Burnout – What You Can Do in Your Home Office

“Burnout” may be the word of the moment.  Many of us seem to be feeling some sort of malaise, and “burnout” seems like an appropriate label for our mental (and sometimes physical) exhaustion, and distant/negative feelings about our work.

Design can help deal with the negative effects of burnout and potentially head it off before it happens—but if work demands, negative social environments, etc., are bad enough, more than the physical environment likely needs to be switched out to encourage employee engagement.

In your home office, the most powerful step you can take to beat burnout is to create work areas where the physical world supports what you need to get done.  In articles like this one, The Space Doctors frequently talk about how aspects of the physical environment such as surface colours, lights (natural and artificial), furniture arrangements, and similar factors can put our heads in the right state to do knowledge work well, or not.  After you’ve ploughed forward with knowledge work type thinking for a while, your brain will be tired, and you’ll feel less burned out if you mentally refresh.  Design can play a big part in revitalising your brain, as we’ve discussed in this article.

Give yourself some options for where you work and control over the physical conditions where you’re working to banish burnout.  Control via the physical environment, is discussed in this article, and tied to all sorts of other positive psychological conditions, besides the absence of burnout, such as a better mood and better cognitive performance generally.

If you can find ways that actually work at building community spirit among you and your colleagues that can be participated in from home offices, do whatever it takes design-wise to roll them out every so often to keep your bonds with your colleagues tight (or tighten them up if they weren’t too strong to start with)—doing so will make burnout less likely.   Similarly, any way you can use your Zoom backdrop, etc., to signal company values will help keep burnout at lower levels.

Burnout’s bad, but the design of your home office can make it less likely.