Overloaded vs Overwhelmed: How can HR reduce both

Karlie: [00:00:08:04] Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our session today. We've got quite a few people coming on to the call today, which is fantastic. So we'll just give them 45 seconds or so to come into the session and then we'll kick off. Thank you all for being so prompt. Really appreciate it, particularly in this crazy run into Christmas now. Will just give it another 15 seconds or so and then we'll launch in. Just as people are clearing that waiting room. Okay, fabulous. We might just kick off there. There's a few more people coming in, but I'm sure they'll catch up. Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us on today's call. Today we are going to be talking about overload versus overwhelm and more critically, what to do about it. Once you've identified that they are present. So today we'll be covering the difference between overload and overwhelm. It's a nuance difference, but I think it is important to understand as this or direct what you do about it. We'll go through some of the key signs and triggers and things to look out for in your workforce. The cost of having these things present in your workforce where I'd like to spend the bulk of the time is around practical strategies, tips and tricks for reducing overload, overwhelm and burnout. So burnout is what happens when overload and overwhelm go unchecked. And I would like to spend a good amount of time in Q&A as well at the end and give you the opportunity to be asking any questions that you might have or any use cases. Okay, let's say my name is Karlie Cremin. I'm the managing director at DLPA. We are a leadership consultancy. We work with our clients around optimizing employee experience and we do that through a few different lenses, particularly leadership training and consultancy. So I would really like to talk to you today about some of the things that we're seeing on market and some of the things that we're seeing work really well for what is becoming quite a widespread challenge for a lot of businesses. Just some housekeeping, I suppose as well. We're on Zoom here. You can see on your little taskbar that comes in Zoom, you have a chat and a Q&A. If you want to throw any of your questions. As we go into the Q&A, I'll be addressing them at the end of the session or as many of them as I can at the end of the session. So feel free to pop them in there and we'll cover off as many as we can. The current market landscape. So these are figures that I have up here from a recent Deloitte study where 43% of respondents said that they were feeling often or always exhausted, which I think is a statistic that should alarm almost everyone. 42% of workers reported feeling stressed most of the time. 35% of workers reported feeling overwhelmed and 46% of workers reported feeling burned out at some point during 2022. One of the for those statisticians amongst us, you'll look at those numbers and say that there is an element of disparity. So people, the way people are expressing their responses to some of these metrics in this study and a lot of others is a little bit mixed. And I think that one of the challenges in this space is that workers generally are not very good at articulating what's going on until you're kind of in the crisis end of things. And so, for example, you look at the 35% of people feeling overwhelmed. I would suggest this is pretty under-reported and that there's a lot of different reasons for why that might be. My personal observation from our clients and one of the wonderful things about my job is I get to talk to a great number of people. I'm seeing this as a pretty uniform challenge across businesses, even businesses that are thriving and going gangbusters. There is this level of stress within workforce generally at the moment, and part of that is the workplace. Part of that is home and life. But it is definitely present in I'm seeing it in pretty close to 100% of businesses that it is actually impacting performance and people's experience of a business. So it is very, very front of mind and I think we see that with how many people have registered for today's call as well, that I think it's something that we are aware is much more prevalent than it's been in the past. So if we'll talk about how can you support your people to thrive and your teams to thrive. So as a starting point to talk about what the difference is between overwhelm and overload in our languaging and our concepts within DLP, when we talk about overload, we are talking about the required output is greater than the possible output. So that is where you are asking more or I won't say you where more is being asked of an individual than is possible to do. And there are different reasons for why that might be. But overload is structural. It is when it is to do with workflow and work workload overall, and it can feed into feelings of overwhelm. Overwhelm is a mindset, so it's actually the feeling of being overburdened with tasks, requirements, obligations, and it may or may not coexist with overload. It's why I think it's important to make the distinction is twofold. One is that the approach to dealing with each is slightly different, which we'll go into in more depth further into the webinar. But the other reason why I would point to that is we had a client recently where there was extreme overwhelm. All their metrics were showing it, staff were reporting it, they were having a lot of the signs that I'll talk about in just a moment. But when we went in and had a look, the first thing that we do in those situations is have a look at the workflow and the process and the workload to see if there's something that we can do to alleviate that and get some early wins. And what we found was actually overload was not present. And so overwhelm can absolutely exist, whether it's in a structural issue where there is an actual overload, but the workforce can still be experiencing it as if there were. And so that is