Highway From the Danger Zone, Part 2
Having spent the past weekend celebrating with loved ones, many of us are perhaps just now returning to our regular routines. Maybe we dove right back in—or we’re listlessly drifting through the motions. The latter might be surprisingly more common, as evidenced in this study published by Routledge. Jumping immediately from leisure time back into work, without any pause in between, runs the risk of us venturing right back into the danger zone of burnout.
Adding salt to that wound, further research by the American Psychological Association similarly determined that the much-treasured rewards of vacation time—namely rest and rejuvenation—can rapidly evaporate upon our return to work. While leisure time remains a crucial maneuvering thruster helping us evade incoming attacks of burnout, flexible work environments can provide a healthy addition to our arsenal.
The increasingly popular office models of hybrid and remote work provide the means by which to navigate the turbulence of stress and exhaustion, yielding both high productivity and employee satisfaction. The APA illustrates the many benefits of such environments in this video.
As depicted by Glassdoor years before the Great Reshuffle blew through the world of work, flexible offices can offer our teams the freedom to gracefully interweave the many elements of their lives. Thus, rather than insist on our teams pushing themselves to Mach 10, we should instead encourage the freedom to barrel roll from work to family without fear that one or the other might become a looming bogey on their six.
“It’s about giving our associates the opportunity to be who they are as an individual, whether that is a community member, a spouse or parent, or anything in between.”
– Amy Freshman
Author
by Faraz Gafoor
Faraz Gafoor is a content strategist, writer, and human-data aficionado. His passion for scientific analysis of everything—from the presentation of data to the way we communicate—is driven by a deep love of understanding how we process and make sense of our surroundings. His curiosity and a never-ending search for prolific and poetic perfection poignantly fit his Prism Personality of a double Scientist.
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