In light of World Mental Health Day on 10th October, and as a follow up to our burnout prevention blog, we wanted to share mental health and wellbeing insights specifically for founders.
In this guest blog, Joe Caplin, Strategy Director at Outfly, explores how the founders in their partner network manage burnout and promote mental resilience within high-growth organisations.
Saving face
Burnout has become something of a corporate buzzword. Tales of twelve hour days were met with accusations of busy bragging. Breakdowns were covered up, anxiety attacks disguised as nosebleeds, and emotions were hidden at all costs. Thankfully, that's all behind us.
Mental health awareness woke us from the nightmare of '60s corporate America. We are awake, clear minded and compassionate. Besides, we work in the startup scene, where everything's bean bags, series A and chai latte's - we're all fine.
Wouldn't it be great if the blog just ended there? Let's sit for a minute in that feeling and enjoy it.
Obviously awareness is only the first step in a journey that keeps going round, retreading the same path, until it's truly embedded into our culture. Mental health in the workplace isn't just about being nice, or accepting that sometimes we get stressed, it's about making real practical changes - both on an organisational and individual level - to account for our needs as complex emotional creatures.
It's about embedding the idea that the fulfilment of its employees is as much a responsibility of a company as its bottom line. It's about putting your money where your mouth is and investing in your people and, for small businesses, it's often really really hard.
Founders are famously a unique breed. We can confirm this rumour as a fact. At Outfly, we've worked with hundreds over the years, and they really are different. The isolating effects of leadership have been written about extensively, that as an entrepreneur loneliness is coupled with unparalleled uncertainty and, increasingly, an overwhelming responsibility; not only for your growing teams' income, but for their mental health as well.
We spoke with a few of our clients, who form members of our extended network of founders, to find out how they deal with their own work/life alignment, how they defend against burnout, and how they've built processes to protect their teams as they grow.
Looking out for yourself
The entrepreneur’s life can often be frantic, which in itself is a problem. As the founder and CEO of fast-growing Artificial Intelligence consultancy, Springbok AI, Victoria Albrecht knows this all too well.
“For me, burnout is a combination of high levels of stress and a lack of focus. As a startup founder, it’s particularly difficult to avoid feeling stressed and your attention is pulled into different directions, because you are, at the end of the day, responsible for the business.
The crucial thing is to not just deal with burnout, but first and foremost to create an environment that avoids burnout from happening in the first place.”
To avoid burning out, Victoria recommends:
Exercising in the mornings
Planning things in the evenings
Being creative outside of work
Removing meetings and projects that distract from your focus
Saying no to things that don’t make you happy
Hugs
Honing in on your passion
This sense of creating an environment in which everyone can thrive, founders included, is a common thread throughout our network. Jamie Akhtar, founder & CEO of cyber-security unicorn startup CyberSmart agreed, saying:
“You need to build a kick ass team around you. Finding the right people who can carry the weight and take the pressure is essential. To do that you need good people who believe in your ultimate vision. It sounds simple, but a problem shared really is a problem halved.”
He also spoke about focus, saying that even as a work-obsessed founder with near endless energy, he had to choose what to do and what not to do. That real passion for what you do was the best defence against burnout:
“You have to do something you're passionate about. Whatever precautions you have, being a founder absorbs your life and unless you're passionate, you are likely to burn out. Within that, do the role you're passionate about doing, rather than forcing yourself to be something you're not. As a founder you have to do everything for a while, but no one can keep that up forever.”
Sharing the load with others
Sometimes as founders, we've discovered that you can go too far the other way, that you're so passionate about your area that you find it hard to properly delegate and let go. Passion gets you a long way, but it doesn't make you superhuman.
“I really enjoy what I do, so I get tired and stressed, but I rarely feel like I'm burning out. Stress is so much easier to avoid when you're passionate. The problem I found is I was working near to my physical limits most of the time. My bar is higher than normal, but it's not infinite, and eventually that took its toll.”
That's what Simeon Quarrie, founder of immersive learning startup VIVIDA, discovered. Learning to let go stopped him from hitting his point of overwhelm, but it took nearing his limits to realise that.
“This was when the point hit home, when I had to balance running the company with supporting my daughter who had cancer. I didn't have the capacity to do both, so had to learn to let go and let my team help me. It was a difficult experience but ultimately it taught me something valuable: How to share the load with others.”
Each of these founders recognised their ability to tap into higher than average levels of energy and stress management, but also that it was not infinite: it had to be directed in line with their skills and passions to be truly effective. Evidently, the key long-term solution to preventing burnout as a founder is to build an effective team that supports you, but how do you, in turn, create the culture that supports them? As Jamie puts it:
“You can't be the pillar as a founder. You need to create an environment that supports itself, not be the only thing standing between your people and a breakdown. Give them tools, give yourself space. Create a network, not a dependency.”