where it's quite important from my perspective, to be distinguishing between the two and making sure you understand how much of each is present in your organization. Signs of overwhelm and overload within an organization. So we have things like increased absenteeism, reduced productivity, increased claims, so that can either be claims and sense of grievances or claims and sense of worker's compensation and psychological injuries. We're seeing a huge upswing in those types of claims are really from 2019 onwards. Lowest satisfaction scores. So if you do things like surveys or other feedback instruments where you're looking at overall satisfaction or and or engagement, you'll see those slip a little bit when you're seeing these factors increase. Higher rates of error. So people who are overwhelmed or overloaded will tend to have a lower quality output and lower engagement with feedback process. So we are also seeing this turn up in a lot of our clients where maybe they had say, 75 to 80% response rate on their different feedback mechanisms and we're seeing that just drop off to maybe 40% or even from 75 to 60 would obviously be material as well. But we are seeing that extreme erosion in people just aren't engaging with their feedback process at all. Something to note about these signs is they're obviously going to be more visible at different ends of the spectrum. So some are lead and some are lag. If you don't have mechanisms for capturing and reporting on rate of error or quality of output and things like productivity, which is more challenging now because we don't or a lot of us don't tend to make widgets. So you can't kind of say I produce X number of widgets per hour. And so therefore if that becomes Y, I know that there's been an erosion. So it's harder to measure that productivity if you don't have mechanisms in place for doing that. You're going to have to wait for the lag indicators to show up. And that is when it's a little more costly and the road back is a little bit longer. So I think one of the the key things in these signs is that the earlier you can identify it, the cheaper and easier it is to address. But nonetheless, there is always a road back. There is there is always a road back. The cost. I think most of us would be aware, even on a personal level within our organizations of the extreme costs and also often the unquantifiable cost that goes with high levels of overwhelming overload and then further down the track, burnout. There. It is estimated by the Harvard Business Review that it costs the US economy 125 to 190 billion per year, that just this element within a business is costing the economy up to 190 billion a year, which is a huge sum. It's a huge sum, particularly in the economic climate that we find ourselves in. That is a huge sum to be talking about. Gallup took another approach on their study that they did recently, which I find these numbers a little more tangible because 190 billion for me is a conceptual number. But Gallup have found that for where an employee is burnt out, overwhelmed or overloaded, that they costing 3400. They're costing the organization $3,400 for every 10,000 of their salary, which I think that is the really stark figure for me. That's a much more tangible figure that you can get your head around. Beyond those studies, I think for a lot of our organizations, we'd be aware that. Overload. Overwhelmed burnout will be increasing recruitment costs, so churn will will be higher in the present talent landscape without harping on about it too much, That is more of a challenge and having a more material impact from a financial perspective. Lower productivity overall. So even where there are only pockets of overload or overwhelm happening. So it might be in a particular department, particular project, particular location, even where that only a pocket we actually see lower productivity spread to the whole organization by virtue of it. And so lower productivity has a material cost to a business which sometimes it's a little bit harder to quantify. Societally, there's also health care costs. So health care costs are rising. Our rate of mental health disorder and so forth is rising. And as I referenced, those workers psychological injuries are rising as well. So there is material health care costs to us as at a societal level. And I also think it is worth noting that that's a very real human cost, that we break this down into figures and sums, but we're actually talking about individual lives, just a lot of them. And so there is a human cost where people are losing enjoyment and quality of life. People are experiencing very real harm by virtue of these overwhelming overload feelings permeating their lives. And there's a percentage of that that is workplace related, a percentage that is home, but there is nonetheless a very real human cost that I think it's worth noting. So if we start with overload, which is the structural ones and from my perspective, overload is the lower hanging fruit in terms of these problems that you can often get some early wins that actually make some of the other things that I'll talk about a little bit easier to do. So overload is always where I would start of actually looking at the structure of what is it that you're asking people to do and can they reasonably do it? So the first thing that I would recommend that you do is to critically appraise the processes within your organization. And you can do that on a department level. You can do that on an organization wide and everything in between. But actually looking at the processes from those process maps, I'd look at our time loading them. So we would be wanting to get to having a time loaded process map. Now that's something that sounds overwhelming, funnily enough, and, and terribly complicated at times. It really isn't. We have, you know, templates and things that, that you can use that quick and dirty is often better than the more in depth that you run the risk of analysis paralysis at times. So I