In 2016, 74% of employees reported that they were willing to support organizational changes. In 2022, just 38% felt the same, according to a Gartner study. In analyzing this difference, the research suggests that workers become increasingly burnt out from change when they feel their organization views them as an employee, not a person. It’s the way that leaders manage changes that can fuel burnout or encourage healthy innovation—and we want to help you accomplish the latter.
In this #ContentChat recap, Erika joins Jenny Magic (@JennyLMagic) and Melissa Breker (@MelissaBreker) to discuss how to overcome change fatigue in content marketing.
Read through a few highlights from the conversation below, and listen to the full audio recording here. Jenny and Melissa share plenty of actionable tips and insights from their book Change Fatigue: Flip Teams From Burnout to Buy-In. If you want to dig more into the topics below, we encourage you to get your copy of their book today!
Q1: In what ways are content marketing and other leaders inadvertently fueling their team members’ burnout?
There are many actions that inadvertently fuel burnout in content marketing:
Constantly shuffling priorities…
A1a: They constantly shuffle priorities, not giving teams enough time to get traction. #ContentChat
— Jenny Magic (@JennyLMagic) June 5, 2023
Conflating “new” with “urgent” (avoid shiny object syndrome!)…
A1b: They conflate newness with urgency. Often the new shiny object (Chat GPT, anyone?) that teams are supposed to pivot to evaluate and incorporate. Constant pivots are exhausting. #ContentChat
— Melissa Breker (@melissabreker) June 5, 2023
Failing to consider dependencies…
A1c: They don’t consider dependencies and are reactive to requests from other teams #ContentChat
— Jenny Magic (@JennyLMagic) June 5, 2023
A1: Not accounting for variable production times. ⏰
Consider all the moving parts including collaborative activities, such as research & design #ContentChat
— Sweepsify 🎈 (@Sweepsify_) June 5, 2023
Having too much work in progress…
A1d: They have too much work in progress and struggle in a diverse and chaotic environment #ContentChat
— Melissa Breker (@melissabreker) June 5, 2023
Not knowing how to establish healthy power dynamics…
A1e: They may lack an understanding of where power comes from and how to best use it (influence and positional power) #ContentChat
— Jenny Magic (@JennyLMagic) June 5, 2023
And overlooking the cumulative effect of every small ask.
A1f: They don’t consider the cumulative effect of the small asks (death by 10,000 papercuts) #ContentChat
— Melissa Breker (@melissabreker) June 5, 2023
The following are a couple of notable snippets from the audio recording:
“The great thing we often find with the organizations that we work with is that [facilitating healthy change] takes more than what people are doing right now, for sure, but it often takes less than people think. It often just takes a different perspective. To Jenny’s point earlier, the ability to slow down a little bit and engage people in different ways—just like we do with our content and our external audiences—[is important]. It’s being able to shift that engagement to our internal team to support people in a different way.” – Melissa Breker
“If we try to rush through anything and hurry up to meet all those deliverables—or hurry up and completely change the way that we’re approaching something—we’re setting ourselves up for failure, and we’re setting people up for feeling bad about creating poor quality content or doing a bad job at distributing that content.” – Erika Heald