In this week’s episode of 5 Minutes with @NYIke, I provide my thoughts on avoiding team burnout and how to create destressing activities. I share several personal photos – I am an amateur photographer but enjoy it – and use them to show that it’s possible to create bonding, stress-reducing activities with hybrid working teams.

Companies Responding with Mental Health Services

It’s clear that burnout, stress, and anxieties are becoming bigger concerns for business leaders. Nike announced that they are closing offices for the week of 8/30/2021 to give employees a mental health break, and Bojangles is closing its restaurants for two days to provide COVID-19 relief to staff. At the US Open, they are providing mental health services to tennis players.

While some corporations are stepping up efforts to provide mental health services, the reality is that it falls on individual leaders and managers to identify employees at risk and provide assistance when required. And herein lies a concern as over 80 percent of leaders admit they don’t know how to reduce employee burnout.

Agile Teams and DevOps Orgs at Risk of Burnout

In tech, the problem of burnout and mental health may be even worse as agile, DevOps, data science, and product management teams are under significant pressure to accelerate digital transformation, deliver business impacts faster, increase release frequency, improve quality, reduce incident MTTR, address growing security threats, and the list goes on. Stress, stress, and more stress

For example, burnout impacts about 83% of software development professionals according to one study.

Is it work-related stress, COVID-19’s impact, or the shift to remote working that’s the greatest impact?  One stat that sticks out is that 86 percent of engineers are now working remotely, compared to 19 percent pre-pandemic.

Destressing Actvities for Hybrid Working Teams

We can debate the root cause of stress in tech teams and employees, but one truth is almost certain. Doing nothing is not an option.

So in that spirit, the five-minute video I shared this week has three stress-reducing and team bonding activities for hybrid working teams. If you have other ideas, please consider leaving them in the comments.