think just really just a very quick sketch out on a whiteboard flip chart or mirror board or whatever it is that that you're using and just putting a time allocation to each task so that you actually get an idea of what that resource consumption looks like. Because I think particularly through COVID, we've seen people lose a little bit of visibility of that. Once you have that idea about, you know, FTA equivalent or yeah, FTA is required for your process map or just the resource consumption required for what you're trying to do. I would then be looking at the tasks within your pipeline and assessing them for how impactful they are for the organization. I'll go through a particular model that a lot of you will be familiar with in just a moment. But I think once we get on the hamster wheel of busy, it's really hard to get off. And that is part of why I would really encourage you to start with overload, because it's where you can break some of the cycle that people get in of doing busy and losing sight of impact. And so really coming into looking at what is the impact of each of these tasks and do they really need to be done? That's part of where the process map can be great as well for identifying tasks, duplication, tasks, redundancy and actually looking at maybe there are opportunities for for low hanging fruit savings within that process map as well. I did a webinar last week which was around the digital experience of employees and we in that we talked a little bit about processes and how to assess them and things. And I think if, if people are interested, reach out. And I'm happy to send a recording of that webinar as well if you'd like. The next thing would be to embed triage processes or mechanisms into your task sheet. So whatever that looks like for your organization is different for every organization and what you're trying to achieve. But having some form of triage, whether that's at an individual team organization level, just to make sure that tasks have been put into the right priority and that energy being a finite thing is being spent on the most impactful things. And then finally, looking at your resource usage and levels. So making sure that A, your resources are being efficiently used and that you have the right level of level and type, I should say, of resource to achieve what you're wanting to. That can be a little bit of a sensitive issue and again, not harping on about it, but the challenges that we're seeing on talent landscape are real. And I think talking about them too much kind of gives them a life of their own. But making sure that the resources you have are as impactful as possible is really, really important because. There is likely a form of talent gap in your organization, so the talent you have needs to be as efficient as possible. To. Quickly talk through. This is a covey model which is often referred to as the urgency trap. As I said, a lot of you will be familiar with it, but I do just want to talk through it because I think there is a level of value in it. One thing that I want to say before I do is that there's a lot of models on market that kind of look the same. So the premise is kind of the same. We use different words, but they're very similar. They are just models. So in the real world, it's imperfect and bit dirty and not ideal and things don't fit neatly into quadrants. So please don't think I'm saying, Oh, what you do is take this model and it's going to solve your problems. It won't. But it can inform your thinking to go down that path and it can give you structure to make it easier to do so. But just just with a little grain of salt. So on this covey model, we have our two axes. We have important, not important, urgent, not urgent in our top quadrant there, which is urgent and important tasks, we have things that have impending deadlines they're causing or managing an immediate risk, and they're time sensitive goals. So these are things that they have to be done by end of day. It's urgent. It must get oxygen and it must be done. Next to that. We have important, not urgent. So these are things that tend to do with strategic action and planning and considered thought and reflective feedback. They are directly related to goals, but the deadline is not kind of sitting on top of you. Then down the bottom we have urgent, not important. So these are productivity drains, distraction and often the result of poor planning. In in our previous quadrant. The key thing to note about that quadrant of urgent, not important, is that they're often driven by other people's agendas. So you can see things in here tend to be like pointless meetings or pointless emails and phone calls. If anyone still does phone calls and there's a lot of communication things in here that it's kind of they've become urgent, but they're not really important or not impactful. But they they distract and they take a lot of energy and focus away from the things that do deliver impact. And then finally, we have our not urgent, not important, which there are little or no value, and they're not at all related to goals. Now, the question I almost always get when I present this model is why would you be doing anything in that bottom right quadrant? If if it's not important and it's not urgent, why would you be doing it? Which I think is a fantastic question. But the answer is that because when people are working on those types of tasks, they actually think they're working in quadrant one. They think that they're important and urgent. And that really is around the classification of things. And so really getting drilling into if things have meaningful deadlines, if they are actually going to be impacting, if they're strategically relevant the other way that this model or this another version of this type of model would be looking at impact as well. So urgency and impact as opposed to importance on that access. This is a great framework if you just even on a personal level, go through your to do list that I'm sure most of us