Practicing Organizational Self-Care
Getting Real about Workplace Boundaries, Capacity, and Breathing Room
Late last year, I led a webinar on the topic of burnout prevention.
Despite a description that explained the presentation would focus on what organizations can do to prevent burnout, some participants were surprised that I wasn’t focusing on individual self-care as the solution to burnout.
I believe self-care makes a difference in our lives, but as a workplace culture consultant, I wouldn’t be effective if I were only training and working in the realm of individual self-care. People’s surprise at the focus of the webinar was a reminder that in American culture, we’re often conditioned to believe that the individual is the cause and solution to every problem.
This led me to publish a post in January about the importance of “leveling up” and thinking beyond the individual to build healthier work environments. This month, I wanted to explore what it looks like to move beyond individual self-care into the realm of organizational self-care.
There are many self-care practices that can be applied at both individual and organizational levels. In this post, I focus on three types of interconnected self-care: assessing capacity, setting boundaries, and building in breathing room.
Assessing Capacity
We can’t talk about self-care without talking about capacity and the ways we might be a tad…unrealistic in our assessment of it.
Last year, I wrote about delusions of capacity. It’s one of those topics that people often bring up to me—that essay definitely strikes a chord.
Often, we’re not honest with ourselves about our capacity. Let’s face it, with all of our obligations, being honest about capacity can be tough. We might fear being perceived as weak or not committed, or of letting people down. We might fear that if we acknowledge the ways we’re operating over capacity, everything will fall apart.
When leaders and managers consistently overextend themselves, even with the best intentions, it can lead to feelings of resentment, frustration, exhaustion, and anger—either internalized or expressed in outbursts.
Similarly, when organizations consistently operate beyond capacity, this can lead to stress contagion, eruptions of toxic conflict, and employee disengagement, burnout, and turnover.
What might it look like for an organization to realistically assess its capacity?
Assessing capacity is an ongoing practice. People managers are in a key position to recognize when their teams are at or beyond capacity by maintaining regular, open communication about workloads and work-life conflicts.
Leaders also play a crucial role in asking and listening to managers about resource limitations. Staff surveys can offer insight into workloads and energy levels. A software like Mentimeter, one of my go-to training tools, can be used to anonymously poll staff during meetings to offer a snapshot of where things stand.
Employee capacity is not fixed; it changes depending on work and personal factors, which makes it important to assess capacity in an ongoing way. When we realistically assess and consider capacity, we then have more information to make decisions about resources, priorities, and timelines, which leads me to…
Setting Boundaries
For individuals, boundaries include the limits we set around what behavior we tolerate from other people and what activities we participate in. For organizations, boundaries include limits set around what behaviors are tolerated at work, hours of operation and what services we provide and to whom.
For people and organizations, the process of setting and maintaining boundaries includes considering our values, responsibilities, goals, and capacity (more on that later).
Contrary to what I believed for a while, boundaries do not have to be rigid to be healthy. Nedra Tawwab, previously quoted on this blog, schooled me on healthy boundaries in her book, Set Boundaries and Find Peace. She writes:
“Whereas porous boundaries lead to unhealthy closeness (enmeshment), rigid ones are a self-protective mechanism meant to build distance. This typically comes from a fear of vulnerability or a history of being taken advantage of. People with rigid boundaries do not allow exceptions to their stringent rules even when it would be healthy for them to do so.”
That last sentence hit me like a ton of bricks.
I had long gotten the message that I needed to be consistent in my boundaries, which I thought meant being rigid and not making exceptions. The idea that some measure of flexibility is part of healthy boundary-setting gave me something to think about.
What might this look like at work?
Let’s say someone has a boundary to not work late or on weekends. In a special situation, that person may be flexible on their boundary to take care of something that needs addressing to avoid adverse impacts.
This is not the same as having a weak or “porous” boundary, which would look like frequently working after hours despite not wanting to and consistently neglecting other areas of life.
Having overly rigid boundaries could look like not making an exception even if the situation calls for it. Overly rigid boundaries may be a sign that a person fears that if they make even a single exception to their boundary, they’ll be taken advantage of. The adage, “If you give an inch, they’ll take a mile,” exemplifies this.
But what if we give an inch, and only an inch?
And what if employees are setting rigid boundaries in reaction to their workplace’s porous boundaries?
When organizations fail to set healthy boundaries, individuals are the last line of defense for protecting themselves, though being put in that position is often stressful.
A person with porous boundaries may easily be taken advantage of in an organization that also has porous boundaries, therefore some staff may enact rigid boundaries in response to working for such an organization.
