Maintain Motivation and Balance to Avoid Small-Staff Burnout

As written by me and published by the American Society of Association Executives, 1/24/2012

So much to do, so little motivation. That's burnout and it occurs in staff and in volunteers.
I was very excited to accept the job as executive director of the tiny, five-person, 2.1-full-time-employee-equivalent Chesapeake Automotive Business Association in September 2004. I was so motivated to do a good job for CABA that I was ready to work 24/7/365. Of course, I knew a schedule that intense was not sustainable over the long term, but I had done it before with previous jobs and was quite motivated again to give it my all.

I paced myself well, I think, and in 2011 when I left the job I had not burned out, learning to balance my work life with my personal life, down considerably from the 24/7/365 schedule of the early days, readjusting constantly around busy times and slow times as I traversed through those seven years.

But that was me. I was in control of my own schedule and could sense where my own motivation level was at any time. I could feel it when work crossed into my personal life.

When you are a CEO or a supervisor of any kind, however, the concern for burnout is often less about you and more about those who work for you, employees and volunteers.

"Burnout strikes when [people] have exhausted their physical and emotional strength," according to an article in Lab Manager magazine (see list of additional resources, below). Whether it occurs in the CEO, the staff, or among volunteers, burnout is a cancer that "can drain an organization's morale, as well as its wallet."

Motivation and Balance

A supervisor doing his or her job well will control the association work schedules for staff and volunteers, so if we fail to understand and respect the motivation level and balance point in the lives of those staff and volunteers, the organization is headed for "frustration, absenteeism, and turnover."

Good employees and good volunteers come in all combinations of motivation and balance; they are seldom at the same level. Some want a job, not a career. Some will give generously part time while others may only be willing to give sparingly to your full-time request. The most adept CEO or supervisor will learn to get the most from each type of employee and volunteer, and together they will excel as a team.

Almost all professors of burnout remedies warn against unreasonable expectations, certainly on the employees but also on the organization. As you add projects or cut staff, you must know where you stand against the motivation level and the balance line of each of the people asked to help make that project a success.

What is a Reasonable Expectation?

My employees and volunteers know that, when they come to me with their frustrations (too much to do in too little time, deadlines fast approaching, and more), my first response is: "We have 2,080 hours to work this year. Let's see where we are." The 2,080 hours is a loose measure of our 40-hour workweek and 52-week calendar, and I use it often if for no other reason than to make a point: I plan to execute our strategic plan in 2,080 hours this year. I intend to employ the right staff and recruit sufficient volunteers capable of attaining our goals without burnout. I planned for the year, not the day, the week, or the month. I didn't say we had 40 hours this week. I said we have 2,080 hours this year, structuring our payroll to encourage employees to step up when the need for extra effort arises. Employees can expect to get back on the 2,080 schedule with a little catch-up time after the crunch, thus avoiding burnout.

One method I employed to maintain control of the 2,080 hour plan was in my policy to award annual paid time off (PTO) in place of separate accounts for vacation, sick, and personal time. With PTO, I never heard the destructive complaint that one employee takes all of his or her sick leave and another takes only planned vacation time. Each employee knew what time commitment I wanted from them for each year. Without having to battle employees about their timesheet, I could stay focused on individual productivity. As the years wore on with my employees, I learned what motivated them and stoked their fire. I respected their work-life balance, and they knew I expected their contribution to my 2,080 hours in which I had to complete my job.
Well-meaning volunteers often suggest and even insist on adding new projects to an already crowded annual agenda. In fact, when I began with CABA, I had a tradeshow and two additional social events that I eventually convinced the board were not providing good returns on our time invested. These extra events were damaging the quality and effectiveness of our other higher-priority projects, I argued. We were spreading our sponsorship dollars, volunteer hours, and staff hours very thin across many projects rather than focusing on making a success of our most member-beneficial projects. The board may not have realized that I was also trying to manage burnout by prioritizing our project list.

In my seven years at CABA, I wish I could have done a better job developing my volunteers. It was one thing to digest the individual motivation levels and balance points of the employees I lived with each and every day; it was quite another to attempt that same understanding of my 20 or so volunteers who I saw in person only a few times a year. Unfortunately, the time to manage volunteers was often squeezed out by less important but operationally critical tasks like simple building maintenance. There were, after all, only 2,080 hours, and in a small-staff office, CEO or not, I was the one left to replace the light bulbs.