have a frighteningly long to do list that sucks our energy away. Go through that to do list just for yourself and pop each task in a quadrant. As I said, they're not going to neatly fit because life is messy, but give it a go and put them in and just see where things where things sit. You know, the things that are not urgent, not important realistically, don't need to be done. We have a lot of examples of clients that we work with. And I want to point out here that our clients are tend to be very successful businesses. They're all full of very smart people. And so it's not lack of skill or acumen that leads to this, but there can be a lot of things that are done because we've always done it that way or because it's been directed by someone. That's their agenda is a little bit disconnected from organization agenda. There's a lot of reasons and ways that we end up doing things that have little or no relevance to the organization. So taking that time to meaningfully look at these things is really important. And these these models are a great way to do it. The urgent, not important that quadrant we'd really be looking at, you can properly delegate those. There'll be a level of them that may not need to be done or maybe can be tweaked how they're done, but a lot of them will be prime prime real estate for delegation and then the in this model that top right. So the strategic action that is where productivity lives, that is the productive quadrant. And so that is in Kofi's model. That is where he is saying to spend most of your time, because that's where you get discipline and framework and consistent outcome and can really add supercharged value to an organization. But then that's not ignoring the fact that urgent and important things are necessary and need to be done. And so that is where the looking at your processes and making sure that you're using your resources as effectively as possible can be really, really great. Um, and so just on that previous slide, the covey model Y, it's called the urgency trap is or why it can be referred to as the urgency trap is because we get so busy being busy that we forget to be impactful and we forget to really hone in on that productive time, that strategic time. As I say, real world, there is stuff that needs to be done and our organizations in all likelihood are not going to be, you know, reaching optimum staffing levels. So we'll all be a little bit stretched, but it's just about how we can get them the most bang for buck out of that time and be as productive as possible. Now, once we've fixed up that structure and we know that our structure is optimal so people are as equally loaded in their workloads as we can manage in an organization, bearing in mind the world is imperfect, then we would look at overwhelm, which is that feeling of drowning and things of being overburdened and the feeling and the mindset that goes with that. Again, I really would drill in. We have a particular client recently, as I referenced, that had it kind of in the most dark terms that I've probably ever seen, but I've seen much more nuanced versions of where overwhelm is not directly correlated or proportionate to overload. So where the feeling of overwhelm is much greater then the overload would kind of point to. And that's not to invalidate the feeling that the the feeling is very real and needs to be addressed and it's valid for the people experiencing it. It's just the levers are a little bit different. So what can you do about overwhelm? Well, we can look at building connection. This is something that has always been important, but it's probably become more important through COVID, particularly in the eastern states or the southern eastern states of of Australia. But I think it's uniformly true that having that connection and a sense of place in our community, in our work and in our private lives and hopefully the two together. Can go a long way from a resilience standpoint and for for reducing feelings of of overwhelm. It can just help us cope with things a lot better when we feel that we're not alone. Equipping managers and leaders to be supportive of their workforce and their teams can really also be great. Bang for buck. Of we know that. And there's so many studies Gallup have done it. The Deloitte one I referenced before, the idea and the states have released one where we know that where managers and leaders are very effective at not just being supportive of their teams, but making their teams feel supported, that where that is present, we have lower rates of burnout, we have lower rates of stress. So this is again, something that it's very easy to write a business case for is very important for businesses and organizations, I should say, to give oxygen and time to and it's not something that's expensive or terribly time consuming. It just needs a very little bit and it goes a long way. Training in a deep trigger process is something that I would really emphasize will go a long way for you and particularly your leaders. This is something we do a lot, particularly in our senior leadership products, but there's a lot that can be done by by other means as well. There's lots of models out there. So when I talk about deep trigger, what I mean is about taking the charge and the sting out of situations where you're becoming disempowered is the language that we would use. But what I mean by that is where an interaction is becoming an energy suck instead of worst case energy neutral, ideally positive or energizing circumstance. And so it's just it doesn't change the circumstance. It's just about taking away your negative emotional attachment to it. That is a life changing process to master, and it is something that it is better than Botox. And I think, you know, we'll put cosmetic surgeons out of business with it because it really is a life changing thing. So if you can equip your teams with that and you can do entry level through to Blackbelt, you know, in terms of so Brené Brown has a lovely one, which is