Women Executives: Will returning to the office mean a return to burnout?
Let’s start with the good news. According to the latest McKinsey Women in the Workplace Report, Women’s representation in the C-suite is the highest it has ever been. Around 32% of top executive roles are filled by women. Hooray! This is vitally important to organizational performance.
The report also reports that women working remotely during the pandemic reported less fatigue and burnout, more focused time on their work, and more ambition to seek promotion. Women found remote work empowering for career advancement while improving work and personal life balance.
For many of us, less commute time itself yielded better work-life balance. Commuting time was replaced with exercise, meal planning, improved sleep, and time with family and friends. Yet, organizations have now adopted return-to-office policies, with 80-90% of organizations requiring 2-3 days on-site. Will returning to the office mean a return to burnout?
Maybe not if you return to work with solid lifestyle pillars that mitigate burnout. While executive leadership coaching can help with burnout by assisting leaders in navigating work relationships, it doesn’t address lifestyle factors or increased health risks such as cardiovascular disease that develop from excess stress. (Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10909938/)
On the other hand, executive health coaching addresses an individual’s health risks that may worsen burnout and supports lifestyle measures to lessen disease risks and offset burnout. When health coaching combines physiologic methods to assess the autonomic nervous system with heart rate variability https://firstbeat.com, personal insights are gained, and small lifestyle changes that may be lifesaving can be garnered.
Returning to the office doesn’t need to mean returning to burnout. A lifestyle plan with solid pillars of diet and nourishment, exercise bolstered with sleep, and stress management can be your ticket out of burnout.
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