Setting Organizational Boundaries
When I was the Prevention Director for a nonprofit, I was in charge of handling outreach requests. We were a small but growing organization and our primary services included 24-hour crisis response, which was consistently taxing on our capacity.
At first, I tried to fulfill every request, but quickly saw how continuing down that path was unsustainable.
As an organization, we set a boundary that we wouldn’t participate in outreach events unless we had at least three weeks’ prior notice. We included this information on our outreach form and reinforced it with community partners.
Could we be flexible in certain situations? Sure, but it allowed us to set general expectations for ourselves and others around how much advanced notice we needed. This eliminated the constant sense of urgency around outreach requests and allowed us to better manage our resources.
Other ways we set boundaries were: if an outreach event were 4-5 hours long, we could maybe commit to being there for 2 hours. Or if we couldn’t be there at all, we could supply promotional materials.
Setting boundaries wasn’t just about saying no or denying requests, it was also about figuring out what we could say yes to.
It was part of the process of building healthy partnerships and being open to collaboration in ways that honored our needs and capacity.
We were a crisis response organization, but a resource fair isn’t a crisis.
It’s important for leaders and managers to use their best judgment in setting team and organizational boundaries to minimize stress, resist unnecessary cultures of urgency, and manage resources appropriately.
Building in Breathing Room
Recently, I met up with a longtime friend who was in town visiting with her husband and 6-month-old baby. It was a work day, so I’d blocked off my schedule in advance to stay flexible and spend time with them when they were available. When we checked in by phone that morning, my friend told me she thought they’d be able to meet me for lunch at 12:15.
“Do you want to say 12:30, just in case?” I asked.
“No, let’s say 12:15, that should work,” she replied.
“Okay,” I told her, “but I have an errand to run and if you’re running behind, it’s no problem. I can pop around to different places near the restaurant, just let me know if you need more time.”
She thanked me. And ultimately, she texted a few times over the course of the next hour to let me know that they did, in fact, need more time.
We ended up meeting around 12:40 and all was well. I was able to do my errand without feeling rushed and get us a table at the restaurant that was ready for them when they arrived. Of course, she apologized and said, “It always takes longer than I think it will to get out of the door.”
I told her there was no need to apologize. This, to me, is the beauty of breathing room. I didn’t have a meeting to rush back for, so I didn’t have to stress out about a delay to our timeline. My friend is a new mother and certainly doesn’t need added stress around getting her baby ready to go out.
By building in breathing room for myself, I could offer them breathing room. We had a long, leisurely lunch, and I was grateful for the quality time with them.
Breathing Room at Work
That feeling of things always taking longer than we think they will isn’t just for our personal lives. It plays out frequently at work in the tasks and projects that take longer than expected to complete.
What does it look like to build in breathing room to plans, projects, and daily work? There are many ways workplaces can do this, but here are a few:
Plan projects in detail. Being detailed in project planning ensures you’re not glossing over important steps and allows for realistic assessment about the time and resources needed to successfully accomplish a project. This will likely lead to smoother and more successful implementation.
Be agile in project management. Some deadlines are fixed and inevitably create a sense of urgency, like grant deadlines. Other project timelines are more flexible. By consistently assessing capacity, leaders can adapt timelines as needed—and communicate updates to timelines so that expectations are clear.
Build breathing room into calendars. Are work calendars filled with back-to-back meetings or appointments that don’t allow time for things like checking and responding to email, taking breaks to decompress, working on projects, or simply catching up on tasks and loose ends? A calendar is not just for meetings; it’s a time and workflow management tool. Depending on how we best work, putting space between meetings, scheduling blocks of do-not-disturb time, or scheduling time for specific work tasks outside of meetings are ways to use our calendars to build in breathing room and space for getting work done.
Prioritize “relational pauses.” This practice looks like scheduling and leading intentional conversations about how work is impacting us as people. This Harvard Business Review article describes such pauses as ways “to bolster genuine and authentic connections between employees that enable individual well-being.”
At its core, breathing room is about being realistic: recognizing that the “unexpected” will happen and is therefore expected, recognizing all of the aspects of project planning and implementation, and recognizing our human and organizational need for pauses to rest, connect, reflect and decompress.
To effectively prevent burnout, individual self-care won’t cut it. Organizational self-care is essential to building healthier environments.
How does your organization practice self-care…or how would you like it to? Share your thoughts in the comments:
Additional reading on organizational self-care:
The Organizational Self-Care Checklist
Stop Framing Wellness Programs Around Self-Care
I help leaders build work environments that enhance collaboration, engagement, effectiveness and well-being. Visit my website to learn more or schedule a free consultation.