The Reckoning, the Rumble and the Revolution, which it's a lovely and accessible and practical type process. There's also others. Ross Harris has a few, there's quite a few on on market, which I'd really encourage you to explore and train your people because as I say, it's life changing for the individual and a huge shift for a workforce. When you have everyone equipped with this particular skill, a reference that already. But looking for the signs early is really important. Um, those lag indicators. So you're already coming down the spectrum in to burn out and into the, the higher grade stress response. As I say, not impossible to come back, of course, but it is harder and more expensive than if you get in early. So finding a way to get those lead indicators picked up. So that's erosion of quality outcomes in in particular. And they'll be nuanced things for your organization as well. But just defining and measuring those lead indicators so that, you know, early where there is something problematic happening in your workforce is really important. Genuinely valuing wellbeing is another one that I would encourage organisations to move towards. Wellbeing is something that we've all kind of known for a while we need to do. I think it hasn't overall been done that well and I don't know that it's been that genuinely valued. So bringing that through and genuinely looking at well-being as a meaningful business metric is really important because we see that it does flow through to dollars, it does through flow through to genuine outputs for your business. So it's not, you know, a soft, fluffy thing. It is a real commercial thing that that needs to have time and oxygen. Trading mindset management as a valuable skill. So I would really say that mindset management in at least your leaders is as important as business acumen and some of their technical skills because it is what is going to equip them to be their best selves, which is going to help the people around them be their best selves. And it really will generate a calmer work environment and help to suppress some of these stress things. Acknowledging the overwhelm and communicating a path out is really important. I see. And just a tiny little caveat around the industrial relations impact of that. But there are ways that you can safely acknowledge that there's overwhelm present, acknowledge that there's been certain triggers in the market, in the workforce, in the workspace that have been a little bit tricky and stressful and so forth, acknowledging it and then communicating how you're going to move forward. Can you'd be surprised the impact that can have. A lot of organizations we see don't want to acknowledge that it's present at all. And sometimes people feeling heard can go a really long way. And actively work to keep the workforce energized and focused. Which having that as a as a dedicated focus and a strategic outcome which we're seeing happen a lot more now, will really put you in great stead. So the keys to an energized workforce purpose is central. So we and that can be like a big purpose, like a legacy thing, but it can also just be like quite a small thing in that I understand that this task that I'm doing right now has a material impact on the business. So it matters everything from answering the phone to talk to prospects of existing customers or stakeholders through to at the coalface delivery and everything in between. Having that link to strategy and purpose. So I understand that that what I'm doing matters is really important and a huge factor in keeping energized and productive. Jim principles I think a lot of you will be familiar with. But these come from the Resilience Project from Hugh van Cuylenburg's work. So that is looking at embedding practices of gratitude, empathy and mindfulness. And they've done a lot of research around the impact this has on productivity, which is meaningful and tangible and very important. They have a wonderful 21 day challenge around embedding these processes and using a diary. And yeah, they have they have a couple of different different mechanisms for embedding those which, as I say, they go a long way. Structures for efficiency. We've talked about that your, your processes and just making sure that you're not making it hard for people to do their jobs. As I said, that webinar last week, we delved into that in little more detail, but just making sure that you're making you're giving people as frictionless an experience of their job as possible. We'll have we'll have a really material impact. Meaningful and regular feedback. So not just the 12 month review, although I do believe that still has a place, but just having structures in place for meaningful, regular feedback that things like check ins, team huddles or whatever you want to call them, town halls and just making sure that there is an easy mechanism for our feedback to flow and be captured. On a regular basis. Tailored people, management and or development plans are very, very important for keeping people engaged and focused on what matters. And so that is where we'd look at things like cascading goals. So that's from your Strat plan down to individual development plans we'd look at. I'm a big advocate of the Sprint methodology, so having, you know, 6 to 12 week goals so that they're attainable and realistic and not creeping out and don't seem like a relevant thing to focus on today and to the extent possible, really tailoring down to individual requirements and needs so that it's not kind of that six page pro forma that, you know, two blocks of it are relevant, but really tailoring that into the individual so that they have something meaningful to work to and a structure to keep focused on what's going to add value to the organization. Positive narrative. So Shauna Core and Michelle Gillen at the happiness since she do a lot of work have done and do a lot of work around positive psychology and the impacts of positive psychology. It's really important to keep people