Written by
Oana Năslău
, Content Writer Specialist
You've probably noticed that remote work has seen an increase in popularity and adoption during the last few years. According to an Intuition study, 48% of employees have continued to work remotely post-pandemic. However, you and your team may have realized by now that this new style of working has its downside. When your home becomes your office, how obvious is it to draw a line between work life and personal life? It is precisely the lack of clear boundaries that can lead to burnout more easily.
In a previous article, we discussed how to prevent remote work burnout. In today’s article, we will approach the topic of burnout prevention from a tangible, technical perspective by looking at XWiki apps and features and how they can ease the life of your remote team.
What is remote work burnout?
According to Psychology Today, burnout is a state of emotional, mental, and often physical exhaustion brought on by prolonged or repeated stress. In 2019, the World Health Organization recognized burnout as an occupational phenomenon while describing it as a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.
People who experience burnout have reported feelings of anger, irritability, and the incapacity to do their jobs effectively. In most cases, burnout is directly linked to the workplace. Adding that to the challenges of working remotely can create the perfect storm.
What can lead to remote work burnout?
There are several reasons why burnout tends to affect remote workers. Correctly identifying them can help you take the right approach when it comes to creating a healthy workplace for your remote team. Here are some of the main causes of remote work burnout:
- Dealing with too much workload;
According to a Buffer study, 44% of remote employees report that they have worked more this year as compared to the previous one. The same study has revealed that 1 in 5 people working remotely felt more burnt out than they did a year ago.
- Lacking control or autonomy over their work;
According to a McKinsey Health Institute study, when it comes to toxic behavior leading to burnout, employees frequently cite the feeling of always being on call, unfair treatment, and low autonomy.
- Being overwhelmed with information;
An OpenText study has revealed that 80% of respondents experience information overload. What is more, 27% of them use eleven or more sources of information daily.
- Feeling isolated or lonely.
Loneliness is one of the most selected struggles when dealing with remote work. As a consequence, 23% of remote workers have reported it.
XWiki solutions to fight burnout when working remotely
Effectively prioritizing workload, enabling team collaboration, and keeping the employees motivated through virtual events can all help reduce the work-from-home burnout risks while also improving the mental well-being of your team members. Below you can find some tips on how to achieve these goals and create a healthy remote workplace with the help of XWiki's apps and features.
Whenever possible, offer flexibility
Remote work doesn't necessarily mean flexible work. Oftentimes, remote employees need to be available during regular business hours. However, some flexibility can be included during the workday, because not all tasks require the entire team to be available at the same time.
If you are considering offering your remote employees flexibility, you could start by allowing them to add chunks of time dedicated to individual work in a shared calendar. This is a sign of both freedom and trust toward your team. Thus, you will provide them with the flexibility they need to manage multiple responsibilities while also staying productive. If you implement this idea, you could try measuring your employees' satisfaction and well-being after some time but we promise you, the findings will be rewarding. Our company has been embracing flexibility for the last 19 years. All this time, we had the chance to learn that there is a connection between implementing flexible work and building stronger remote teams.
Knowledge sharing is caring
If you want to make sure that your team can share knowledge in a structured manner, easily find procedures, follow them, and decrease decision fatigue, then a knowledge base solution might be the answer. All this can be done in the same workspace while reducing friction and time zone constraints and preventing burnout factors such as information overload. You may need to put in place a knowledge base if you:
- Have a lot of information scattered across the organization;
- Want to fill in knowledge gaps and have people in different departments aligned;
- Aim at creating a smooth onboarding process;
- Wish to foster collaboration in the workplace;
- Are looking for ways to avoid corporate amnesia.
If you are considering whether to use a knowledge base, you can check out our article on how to build a knowledge base.
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Have your team meetings discussions documented and easily accessible
Making sure your team is aligned requires regular meetings. They are an instrumental part of communication for remote teams, but they also need to be effective. To make sure that a meeting doesn't turn into a call that could have been an email, you can use tools to manage and document every meeting detail you and your team could find useful. Your team will thank you for not having to browse through emails or other people's recollections of what was discussed during the last weekly call. This saves time and mitigates the risk of feeling overwhelmed with information scattered across multiple sources.
