Proactive Mental Health Best Practices for You & Your HQ Staff
Preparing to navigate your busy season with confidence and balance
You plan and develop travel programs all year long. You and your team develop experiences that you can’t wait to share with eager participants. Then, you market to and enroll travelers, train your field staff to be excellent leaders, and prepare for the group’s departure. At this point, you (as a leadership team) have done everything possible to prepare participants, staff, and partners for what you hope is the most impactful travel experience of their lives.
However, as you usher your field staff to their new destinations and answer last-minute questions from your departing travelers, you look around at your colleagues and see it - they’re bracing themselves. This should be an exciting time in which the team’s hard work is brought to fruition. However, what you see in your colleagues’ eyes is anticipation of further stress.
As the long road to prepare for the peak season ends, you venture into the most difficult portion of the journey - delivering the program. This one is filled with on-call shifts and stress about potential incidents. It’s lined with managing expectations and supporting field staff remotely. The other light at the end - successful programming completed - still seems far away.
Bracing for the inevitable stresses of managing programs is a recipe for burnout and frustration among HQ staff and leadership teams. So, what can you do to proactively address HQ burnout and manage the leadership team’s mental health on the precipice of your busiest season? How do you support each other, as a leadership staff, through peak season before burnout becomes an inevitability?
We spoke with organizational leaders and the Cornerstone mental health team to offer best practices and insights below.
Use the Stress Continuum
If you’re a Cornerstone member, you’ve likely heard us reference the Stress Continuum … a lot. That’s because it works!
“Utilizing the color system in the Stress Continuum training can become a strategic part of your team building, understanding how both you and your team are impacted, and how you can support each other during the busiest parts of our season,” says Maureen McConnell, Cornerstone Mental Health Advisor.
Here are some of the key reasons to start using the Stress Continuum before peak season demands:
Shared vocabulary: Creating a shared vocabulary and opening the lines of communication among all levels of staff is incredibly important during stressful periods. Learning about that shared language and practice using it to describe how each leader is feeling (and where to provide support) is something that needs to happen before you are in the midst of peak stress.
Expression with the appropriate level of vulnerability: Using the Stress Continuum (red, yellow, green) allows team members to deliver key information to the team about their challenges and needs, without necessitating that they “explain” themselves. While the Stress Continuum allows for people to share more if they’d like, it ultimately creates a shortcode for expression without requiring that colleagues share beyond their comfort level.
Action items: The concept works like a “cheatsheet” for identifying what support you need to provide to your colleague or team. Both you and the colleague requesting help can formulate a plan based on the outlined next steps correlated to that color, without wondering if you’re reacting appropriately.
Pro tip: Engage the Cornerstone staff to design and facilitate a Stress Continuum training for your HQ team!
Acknowledgement & On-Call Planning
Make sure you’ve discussed potential burnout with those who may be most affected. Acknowledging that you all know that stress is a part of operating in peak season - and creating ways to manage it - opens the lines of communication among team members. It’s critical for your workplace culture that your team can rely on each other and can reframe the stress of the season as an exciting challenge that they’ll navigate together.
“Understand that burnout goes beyond you as an individual,” says Maureen McConnell. “This can mean that the emotional, physical, and mental fatigue that you experience as it relates to burnout can be a result of BOTH how you approach the work you do AND how the work you do impacts you.
Sometimes our attachment styles can define our approach to work and the relationships we build at work. We can find ourselves driven by the fear of doing something wrong, which can lead to being easily distracted "trying to put out (perceived) fires.” Other times we may adopt a perspective that we're higher achievers than our coworkers, putting in long(er) hours than necessary to fuel that perspective.”
Re-examining attachment styles in relation to time can be a great first step to proactively addressing burnout. Addressing how you perceive both clock time (deadlines, business hours, etc.) and event time (how we make room for community events that foster connection, eating, sleeping, and our own creativity) goes beyond “time management.” It's important to critically think about how to reduce the volume of work tasks and help staff find the big decisions that minimize the micro-decision making responsible for cognitive fatigue. Leaders can also structure their time to be available for employees to proactively ask questions, rather than waiting for persistent, urgent, or last-minute requests.
Acknowledge potential challenges ahead and approach planning with thoughtfulness and transparency. Be clear in how you’ll manage on-call support and crises as they arise. Running meaningful preseason training for your team and setting up a system that allows each team member to be truly “off the clock” at some point each week is critical to preventing burnout.
Craft Culture Intentionally
Make sure that you’re building an intentional, thoughtful culture of work balance throughout the year. This includes peak seasons! How you model balance is how your team will likely engage with the concept, despite what your written company values convey.
“There are paradoxes in leadership, the decisions we make to address one aspect of our business can often have unintended consequences, and can be a frustrating (but necessary) part of organizational development,” says Maureen. “However, it is important to consider the cost of adopting burnout as a leader's rite of passage in our industry. Complex systems like the travel and experiential education industries require a collective approach to innovation and creative solutions, leveraging team expertise, empowerment, and equity. A collective approach to leadership is also needed to critically examine how the expectations of the industry impact our organizations.”
Celebrate & Recognize
Okay, we know there isn’t realistically much time between departure and when you begin to manage incidents. In fact, arrival is often where potential first incidents and troubleshooting needs occur. However, can you find an hour or two to plan a celebration in recognition of your staff’s hard work?
One of the central challenges of transitioning from a busy planning season into a busy management season is that there isn’t time to celebrate achieving this milestone. But you’ve done amazing work - programs are happening! Ensuring you take deliberate time to recognize your colleagues’ efforts and celebrate all you’ve achieved as a team can help re-energize the group. Here are some ideas of how you could encourage celebration:
Meaningful Wellness Initiatives: Ideally, it is important for leaders to recognize that organizing wellness initiatives can feel mandatory to employees. Best practice is to take a pulse (you can use the stoplight) before scheduling an event. Asking employees before you plan can go a long way in creating an equitable environment. It also provides leadership with valuable feedback regarding what your employees need from your organization in terms of self-care. Sometimes the best self-care is time away from work.
Flex self-care time: Remind team members to take intentional time for self care, on their terms. Whether that looks like a pedicure, a walk around the block, reading, or seeing a movie. This gives employees choice about what they choose to spend their time on (leaving early to catch their kid's game/performance, coming in later so they can exercise in the morning, etc.).
Physical gifts: Important to notice that this isn’t the most important initiative, but it’s one of the many ways you can show thoughtfulness or care related to your employees. Providing opportunities to choose their gift can also go a long way in both recognizing and reinforcing valued employee input.
Engage the Cornerstone staff
This is what we’re here for! Whether it’s a preseason meeting to support your business leadership with best practices and guidelines, a formal training for the HQ team to open up about how they’ll support one another during the season, or even one-on-one time scheduled with business leadership to work through the challenges of managing wellness while on-call - our team is here to support!