Skip Potter is an independent contractor in association management and is the former executive director of the Chesapeake Automotive Business Association in Pasadena, Maryland. Email: potter.skip@gmail.com

Additional Resources

There is much written on the topic of burnout, so if you need to learn more about the signs and causes there are many credible sources, including:

• "What is Employee Burnout?" Lab Manager, December 8, 2009
• "The 21 steps to guarantee employee burnout," by Kevin Kennemer, The Chief People Officer Blog, September 15, 2011
• "Job Burnout: Job Factors That Contribute to Employee Burnout," by Elisabeth Scott, MS, About.com Guide, updated February 21, 2010
• "5 Steps for Preventing Volunteer Burnout," by James Robbins, EZineArticles.com
• "Avoiding CEO Burnout," by Jennifer Salopek, Associations Now, August 2009

Using Technology

I.T. managers aren't going to like this idea: I.T. may be responsible for the network, hardware and operating systems but they should only be consultants and support for the applications necessary to run your organization. This means that the membership department is the lead for buying and maintaining the association database management system, the meetings department owns responsibility for the event/registration software and the website is the kingdom of communications expert.

Productive Staff - The 3 Ts

Tools, Teaching & Trust: The 3 gifts for Happy, Productive Employees.


By Skip Potter, CAE

“The 3 Ts” for Happy Productive Employees: Tools, teaching and trust. These are three of the greatest gifts you can give to your employees when all you want from them is their best effort.

There are entire academic disciplines to address productivity so don’t expect me to cover all the aspects of industrial psychology and an MBA in this one simple feature. In fact, I don’t have either of those degrees. I just have a happy and productive membership department and that is what qualifies me to share with you my philosophy of “The 3 Ts”. To better underwrite my credibility, however, I find that Russell R. Day, PhD (R.R. Day & Associates, Chicago; russrday@aol.com), an Industrial Psychologist specializing in executive coaching and employee evaluations summarizes his view in this area saying: “Good supervisors/leaders create a work environment that inspires and motivates others to excel”. In a recent interview, Day revealed some important factors in employee satisfaction and motivation discovered in a proprietary study he had conducted for a large client. Among them are familiar terms like “resources”, “coach”, and “empowered”, coincidentally similar to the Tools, Training and Trust philosophy I profess for happy and productive employees.

Being a boss is a big responsibility. Not only is your own boss or board of directors depending on you to synthesize their needs into a vision and then to organize and motivate a staff to execute solutions, you have staff that depend on you to provide for their needs, as well. Employee needs include many basic and personalized motives but a manager that provides a challenging and learning environment will likely be rewarded with the happiest and most productive staff.

So how does a manager build that challenging and learning environment? Is it in the Gestapo organization dominated by the boss who barks out “my way or the highway” commands? Is it in the kind but disorganized manager whose staff must wait like firemen for a task to arrive as an emergency? Is it in the micro-managed team? While these types of organization can often get a job done, high turnover, not happy and productive employees is generally their measure.

All productivity and time-management books and speeches proclaim you to “delegate”. Most of us know, that is easier said than done. Few managers are skilled at really “letting go” of a task. They “dump” rather than “delegate” tasks to their career-minded staff who are hungry to show what THEY can do for them. Dumping a job on an employee is often necessary if the supervisor has not effectively provided the tools and teaching so that they could trust the employee to exceed their expectations. In a sense, dumping is delegating without the tools, teaching and trust and is certain to frustrate the employee and disappoint the employer.

Application of “The 3 Ts” assumes that a manager has already cataloged the interests, talents, and skills of their employees and matched them into a position that will best satisfy both them and the organization. You can’t expect fish to fly so don’t make your introverted scientist the sales manager. Both of you will be miserable and little success will ever blossom.

The happy, productive staff needs to feel they are an important and appreciated part of their professional team, each with valued talents and welcomed opportunities to contribute. The old adage, “Two minds are better than one” is most valid when it comes to productivity. The boss that uses his/her employees only to support his/her own creative agenda is limited to achieve the extent of his/her own knowledge. A boss that provides his/her staff with the tools they require to do their work, the wisdom of his/her experience (teaching), and the trust that they will do their best will achieve goals well beyond the limits of his/her own contribution.

Tools of the Trade
Tools are not just necessary for generating productivity. They are the toys of professionals. Certainly you have seen the excitement of “tools” for the hobbyist. At home in the kitchen, the household chef finds great pleasure in having the counter space to spread out and the special pots, pans, spoons, knives, and cutting boards all at the ready. To the amateur gardener or the weekend mechanic, a cruise through the tool section at Sears is a thrilling amusement ride. To the professional at work, having the best tools of the trade are the playground that keep them interested and excited about their job. Greater productivity is an assumed benefit of tools like a computer or membership software but do not overlook the value those tools have as incentives to employees. Day’s research found that (employees) “want resources and support necessary to do a ‘good job’. High performers … want to excel and they become very frustrated when the organization is not willing to provide them with the necessary ‘tools’ to do the job ‘right’.”

