I just read a few questions posed by an Agile Coach about burnout. Here are two interesting ones:
* How do you protect your Agile Coaches (and all staff) from chronic stress?
First of all, this is an organizational problem beyond the scope of a team-level coach. It's a basic principle that the teams work at a "sustainable pace," which is to say that everybody starts work every day refreshed, rested, and able to do their best work. That's not something that can typically happen at the team level because dysfunctional management will push the team to "work harder" and point a firehose of tickets at the team, punishing them if they're not working "hard enough."
A team could certainly limit that flow, accepting only one story at a time and setting its own pace. Still, in a dysfunctional organization, management will see that as underachievement and start cutting bonuses. The only real fix is to change the company culture, which is no mean feat. A good team will inevitably be destroyed by bad management.
* How do you train your teams to recognize and respond to burnout?
If you're working at a sustainable pace on a team where everybody is friends and the work is meaningful, burnout won't happen. Burnout comes from being relentlessly pushed from outside. You cannot "train your teams" to respond to burnout because they're the victim, not the instigator, of the problem. You can train them to develop a spine and push back, but that's a death sentence in many badly run organizations.
On the other hand, some organizations don't really pay attention. The team will be vastly more productive working at a sustainable pace, so if the team makes itself entirely opaque to outside inspection, then the only thing they can be judged by is increased productivity. Only an organization that values control over productivity will object to that.
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Great article Allen. I’ve personally experienced fixed deadline projects in the past with unrealistic early estimations on overall size given to stakeholders (not taking into account Hofstadter Law) which causes a team to burn out due to unrealistic expectations and poor overall stakeholder management. The deadline remains, the team doesn’t grow to accommodate the actual work, and the team burnt out.
I like the article .
It triggered some tangential thoughts about what are some non/obvious examples of “work harder” and “ control over productivity”. Two examples came to mind.
I share them here because I’m curious about people’s thoughts on them.
For example, “work harder” is commonly understood to mean produce more output. I suspect it could also mean force more cognitive load onto the workers. Consider a team with 5 people vs 15 people. Team topologies probably have an impact on burnout.
Another example, “control over productivity” could probably mean any management actions that prioritizes the team’s output over the team members’ daily work experiences. For example, strong dependency upon a story point method for planning. Operating with the theory that if the team creates their own estimates then burnout from overwork is because they’ve misestimated.
Thoughts?