Help your employees recover from burnout with Spill therapy sessions
Taking time off work will address the symptoms of workplace burnout, but treating the root causes – which stem from psychological working conditions – requires a concerted effort from managers.
As a leader or someone responsible for people and culture in an organisation, what can you do to support burnout recovery and prevent employee burnout from happening ahead of time? It's tempting to tell an employee to just take some time off and leave it at that. And sure enough, proper rest is needed as burnout treatment — but it only works temporarily. If someone in your team has already burnt out so badly that they have to take time off, that's a sign of deeper organisational issues that need to be rectified to prevent it happening again.
Here, we’ll give you both the short-term and long-term burnout recovery strategies you need in order to tackle both the symptoms and the root causes of employee burnout, and a free burnout recovery plan PDF to use with your team.
How to recover from work burnout
When Spill's therapists speak to the men and women who send us their furtively-typed cries for help, these people don’t talk about needing a few days off. They talk about what we recognise as the deeper causes of occupational burnout: I feel like I'm on a speeding treadmill, I hate my boss, I'm tired of being bullied by my colleagues, I feel there's no future for me in this company, I feel the company has no future, I'm tired of politics, I feel cheated, I'm angry, I'm stuck.
To get them back on track, Spill advises taking a break and getting some proper rest (the necessary plaster), but then we advise that what’s most needed is to dig into the root causes of their burnout and how these can be addressed at an organisational level. Otherwise, we are simply treating symptoms while ignoring the causes, meaning that cases of burnout will be likely to crop up again soon.
In short, the question that should haunt you the minute you discover an employee with burnout is why they became burned out in the first place. Was there a systemic shortcoming in your organisation that caused them to get to this extreme state of mental exhaustion?
The first step is to address the symptoms of burnout — fatigue, negativity and ineffectiveness — and to address them quickly. It's important to do this sooner rather than later, as prolonged periods of burnout risk turning into a more serious form of poor mental health, which could be a lot trickier to recover from.
How long does it take to recover from burnout?
On average it takes three months to a year to fully recover from burnout. But just as the symptoms vary from person to person, so does the length of time it takes to recover. In the most severe cases, research suggests that recovery can take up to three years.
Burnout recovery time depends on which stage of burnout the person is at and how severe their symptoms are. More on that in the next section.
Get our burnout recovery plan template
This template is designed to help managers form clear objectives and initiatives to support employees who are experiencing burnout, and prevent it from happening again.
Short-term employee burnout recovery plan
What is the fastest way to recover from burnout? In a word: rest. This has to be the first priority, and has to come before a person starts trying to change their relationship with work or develop prevention strategies for the future. Think about what happens when you sprain your ankle, for example: the most important thing is to rest and let it heal. Only then can you start thinking about doing physiotherapy to strengthen it or to increase mobility. It’s exactly the same with our minds: when experiencing severe burnout, the mind needs time to recover first and foremost.
How much time off work does a person need for burnout?
That depends on how severe their symptoms are. The best way to assess this is by using our burnout symptoms test. With only moderate burnout symptoms, taking a few days off might be enough; if the symptoms are severe then that will probably need to be weeks rather than days.
5 ways to recover from burnout
What’s also important is how that time off is spent. The World Health Organisation outlines five pillars for mental wellness. As ways to get the most out of time off work, and as steps to recover from burnout, they're as good a place as any to start:
1. Connect 👯
As burnout can make a person feel disconnected and numb, spending quality time with close friends and family can help restore a sense of meaning and engagement, bringing much-needed vitality back into life.
2. Be active 🏃
30 minutes of moderate exercise every other day helps promote mood regulation and higher energy levels. And ideally do it outdoors: people who spend more time in green spaces see an improvement in their mental health.
3. Keep learning 🧠
As tempting as it can be to do nothing at all during time off for burnout, it's important to re-find a sense of joy and accomplishment by engaging in fun activities, whether that's reading, playing games or something else. Finding activities that bring about a flow state can help us to feel less anxious and less worried.
4. Give 💛
Perhaps counterintuitively, one of the best ways to feel better and speed up burnout recovery is to focus on helping others. Spending money on other people has been shown to improve a person's mental health more than spending it on themselves, for example. Giving can be as simple as helping a family member with something around the house or going on a GoodGym run, which involves an hour of helping on a community project as well.
