A burnout occurs when someone works beyond the limits of his physical and mental potential for a long time. Project team members are most often hit by a burnout when working on large projects with challenging schedules and high demands on performance. Project managers should therefore be cautious and learn to effectively prevent burnout. The Project Smart website advises to follow the rules below:
Involve timeouts
Involve regular breaks in the work of your team in order to calm the tensions and gain some time for reflection. The timeouts may have the form of prolonged weekends or long lunches.
Free your team of stress
If you see a problem, do not let it grow too much. For example, if you're facing an unrealistic deadline and the whole team is working on making it fulfilled, even though everybody knows that it is impossible, resolve this stressful situation by some of the necessary measures - putt off the deadline, limit the scope, add necessary resources, etc.
Plan regular checkpoints
Always meet between the phases of your projects are to see what you have achieved. Decide what works and what does not.
Have realistic expectations
If you set the goals for yout team so that your subordinates will have to work sixty to seventy hours a week to meet them, neither timeouts nor control meetings will help you in the end. For your team to avoid burnout, you need to enable real success. Once people feel that there is no way to handle your requirements, they will burn out very soon.
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