be contrived. This doesn't have to be like book club every Thursday. Um, like right now, me and four guys are reading the Red Rising series. Highly recommend. I'm on the fourth book. Most of the guys are on the fifth book, and one of the guys is behind me on the second book. Um, but I will tell you, it's it's the guys who are reading it are guys that I wouldn't normally talk to every day. I mean, we we say hi every day, right? But I don't work close as closely with them. And now we talk almost every day because we're checking in on where you're at in the book and what you're thinking and how you're doing. And if you've ever read Red Rising, it is a roller coaster. I will do a whole book review on Red Rising. So I think sharing those things together, hey, have you seen this movie? You should go check it out this weekend. Talk about it the next day. It's it's humanity, right? Just be human. And even if you work in a corporation, I think it's possible to insert that humanity in there. Again, you're on that team of three that you're buying coffee for on Fridays. You read a book that helps you, changes your life, buy two more books for your coworkers. Put them on their desk and say, hey, I think this might help. Or I, or I enjoyed this. I really usually recommend fiction because I think fiction really gets us out of our own head and into something not real that's fun. I think that matters a lot. And I love fiction. And you can learn so much from the archetypes that that happen in fiction. Um, okay, my final thing, and then I'll wrap this up because bagels are in six minutes.

Celebrating Wins With Letters

Courtney 21:01

Celebrating. This is something I'm still working on, really struggle with. I wrote an article for it uh about this in uh for one of our companies this morning. I was on a leadership um, like cohort call that I have with um like four other business owners. And we were talking about this last week. It is it is a hard thing for entrepreneurs to celebrate their wins. We're constantly looking for the next thing. And what I've had to learn is that the people around me don't always want to think that way. Sometimes the people around me want a pat on the back and a beer and to celebrate that they did a great job. It's hard for me to remember to do it. Um, it's weird because you know, you work so hard and you think you're working towards a win, and then you get the win and you just keep going. And this has been bad for my mental health and it's been bad for my employees. So I am really, really focused right now. On changing our language to focus on our wins. I really focused on congratulating employees when they accomplish something. We're pushing through raises that like we've kind of had a hard year, and raises are not easy to do, and we're doing them anyway because we're pushing on that. Like, I need to recognize you for what you've brought to the table. And I um I was on the call with the leadership group uh last week and I was talking about how hard this is for me. And one of them gave me a great idea that I just started implementing. He said during his one-on-ones, he asks, so they're with his direct reports, he asks those people to let him know about someone that they recognize as a standout employee, whether it was a just one accomplishment or just they've been doing great lately. So not somebody who reports to him. And then he handwrites a letter to that employee. So this is an employee that wouldn't usually report to the CEO. Um, so I started doing that. Luckily, we were doing our one-on-ones. Sorry, dogs running around. Luckily, we were doing our one-on-ones this week. And so I started lay down. I started asking uh my one-on-ones, give me one person. And I've got three so far, got to handwrite my letters because I'm gonna do that part. I think that part's really important. Um, but showing gratitude for the people who show up and do their jobs every day, like I said in one of my old videos, um, this might be my whole life, this job. But to my employees, it is just a job. And so they're not gonna feel that gratitude and that win as heavily as I do. So I need to help them feel that and I need to celebrate those wins. And it can feel contrived, it can feel like a little corporate to like announce when someone does a great thing. Um, but I think it really helps. We've also started doing this little thing uh during our all hands meeting on Tuesdays, or we'll go around and there's five or six people go and point out somebody who has done something great lately and gives them a gift card. I obviously I provide the gift cards, but gift card for Starbucks or Grubhub or whatever. Um, so kind of forcing the employees to give gratitude and celebration to each other, because if it always comes from you, um, then it doesn't, I think, feel as genuine. Uh, the going back to the letter writing campaign, in those letters, it's important that I say, um, so and so told me that you did a great job. So not only are they seeing that the CEO recognizes them, but they're also seeing that their coworker recognizes them, which is really important, and or their manager if in that case. Um yeah, so that's something I'm still struggling with, and I'm not as flushed out on my ideas of how to do this, but I'm trying to work it into my organization. And again, that's why I'm talking about it here because this podcast is here to hold me accountable. So I'm working on that and I will check back in on how that's going.

Closing And Accountability

Courtney 24:56

So that's part two of burnout. There's gonna be part three, four, five, six, seven, I'm sure, but I just wanted to share some of the things that are working for me, share some things that I'm working on. And now I'm gonna go eat bagels in two minutes with my team. Thank you. I'm so grateful that you're here. Please keep coming back. Share this with a friend who might love it. Um, and I don't know how how you comment on podcasts. I think this is on this will be on YouTube, so you can comment. If you have any questions or want to chat, I'm here.