focused on a positive narrative. That doesn't mean don't acknowledge some of the scary and not so good things that are going on, But it's just the focus is on the positive narrative and also the future focused narrative. So we're looking forward and moving forward in a positive and powerful way. This is something from a psychological perspective that really does energize people and keep them focused and productive. Case two a culture of productivity. A productive culture is one that generally people are going to be more engaged and have a higher tolerance for stresses, which is really where we're wanting to get to. So we've covered a lot of things, but communication and connection, very community and connection. So looking at the social context of work as well, having a connection to the organization and what we're all playing for will be a more productive workspace. Purpose and meaning, again, can be big purpose and legacy can be very small. This task matters and that there's meaning to to what I'm doing. And it's not just what I perceive as a pointless activity. Leading a communication here, I would say, you know, we have to be careful about over communicating. And so just making sure that communication is clear and impactful and that we're putting it forward in a way that makes it clear why it's relevant to the people that we're communicating to. Reasonable expectations where you're setting unreasonable expectations. We see quite high levels of overload and overwhelm. So just being clear about what can actually be achieved. And so you're making sure that you are having the clarity around how to add impact and then a reasonable expectation around timeline. Efficient processes. I know I harp on about it a lot, but it is just something that we see not done brilliantly on market and it can fundamentally change your organization with not much time or money that it is the low hanging fruit. But yet almost every almost every people related stress point in your organization. Supportive management and leadership. Again, equipping your leader to be supportive and have people feel supported and also for them themselves to feel supported within your organization. Reasonable timelines again and measurable timelines. So 6 to 12 weeks, depending on your workflow, I'd really have those sprint gaits so that you're having a meaningful goal that you're working towards within within a reasonable timeline sense of agency. So that's my actions matter and have impact equipping your your team so that they they do feel that what they do has an impact and does genuinely matter even in a small way. That doesn't have to be you know I have custody of decision making. It's really just that I am having an impact on my environment and therefore, I'll take more care with my action. Connection to strategy. Really, really important. I haven't gone into it in depth in this session. I saw some familiar names on the registration list, which. So it's lovely when people know how you sound and turn up. Anyway, those people will have seen in previous sessions talking about the importance of that link to strategy and daily action. But it really, again, can be such a shift in your culture and the way your organization functions for people to understand how even small things are actually strategic action. And that that strategy isn't something just for boards that sits in a dusty corner and gets cold. It's a living thing and it's the organizations. Why? Very quickly. And we're just about on time. Key trends on market that I just wanted to I've referenced a lot of them, but I did want to explicitly talk about them here very quickly, just so that you're kind of aware of what else is going on across the market. We're seeing wellness as a separate strategy and budget line item with associated KPIs. This is something that we're seeing driven by board. Which is fantastic news, I think for for by and large, I think it's fantastic news and that the wellness strategy is really, you know, have having a lot more oxygen and a lot more meaningful input and importantly, that it's being measured in a meaningful way that that connection to business outcomes is being taken seriously in a much bigger way than it has in previous years, which I personally think is a fantastic step forward. And we're seeing a lot of focus on equipping leaders to manage burnout. It's as I said, it is recognized as a huge trend. We see it in almost 100% of businesses and organizations that we talk to. And there is that recognition that your leaders and your managers are the best placed resources to deal with it early. And so really focusing on equipping them to do that before we see it bear fruit further down the line with the more expensive outcomes. I mean, it's not great, but I should be careful how I say that. It's not great because we don't want to see it in the workforce. But I'm very pleased to see that burn out is we're seeing it as key risk on most corporate risk registers. Now, why I'm glad to say that is because it's something that hasn't been talked about. It's something that a lot of the time has been put on to the individual, like it's somehow your fault that you're burnt out. But it we are seeing it on most corporate risk registers. That means that it is in the purview of the boards. It means that it needs risk mitigation around it. And that, again, there is that recognition that this is something that costs an organization money, that has a material impact on honor organizations performance and is something that that genuinely needs to be managed in the same way that we do, you know, economic risks and legal risks and compliance risks. This, this is something that matters and is real. And so we're seeing that on a solid most of the corporate risk registers we see now and the auditing of systems to bridge talent, the talent gap. Obviously, talent gaps are a pretty key risk for for most of us, even if it's only on particular skills. I think almost every organization experiences a level of