According to a 2023 article in Harvard Business Review, building a burnout-proof workplace starts with reducing the daily “microstress” that lead to longer-term frustration — the proverbial straws on the camel’s back.
For leaders looking to prevent microstress, the article recommends starting with four questions:
Can we reduce structural complexity?
Does our workflow make sense?
Has the profusion of teams spiked employees’ microstress?
Have we built a sense of purpose in our employees’ everyday interactions?
As competition for software developers remains high, the need to retain talent only continues to grow. One key to supporting teams is providing an environment where sustainable responsibilities are balanced with work that keeps developers engaged. More than simple retention, ensuring the well-being and happiness of developer teams is paramount for sustained productivity and innovation.
According to John Hall of Identity Digital, attention to the signs of burnout is step one to preventing bigger issues on a team. He points out indicators like increased errors, lack of focus and impatience as red flags.
“That’s where regular one-on-ones come in,” he said. “We use these to check in, see how everyone is doing and address any concerns they may have.”
Similarly, Steve Orr of AirDNA acknowledged the challenges of spotting burnout amidst demanding project timelines. He highlighted subtle signs such as decreased energy levels and reduced collaboration.
Once leaders are reliably identifying and addressing the signs of burnout on their teams with clear and simple systems, there’s room to ensure that employees are able to expand creatively in their work and prevent stagnation and frustration.
“Giving engineers opportunities to work on new projects and with different technologies can help with burnout,” said Orr. “You’re more likely to face burnout when you’re doing the same exact thing for days, weeks or even months at a time, so changing it up can help.”
Built In sat down with Hall and Orr to learn more about how they identify, address and prevent burnout on their teams while helping their software developers thrive.
Identity Digital is a domain name registry offering new domain names in multiple languages and character sets.
What actions do you take when you see signs of burnout?
Building trust and being open is important. It is a privilege to work with these people, and I want my direct reports to feel comfortable talking to me about anything. If I see someone burning the candle at both ends, I might encourage them to take some time off. We all need a recharge at some point. I also sit down with them and take a good look at their workload. Can we lighten it up a bit?
We are very lucky to have a leadership team that prioritizes employee well-being. For example, along with PTO, our company has allocated time for us all to spend volunteering in the community. Taking some VTO can give us a sense of giving back while at the same time giving us a much-needed break.
If I see someone burning the candle at both ends, I might encourage them to take some time off. We all need a recharge at some point.”
How do you help developers identify issues at their source as soon as they occur, so that they’re not sifting through a slog of information downstream?
Keeping track of complex systems can be challenging and lead to burnout. That is why we take steps to make sure our developers are not drowning in data. We have some monitoring and alerting systems set on specific thresholds. If something goes wrong, the monitors will let us know right away. We also use our logs to give us a deep dive into what is happening under the hood.
However, the key to avoiding burnout is not just about the tools. We also spread the responsibility of handling bugs around the team. This way, everyone gets a chance to learn new things and become familiar with different parts of the code. Sharing knowledge is important as well, so we have regular discussions and document how we tackle problems. Everyone benefits from working together to make sure things continue to run smoothly and that nobody gets overwhelmed.
What sorts of creative stretch projects or meaningful growth opportunities do you offer developers on your team?
We all want to keep growing, and at Identity Digital, we invite our engineers to push themselves. To break down the silos, we encourage the team to collaborate with other departments like product, marketing and customer support on upcoming projects. This broadens their horizons, helps them hone their communication skills and gives them a behind-the-scenes look at how the whole company works. We believe in learning from each other, so newer engineers team up with our seasoned veterans for guidance, feedback and support. This mentorship helps our junior devs grow and keeps our experienced engineers sharp.
Something new this year is our technology guilds. These are like mini-clubs where engineers with similar interests can gather regularly to discuss specific technologies and brainstorm ways to improve them. Finally, during our one-on-ones, we chat about our aspirations and connect them with the company’s needs. This can lead to opportunities like getting certified in new tech, attending leadership workshops or even diving into specialized training using our online learning system, which has tons of courses on just about anything you can imagine.
AirDNA offers analytic and insight tools to Airbnb hosts.
What warning signs do you look for in your software developers at AirDNA? What actions do you take when you see signs of burnout?
It’s not always easy to see the signs of burnout, particularly when everyone is working hard towards an approaching deadline. When it does start to creep in, you begin to see things such as a drop in energy during meetings, less collaboration among team members and maybe even some frustration expressed openly when facing situations like frequent shifts in priority or longer hours. Some actions that we take when we start to see signs of burnout can include speaking with product to try and reduce the scope of current projects, encouraging people to take days off, hosting a company-sponsored fun event like a happy hour or dodgeball archery and having the team end their day early right before a holiday.
How do you help developers identify issues at their source as soon as they occur, so that they’re not sifting through a slog of information downstream?
Observability often comes down to putting the right tools in place and using them effectively. This can cover a wide range of areas: from automated unit tests the developers write themselves at the function level; to error logging and tracking within the various environments; to infrastructure monitoring for things like uptime, container restarts and low disc space; to data quality checks making sure the data we ingest looks right.
Just because you have the tools in place doesn’t mean the work is done. There’s still the matter of figuring out who’s responsible for keeping an eye on and responding to the type of alerts these tools generate. Alerts don’t do much good if nobody pays any attention to them. We’ve done this in a few ways, including clearly defining who is responsible for what alerts and separating the alerts into different Slack channels, so the right people can be added to each channel and keep tabs on what’s happening in each area.
Just because you have the tools in place doesn’t mean the work is done.”
What sorts of creative stretch projects or meaningful growth opportunities do you offer developers on your team?
While it’s sometimes hard to find time for creative projects when faced with deadlines for getting new product features out into the world, we’re working on making time to ensure this is something we build into our annual schedule. Right now we are in the planning stage for putting together an internal hackathon. As far as other growth opportunities go, our team has grown in size in the past year, which means there are plenty of chances for people to do new things. Specifically, there have been opportunities for developers to take on more responsibility as team leads and people managers.
We’ve also encouraged those who are interested in broadening their technical skills to do so. We’ve had dedicated front-end and back-end engineers in the past, who mostly stayed within their own area of the code. More recently, many of them have crossed over to also do work on the opposite side of the tech stack and have become full stack engineers. We’re big believers in supporting the career goals of our engineers and will do what we can to give them the opportunities to grow in the ways they want to grow.