Build a culture, build a team
Startup employees are in a unique position when it comes to culture-building. With the added pressures of limited budgets, uncertainty and the constant 'MVP' sprint mentality, comes a benefit: You haven't inherited your culture from anyone. The dozen or so of you are the culture. There are no rules to blindly follow, except your own embedded assumptions about working norms. Once these are broken you can work however works best for you. Founding teams can use this advantage to shape cultures and better protect their teams.
One of the advantages of a smaller team is a flat hierarchy. Hannah Sutcliffe, co-founder of VR startup MOONHUB thinks that's part of the secret of their culture.
“Without a hierarchy, without a separation between founders and team members, everyone knows they can speak to someone, so no one feels isolated. It's easier to talk through things if you don't feel like you're also giving someone a performance review.”
This closeness helps to break down workplace taboos, enabling 'employees' and 'managers' to talk about sensitive issues more freely than they would with a more traditional workplace hierarchy.
“I try to popularise talking therapies, and normalise their discussion. I'm always happy to talk about my own experiences with anxiety, and the therapies that helped me get through it. People have a range of needs, some of them might be therapy, for some it's mental health days. It's easier in smaller teams to build flexible policies that work for people individually, and to cater to their specific needs.”
Keeping this flexibility as you scale is no mean feat. As CyberSmart grew, Jamie managed to do something truly innovative to retain the 'small team' mentality.
“We invited all our line managers to undertake CIPD certified people training so that they could, in effect, replace the pastoral needs of HR. This let them provide team-level support which is always more flexible and personal, rather than each new need requiring a company-wide policy change.”
Do as I do: Being a role model
Building mental health protection into the fibre of the company has to be constantly reinforced. As a company scales, the culture trickles down from the founding team, from upper management. You need to teach good working practice and then practise what you preach.
“I talk a lot to the team about routine, about starting the day with exercise, not work, about switching off at its end. However you do it (I do it with cooking), take your mind off work and then don't open your laptop again. It's about making it a part of 'good employee' culture. Let people know that that separation is not only okay, it's expected.”
Sometimes as a small business building a culture alone isn't enough. You often also take on the role of family for your colleagues, and when push comes to shove, you’re the one that needs to go the extra mile.
Last year at Outfly, one of our core team members had a stroke. When that happened there was no question that we would extend paid leave, and help them access the funding and support they needed to get back on their feet. But what happens when the issue is less clear cut? Simeon spoke about how scary it was to give a team member the time they needed, even though they knew it was the right thing to do:
“Things came to a head for one of our team and we ended up giving them paid leave for several months. As a small business this can be a really difficult decision; there's work to be done and money's very tight, but you have to remember that as an employer you can often be dealing with life or death situations without realising it. It's more than people's livelihoods, it's their lives.”
After this experience, Simeon strove to build up support networks within VIVIDA to help people access help before these make-or-break points, building in truly anonymous prepaid counselling sessions that anyone on the team could use, as and when they needed. He says the results have been fantastic, but that helping people cope needs to be a constant concern:
“Ask your team questions, questions like ‘what part of the job do you dislike most right now?’ If you can solve that, you’ve gone some way to helping.”
Employee benefits like this are important as our work and home lives blend and cultures shift towards vocational 'whole-person' working styles. Springbok supports the mental health of their team with generous holidays and personal well-being allowances, but Victoria says it's also important to make the time people do spend at work less stressful.
“Little things like taking a more collaborative approach to defining deadlines can help to remove the pressure from people. So can giving them the actual time to do the work! For example, we try to create calendared flow periods for people to get their work done in, and have a block on meetings every day after 2pm to help with this.”
This structure of 'discussion time vs. meeting time' greatly helps reduce unintentional overwhelm, and is one of the positive threads to have come out of COVID. At Outfly, we already had a remote working policy before the pandemic, but it was solidified as we planned our return to the office. I started writing this on a Tuesday and am finishing on Thursday, the days I get my work done. From personal experience, it helps.
The COVID of it all
“The pandemic has changed everything. Pre-pandemic you were a 'good company' if you were even trying. We had SPILL, Headspace, mental health people coming in... we did all the baseline stuff and more, but since COVID we realised that we needed to support the team even further.”
Jamie's words echo a trend it's difficult not to see. The last two years fundamentally changed the way we think about work, and changed the expectations people have of their employers. CyberSmart have gone above and beyond in this regard, offering everyone in the company the ability to become a mental health first aider, providing peer support at every level.
