I suggest everyone on my team keep an eye on Product Hunt at some level. It is a great place to see a wide variety of new apps and platforms across a variety of verticals, and can reveal useful products for both our business and personal lives, or just be a source of inspiration. On their site one of my UX designers pointed me towards Care, a burnout prevention tool for remote teams.
The Care app/site is both an assessment tool and a recommendation engine. After a quiz, it scores your stress, focus, and recovery level, and then provides potential fixes in the categories of personal well-being and team health. They offer a Slack plug-in or an online assessment. The assessments are free, or you can sign up your teams for a subscription and see even more metrics, comparisons, and recommendations.
Understanding your team’s burnout levels is always important, but perhaps even more so in this age of labor-market upheavals, evolving work-from-home norms, and macroeconomic uncertainties. With remote teams that can be even more difficult, as creating a maintaining personal connections is more difficult, as well as understanding someone’s true input / work hours. While burnout is often a result of exacerbated workplace stressors, it is not just a couple companies experiencing burnout culture; it is everywhere, as this American Psychological Association article details.
The first steps are understanding where your team members see themselves in terms of stress and burnout. Then you can look to the solutions, for themselves and their teams.
Note: burnout can/does affect all participants in a workplace. As a product leader, be sure you are also checking in on your managers / yourself.
STAND-UP EXERCISE
Have your team take the free self-assessment from Care prior to stand-up. You as a leader will be able to see the team’s overall results. Discuss with them if they were surprised by any part of the assessment. Were there any questions they wished were asked that weren’t? Is the action plan that was provided feasible or unrealistic? Are there items missing? What are ways in which we can combat burnout culture as a team? (Perhaps have those interested read this Entrepreneur article “5 Ways Leaders Can Fight Burnout Culture”.)
Encourage your product managers to perform this exercise with their own teams, and discuss how product teams can support each other.