Our Meeting Application (Pro) is an extension that allows you to manage information about meetings and to centralize it inside your wiki, instead of using multiple channels to access and modify it. What is more, the app enables you to add and store notes or minutes of the meeting, so that no valuable idea discussed during the call is lost. This tool also features a poll option that allows people to vote on whatever details of the meeting you want them to.
Provide easy access to information, procedures, and files
Information, in general, and procedures, in particular, tend to pill up and increase in size and complexity. When this happens, teams tend to perceive a load of information as a continuous burden. In order to prevent this, you may be already looking for ways to organize and structure documentation as effectively as possible: in the form of wikis, knowledge bases, or onboarding guides. But moving forward, how can you make sure that every team member, regardless of seniority, can easily navigate through procedures and find specific information promptly? The answer to that is a powerful search engine embedded inside your workspace.
XWiki's Solr Search Application is embedded in the core product and you can use it inside the XWiki instance without any installation. It allows you to search on the wiki for documents and attachments using keywords. Each search result highlights the places where the search keywords have been found. By default, the search returns document and attachment results sorted by relevance. You can also sort the search results by other criteria, such as document title, last modification date, file name, or uploader.
The File Manager Application helps your team organize files inside XWiki using a tree hierarchy of folders. The app allows you to move, rename, copy, and delete files and folders. You can modify the folder hierarchy with the drag & drop feature. The File Manager supports a wide range of file types, including PDF and Office documents, as well as audio and video files.
Enable your team to prioritize workload
Besides promoting collaboration across teams, you will need to make sure that people don’t feel overwhelmed with tasks and that work is distributed equally. You can help them prioritize their tasks and consequently alleviate workload as part of a proactive approach to fight burnout. Efficiency and productivity go hand in hand and you can empower your team to achieve both using actionable tools. Thus, at the end of business hours, they are sure to have accomplished the most critical tasks planned for that day.
XWiki’s Task Manager Application (Pro) allows you to add all of the team’s tasks in a table inside your wiki and track the progress, status, priority, and due time for each of them. The application comes with a suite of macros to facilitate the management of the existing tasks. For instance, you can have the items organized in a Kanban board by using the specific macro provided in the app.
Organize regular meetings and virtual inclusion events
Working efficiently may mean holding fewer meetings. Nevertheless, if you are concerned about the well-being of your remote team, you will want to have regular, meaningful meetings as well as virtual inclusion events. These activities are meant to keep the team engaged and create a sense of belonging.
There are plenty of activities that you can organize on special occasions, such as Halloween or national day celebrations, but regular daily team engagement initiatives can also be implemented. For instance, you could consider creating a collaborative movie and music selection and have each team member participate in this activity.
Once again, technology comes into play and offers the proper instruments to implement fun and engaging team events remotely. Besides video call apps, there are other tools you could use for team-bonding purposes. App Within Minutes can help you create that collaborative movie and music selection without you needing any programming skills. It is easily customizable and it will help your team collaborate in a fun, yet smart way.
When people are involved in decision-making, they feel that they belong to the team and that their ideas matter. This is especially the case when you manage a remote team. If you are looking for ways to enrich your wiki with features that encourage your team to share, discuss and vote for ideas, you could give the Ideas Application (Pro) a go. It provides an easy system to centralize ideas or suggestions and determine your team members to share some thoughts by recommending changes or improvements that need to be voted on to be implemented. The home page lists all the submitted ideas in a filterable and sortable live table where the general info is displayed for each idea.
Although fun activities take place in an informal setting, they require preparation and should take into account everybody's opinion inside a team. One practical way to choose a time frame for organizing your next fun activity or to decide which games to play is by voting. Adding the Polls Application (Pro) to your wiki could help you quickly create such polls. The app enables an easy-to-use multiple-choice poll similar to Doodle. It supports voting without edit rights. You and your team can view all the existing polls in a filterable and sortable live table on the application home page, together with specific details such as the winning results.
Closing thoughts
We hope these tech tools solutions can contribute to your strategy of preventing burnout for your remote team. They work better when you combine them with the right measures meant to ensure your team's well-being. You might need to asses these measures occasionally and keep the ones that best fit the team. In case you want to dig more into the matter, you can have a look at our article about what things successful remote teams have in common.