But just buying the tools is only the beginning in reaping their reward. Fully integrating those tools into the daily routine is essential. Like most associations, mine has long had an elaborate database management system to handle our membership administration. Selecting membership software to meet our needs was the easy part. (And that wasn’t easy, at all.) The most difficult challenge was in the adaptation of that stock, out-of-the-box software to the specific process needs of our association and in the adaptation of our staff processes to take advantage of the productivity promise of the software.

Giving your employees the best tools of their trade is best done in collaboration with them. By now, you understand the term “tools” here is very broadly defined to include the entire working environment. In adapting our membership software to our processes and vice versa it is a group effort. Often I would stand at the workstation of a membership administration staffer and ask them to “show me” how they handled a membership call. As they demonstrated the series of actions they would take, we would examine extensively alternative steps or note additional information that might be helpful in accomplishing the task more quickly and to a higher level of customer satisfaction. In one such review we examined how difficult it was to process a product order from a member. As a result of our review we made several improvements including the addition of a dedicated printer to this work area, a simple software modification that quickly discriminated between member and non member pricing, a change in process regarding credit card processing, and a change in process involving our mailroom. The result was a 90% improvement in order processing time and a 75% reduction of order errors.

Employees with the best tools, customized to fit the needs of their job will have the best opportunity to be the happiest and most productive.

Teaching
Teaching occurs on two fronts: staff development and transfer of knowledge. Employees and, indeed, many organizations make staff development a key ingredient of their employee benefits package. Support for an employee’s pursuit of a college degree, encouragement to absorb the education of seminars and conferences are proven as both valuable employee incentives and as effective means for improving the organization’s capabilities.

Perhaps of greater value to both the employee’s career and to the organization’s capabilities, however, is the transfer of knowledge based on job-specific experience that lives in the mind and habits of the tenured supervisor. Seldom is this “teaching” opportunity organized into a planned and intentional education program and when it occurs, if at all, is often incomplete and accidental. For me, this transfer of knowledge from my 18 years of corporate sales and marketing and another 14 years of membership development and administration is one of my most important responsibilities both to my employees as their boss and to my organization as a senior staffer. I was reminded of the enormous value in this teaching role when one of my customer service specialists recently said: “I have learned so much from you. Thank you for taking the time to teach me. I really appreciate it”. Another factor noted near the top of the Russ Day research was that “Employees want to work for managers who are good coaches”.

The boss as a teacher who unselfishly shares the wisdom of their experience with their staff is most likely to have the results of that staff’s efforts match or exceed their expectations.

Trust
Even underwritten by the best tools and coached with the most enlightened wisdom, however, an employee will not contribute to the limits of their possibilities if their supervisor does not delegate or “let go” and trust that their employee will go on to build their own “better mousetrap”. Trust, in one sense, means, “to let go” and we hear this lament in the frequent reminder that effective managers must delegate tasks to their employees. I asked my own staff about my leadership style and one manager indicated that “one of the major things” that made their job fun was that “you let us take ownership of our projects. You are there for guidance--to bounce ideas off of--but you never take the project back and it continues to be our baby.” The environment that results from true “delegation” is both a productivity gain for the organization and an appreciated employee incentive.

On the flip side, however, employees must understand that trust is earned; and, in this sense, trust means that the supervisor has mentored that employee long enough and effectively enough to feel certain that the employee will build on the boss’ vision rather than create a new vision all together. In recent years I have had more than one very skilled and highly promising employee quit my staff because THEY failed to invest enough in earning my trust. In each personal case, my anxious staffer insisted they should be assigned the general task and left to do it their way. In the long run, “their way” may well have been the best way and even “my way”. But they didn’t give me a chance to teach them what I have learned in my years in their position and to convince me that they could provide additional creative solutions to the problems that will face us in the future. After all, I am the boss and the one ultimately responsible for the costs and quality of the output of the department. Developing trust is a mutual responsibility.

The Experts Agree
Day notes that “More important than compensation and benefits, employees want to be empowered. Give them the tools and the direction; then let them do the work without being micro-managed.” This is the essence of “The 3 T” philosophy. Tools, teaching, and trust: Successful delegation of a task depends on full provision of these three gifts. A happy and productive staff will be a likely result.