How To Manage Your Team's Mental Load

VICTORIA BROWN

Mental load is the amount of cognitive effort that is required to complete your job - and I want to spend this article focusing on your team's mental load and why as a leader you need to a) be aware of it, and b) look at ways to reduce it.

Your people's mental load is the combination of both the physical and mental effort that is required to perform tasks, track their workload and workflow and navigate daily life at work. Mental load is a critical factor in determining productivity and can have a significant impact on an employee's mental health. Leaders who ignore their team's mental load can have a detrimental effect on their team's performance, their people's job satisfaction, and ultimately the company's bottom line.

When employees are overwhelmed with mental load, it can lead to burnout, increased stress levels, and reduced job satisfaction - everything feels thick and hard to move through, processes are cloudy or confusing, communication doesn't flow and your team feel like they aren't adding value. You know what it's like when you don't feel like you're doing anything worthwhile, you feel low vibe AF, demotivated, tired and over it. This can result in lower productivity levels, increased absenteeism, drops in performance and unhealthy culture.

The goal for you as leaders is to empower your teams to do their best work. That means helping set up processes that are streamlined and effective, removing obstacles and distractions and making sure people are being looked after holistically. 

Here are the things I want you to think about doing to reduce your team's mental load:

• Goodbye to unnecessary meetings. If they don't have a real purpose, or require people to be there - kill them. At the very least, set up meeting rules for example meetings are preferable before 12pm and no meetings on Thurs or Fridays. Creating clear space for focus and output.
• Remove distractions. Encourage people to turn off their notifications and check them at a time that is convenient and works for the workflow. For example once an hour rather than every second that a new message comes in. What else is distracting and how can you help remove it? Noisy neighbours? Overly active emails or platforms?
• Manage email pollution. Set up clear rules for who needs to be in the "TO" line, and who needs to be in the "CC" line. For example: People in the TO line are people that are expected to take action from the email information, and people in the CC line are only expected to be across the information. That way you can all set up inbox rules that put CC emails in a folder to review when you have time rather than have them clogging up your inbox.
• Talk about Life/Work balance with your team. Encourage people to create this for themselves, encourage people to use their leave, provide support and resources.
• Set up processes and optimise as needed. What tasks do you guys do all the time? Are there simple processes set up to manage those tasks? Free up brain space by making basic things easy - and allow your team to focus on higher value work. Make sure processes add value and make things more efficient, you don't want them to be "busywork" or overly complicated. Ask for feedback and optimise.
• Make sure the culture is positive. Stress and conflict can pile on mental load, so what can you do with your team to create a light, fun, enjoyable culture that everyone WANTS to be in and empowers people to crush their roles.

Keeping your team's mental load as a KPI just for you is a great leadership hack, you measure it in the effectiveness of your team and it encourages you to review things from an operational viewpoint but also holistically look at HOW your team is getting work done.

Good luck! 👑

VB