We reside in tumultuous times which could create an additional layer of uncertainty for workers who need to construct relationships with students, patients or clients. Providing calm, confident and warm emotional labour can be difficult for individuals experiencing burnout, grief or compassion fatigue.
I have been staring at the impact of compassion fatigue and burnout, along with the nature of emotional labour, in educational settings.
Workplace culture has become a vital element to avoid burnout and support employees experiencing emotional distress.
Organizations that promote a feeling of collective compassion – by supporting noticing, feeling and functioning on the suffering of others at the workplace – could see improvements in both employee performance and job satisfaction.
Compassionate work culture
The emotions of sympathy, empathy and compassion play an important role in developing a compassionate work culture, by helping us pay attention, in professionally appropriate ways, towards the suffering of our students, patients, clients, colleagues, managers and leaders.
Sympathy – the superficial recognition of the distress of another individual – may be the initial step towards creating a compassionate workplace. It helps us spot the suffering of others.
The emotion of empathy compels us to take the time and attention to investigate and comprehend the response of the individual in distress. Compassion is noticing, feeling after which functioning on the suffering of others.
Workers' acknowledgement and reaction to these emotions vary based on their professional duties and boundaries. But compassionate action could make the main difference at the workplace, whether through small moments of kind interpersonal interaction or sustained collective effort to address complex and multifaceted challenges.
Responding to co-workers
An example of how these emotions help to produce a compassionate workplace would be the familiar case of the person experiencing a brand new computer software, such as an expense reporting system.
A sympathetic response with a colleague would be to notice that a co-worker is spending a lot of time inputting their expenses into the management system, and to say, “The new product is tricky! Good luck!” and then walk away.
Empathy would prompt the colleague to seek to know what the co-worker had been doing (rather than jumping in with an immediate solution) so the colleague can determine the origin of the frustration. Empathetic listening needs time to work.
Having felt similarly frustrated, the colleague may feel compassion and feel compelled to act by scheduling time throughout the next reporting period to sit with and assist the co-worker complete their expense submission. If, through empathetic listening and compassionate action, further action is warranted, the colleague may offer to raise the issue like a larger systemic issue associated with software training with management.
Compassion in action
Building an organizational culture that encourages compassion requires employers and employees to create time and space for listening. The reason for a person's distress, whether displayed in the workplace or otherwise, can be complex, multi-faceted and never easily solved.
Compassion satisfaction, or the joy and pleasure of providing choose to others, provides the caregiver with the long-term fortitude to help others.
While compassion isn't itself limited or easily extinguished, functioning on it may be slowed or stopped by burnout or compassion fatigue.
Moral distress
The symptoms of compassion fatigue include a changed worldview to negative, helplessness, hopelessness and disassociation from the individual in distress.
The main the signs of burnout are physical fatigue, mental and emotional exhaustion, feeling unacknowledged or unimportant and viewing the folks one serves and one's colleagues with apathy or a insufficient care.
These symptoms can hinder a compassionate individual from acting on their emotions, creating moral distress for employees who wish to be helpful, but do not have the time, energy or fortitude to act on their own sympathy.
Employers can ignite sympathy, empathy and compassion by:
- Encouraging rest for fatigued or burned-out workers. Rest is not only associated with carrying out a healthy sleep schedule. It also includes actions like selecting a hard stop here we are at answering emails or thinking about clients' needs each day, using allotted personal days, de-stigmatizing personal leaves for mentally or emotionally exhausted employees and having a judgement-free go back to work plan.
- Educating employees and managers about how to access organizational and native resources, such as benefits plans, crisis hotlines and mental health clinics. Rarely are individuals equipped – nor when they are – to defend myself against the emotional and mental work of healing those who have experienced traumatic events, so knowing where help is provided can lighten the workers' and leaders' role.
- Ensuring that leaders (both formal and informal) model the significance of rest by scheduling, and taking, breaks throughout the workday. A break could be a ten-minute solo walk round the workplace or an energizing breakfast with colleagues in the local cafe.
- Managing the precious resource – employee and manager time – thoughtfully. Every organization likely has busier and slower times within the day, week or year. Consider the way your organization regards time, as workload is tightly related to to employee burnout. For example, in schools, September and June are extremely busy as the year ramps up and decelerates. Avoiding implementing new innovations at the moment might help educational workers concentrate on building strong relationships with students and colleagues.
- Supporting work check-in practices that offer choices for leaders and employees to self-reflect on their own mental and emotional states of mind. Such reflection may include asking oneself: “Am I compelled to look away or act?” Are leaders or employees in a position to shift focus from hopeless worry about all of the suffering they can't relieve to hopeful impact by doing the things they can do for each other?
Meanwhile, if resting, taking daily breaks and investigating and accessing workplace benefits and other resources do not help with recovery from compassion fatigue or burnout, think about a longer leave of absence or investigate other career, job or workplace options.
The embers of sympathy, empathy and compassion aren't extinguished by compassion fatigue or burnout, but they might be temporarily muffled by stress and circumstance. These emotions can be re-ignited through finding daily actions that can support a compassionate workplace culture.
This article is republished from The Conversation. Read the original article.