“When we offered it as a policy we knew it would be popular. What we didn't know was that 25% of the company would take us up on it. The result is that everyone has someone to talk to, and that the fundamental culture of openness and understanding is built deep into the company.”
Perhaps by now you'll be bored of reading about how COVID changed things, but, well, it did. It put huge strains on management systems, upended structures, you know the story - but it also allowed us to take stock.
We saw into each other's houses, each other's lives. We broke down boundaries and some of us had a chance to recapture an intimacy that's often lost in larger organisations. The façade of the 'working' mask that had been slipping for years was ripped off. Even in smaller companies the change was felt. Hannah spoke about how the pandemic helped them break down barriers.
“People are more open, they're more able to state when they're alone, when they're struggling. It only took one person to say it before everyone felt like they could. We all shared an experience, in a way that brought us together.”
Sometimes it's hard to keep professional lines when the lines keep blurring. As an intimate team it's easier to help people with each other's problems, but you also have to define boundaries and give people the space for privacy.
“If someone has a broken arm the first question is 'how did you do it'. Mental health feels more invasive, you're going into someone's head. You don't want to put pressure onto someone to answer something they feel uncomfortable about. It's a hard line to draw. But we're starting.
The real stigma is to look at mental health in the same light as physical health. We're getting there, but we're not quite there yet.”
The pandemic was felt by everyone. For many it was an insight into the isolation felt by those who suffer with mental health more regularly. As Simeon put it:
“Every member of our team had some sort of breakdown, whether it was a day, a weekend, a week, a month... everyone was affected in some way. Since lockdown, we've focused on trying to create a family atmosphere as one of our priorities, communicating about things that aren't just logistics, getting to know each other, talking.”
Creating closeness within a company has clear advantages, but it comes with risks. You need to balance the twin objectives of intimacy and separation to give your company culture the best chance of thriving in the new digital nomad world we're moving into. As Jamie reminded me, there's a risk, a big risk, that:
“Some people already feel like they're not working from home, but living in the office. That's the last thing any of us want.”
So, what next?
Mental health awareness in the workplace is here to stay. Phew, finally. We wish it hadn't taken a pandemic to cement the idea, but you take what you can get. What the pandemic did do was rapidly speed up the adoption of integrated technologies that blur the lines between work and home.
As founders, we're in a position to shape the way our companies work, to harness new capabilities and working styles to increase efficiency, creativity and collaboration. How these manifest in practice will, as always, take time to discover, but a few things are already clear:
Provide the opportunity to separate, building in break points from work in the form of holidays, mental health days and 'no work' times. Encourage physical separation too, giving people the resources to build these in when working from home.
Provide structure, helping people plan out their work so it doesn't get on top of them, hidden by all the meetings. Share the load, so that their deadlines are not theirs alone.
Provide resources like counselling, mental health first aiders, and offer time away to help people who might be struggling in silence address issues before they become more serious.
Communicate - people expect to be given a sense of control, to be consulted on how they best work. No one will ever have all the answers, but it's clear that as we move through organisational shifts, people value having a say in shaping their own cultures.
However much we try to facilitate separation, work and home lives are blending. One of the best things we can do to help is to build cultures of openness and resilience, giving people the support networks they need when they need them. To do that we can consider:
Empowering people to know what to do, with training on mental health and management at all levels of an organisation.
Leading by example, switching off publicly, carving out time for ourselves and encouraging others to do the same.
Normalising mental health support, encouraging people to share (if they're comfortable) their own stories, and how they got through them, so that those still struggling know they'll be heard and empathised with.
Founders need to look after themselves. If you aren't performing at 100%, your company will pay. Sometimes this means dropping down to 90%, so you can live to perform another day. A few ways to do this are:
Hiring a team and learning to properly let go. The right people won't make you less busy, you're an entrepreneur, that's your life, but it will enable you to focus your efforts on the bits you do best, and take the company to the next level.
Enforcing your own routine and practising what you preach. Say no so you can say yes, switch off so that when you do things, you can give them your full attention.
Share your load with friends, mentors, colleagues, make sure you’re giving yourself the support you strive to give others.
Get more hugs.
These tips and insights are from a selection of our network of founders at a range of startup stages. The best thing you can do if you're struggling with building this culture internally is to get advice specific to your situation, from people who really know what they're talking about. That's why we're working with Calmer. More than any other startup we know, Calmer are rescuing burnout from it’s buzzword status with in-depth workshops, training, thought leadership panels and consultancy. Find out more about what Calmer can offer you and your business.
Joe Caplin is the Strategy Director at Outfly, the design innovation agency for startups and challenger brands.