5. Take notice 👁️
Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel-prize-winning psychologist, coined the distinction between the 'remembering self' and the 'experiencing self'. When we're not feeling great, the remembering self often retells our memories through a negative lens. Focusing on the experiencing self — by bringing more attention and awareness to the present moment, such as through mindfulness or meditation practice — can help to lift our mood.
Survey your team's burnout risk each week with Spill, and let our therapists reach out to help anyone who's struggling
Burnout time off work plan for managers
Taking time off work to recover from burnout is often easier said than done. A lot of the time, it's fear and worry that stops people taking a break from work, even if a manager has suggested it. As the psychoanalyst Josh Cohen puts it, you need to actively free a burnout sufferer of "the nervous compulsion to go on regardless". So it's not enough to just propose it: you need to take active steps to plan out when they will take the time off, and how you are going to help overcome the four common obstacles people have to taking time off for burnout:
1️. "I'm worried I'll be seen as a slacker"
Make sure senior people in the company (and especially the person’s manager) are setting a good example by taking time off themselves. Emphasise to the person that taking time off will not impact how their performance is assessed.
2️. "I'm worried I'll miss out on stuff"
Ensure work progress and socials are documented on Slack, so that everything can be caught up on quickly and easily when the person returns. At Spill, we ask teammates to make a daily 3-minute Loom video while someone is off work so that they can easily catch up before their first day back. The person’s manager should also offer to check in a couple of times during their time off, and reassure them that they aren’t missing out on too much.
3️. "I'm worried I'll create more workload and stress for my colleagues"
Push back work wherever possible, reallocate it only to people who are under capacity, or bring in freelancers to pick up the slack if you have the budget. Reassure the person by making a clear plan for how the work will get done without causing undue stress for others.
4️. "I'm worried I won't be put on good projects when I get back"
Make sure that the employee is considered in any upcoming work allocation discussions, and that their preferences have been discussed before leaving work.
Long-term employee burnout treatment plan
The aim of taking time off to recover from mental exhaustion and concentrating on the pillars of mental wellness is to allow a person to get back into a state of mind where they can then productively address the root causes of their burnout. So what is the best treatment for burnout in the long-term?
Our free burnout recovery plan PDF template will help with this next step👇
There is currently no way of medically 'treating' burnout, because it's an occupational phenomenon rather than a medical condition. The use of antidepressants in treating burnout is considered "controversial" (read: pointless at best, dangerous at worst) by the medical community. As burnout is caused by work issues, and will continue to be caused by them until they're addressed, artificially suppressing the symptoms may be actively unhelpful. In the case of depression, a generalised condition which often has no specific cause, antidepressants can be invaluable. But as with so many of the body's physical symptoms — cough, fever, nausea — the emotional symptoms of burnout are there to tell us that something is wrong, and to help us react. Burnout symptoms are the canary in the coal mine, and we need to pay attention to them.
To help an employee recover fully from burnout, you need to (a) understand what the underlying work-related causes were for them burning out in the first place, and (b) make changes to stop those causes happening again. For the first point, the best thing to do is to ask the employee in question to fill out our burnout causes questionnaire.
This helps to bring some structure to a one-on-one conversation with the employee, which is the next thing that needs to happen. The employee should complete the questionnaire before the meeting and come ready to discuss the causes where they have responded with ‘strongly agree’. The manager can use our free burnout recovery plan PDF – which you can get access to below – to discuss objectives and ideas for each of the problem areas, which we’ve given suggestions and thought starters for. Each idea should be given a success metric and a date to be checked in on, to keep managers and employees accountable to the plan.
We hope these ideas help you feel better prepared to support employees who are experiencing burnout. For ongoing care, point people towards a mental health support solution like an Employee Assistance Programme or (even better) a Spill therapist. Therapy is highly effective at treating both the symptoms and the root causes of burnout. Spill's weekly check-ins also keep an eye your team's mood every week to catch signs of burnout and help people quickly, before they get worse.
Get our burnout recovery plan template
This template is designed to help managers form clear objectives and initiatives to support employees who are experiencing burnout, and prevent it from happening again.
Give your team access to Spill therapy sessions with burnout specialists to speed up their recovery