it and the auditing your systems to see. So that's your systems and processes and digital tools that you use, the whole network of things, of how you get things done, auditing that to, to get to a point where you can cope with your current resourcing level while the market works through what it needs to work through without eroding quality outcomes. So we are seeing that it's a more standardized approach now. Fabulous. So thank you so much for sticking with me through that. We do have time for Q&A. The summary of that is overload. We would be referring to structural issues around processes and actual workload being greater than possible output. Overwhelm is the mindset element, so it's the actual feeling that often accompanies overload but doesn't necessarily need to. It can be present without it. Both are critical risks to a business and need to be actively managed. Leaders really ought to be equipped to manage these risks in the same way that they manage other risks in their in their roles. Critical appraisal of your process, including the time loading, is a great place to start for quick wins. I really do want to emphasize that it doesn't need to be a lengthy, in-depth or hugely costly process, and the wins you can get out of it really are pretty, pretty mind blowing. With pretty minimal changes. And finally, building a productive culture lowers risks associated with overload, overwhelm and burnout. Fabulous. Thank you so much, everyone. I can see a few questions. I'm happy to. Take. Perfect. So there was a question around my email. So it's just I'll type of in here as well, but. So it's karlie.dlpa.com. So if if you would like to get the copy of the recording from last week's webinar, please reach out. More than happy to send that. So then we have a question in here. When employees are overwhelmed but not from overload, what else could they be overwhelmed from? And how do we manage that? If it's not related to workload. Yeah. Fantastic. So where it comes from, it depends on your particular culture. The example that I was using with the recent client who had extreme overwhelm but not overload, that was really driven by lack of role clarity. So people were kind of just doing, I call it jazz hands busy that it's like and genuinely like they felt overwhelmed. They thought that they were doing things that were required of them. They were hanging out mostly in that bottom right quadrant covey. And it's not their fault. They genuinely, genuinely thought that they were doing the right thing. And it was just because they didn't they hadn't known as an organisation, they hadn't articulated what was required of people. And so that lack of role, clarity, people were doing their very best. But it was just so removed from the strategy that there was a lot of a lot of pointless busy. So it can be can come from there, it can come from different cultural elements, it can come from prolonged stress. So there is a point in our stress response where we actually lose our ability to problem solve. So if it's gone on for a long time, the very small problems can actually feel like massive problems. So you can get quite an extreme stress response to small things. So we do we certainly do see that at play. And there's a whole host of things around this which are really mostly to do with culture in terms of then what you do about them.It really is mindset management mostly. So equipping your team so well, I should say with the client, obviously what we did was provided training to their leaders to manage mindset and teams and high performing teams and everything that goes with that and also the structure around role clarity so that people were making sure that they were doing high impact things. But there's a lot that you can can do around this, which will be a little bit driven by the particulars of the culture that are generating the overwhelm. But I mean, the other thing to reference in there is I think that some workplace has have a little bit of an addiction to overwhelm. Like once you've hung out there for a while, it becomes the new normal. And so that that really is around cultural change. And we'd work with training, training your leaders to craft a new narrative in that example. And so then we have hopefully that answered your question. And I should reference on any of these. If you have more specific questions or particular use cases, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn. And I'm more than happy to have a real life covey or a virtual covey and we can talk through talk through your circumstances and can make some entry level recommendations for you. Where can you find out more about how to apply the general principle? So that's the Resilience project. If you just Google the Resilience Project by Hugh van Cuylenburg. I think I might have been wrong on the book but they have a lot of free resources. There's also a similar framework, which is acceptance and commitment therapy. So that's Russ Harris and he has he is so giving with his resources. So there's a heap if you Google Russ Harris, there's a heap of free templates that he has on his site as well. Or again, if there's if you have a particular thing that you're after, feel free to email me or contact me on LinkedIn and I can I can send you a link. I think I've come. Everything. Give it another 15 seconds or so in case anyone's typing. A very long question. Thank you all so much for your time. As I say, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or via email. The best thing about my job is getting to talk to wonderful people. So I'm always open to obligation free conversations and I love problem solving. I live for problem solving. So more than more than happy to jump on. Okay. Fabulous. Is there another? Fabulous. Okay. Thank you all so much. I know we're all so busy, so I very, very genuinely thank you for choosing to spend your time to listen to me. I hope you have a wonderful day. Rest of day, rest of week. And I hope to see you all on future sessions.