Creativity in a culture of busy

Is it possible to lean into the world of burnout and move from surviving to thriving at work? Yes, it is.

We live in a culture of busy. We text. We email. We Slack. We pack our days with 30-minute back-to-back meetings. And then the exhaustion sets in, and with that comes poor decision-making, irrational responses to challenging conversations and forgetfulness. What’s actually happening is burnout.

68% of tech workers fall victim to burnout, and interestingly it happens more now than when we worked in offices. In fact, the condition has become synonymous with tech jobs. So what exactly is it?

Burnout has three dimensions:

• Feelings of total depletion or exhaustion
• Increased mental distance from your job
• Negative and cynical feelings towards your job

In short, it undermines creativity.

In the Xero design world, creativity is core to how we work. It drives how we solve customer problems, how we design beautiful experiences and also how we connect with one another.

When we are not inherently creative, we are stagnant. But I believe that nurturing creativity in a busy environment is very possible.

I recently spoke at designconf about the three different ways I’ve encouraged my design communities to become agents of change, unleash their creativity and safeguard their wellbeing at work.

Put your own oxygen mask on first

It’s code red safety 101: when everything starts to break down, start within and work your way out.

How can you possibly nurture creativity, or inspire others to nurture theirs if you’re disconnected, exhausted and frazzled? So, be curious, and be honest with yourself. Pay attention to what’s going on in your mind and body. What do you notice? Are you present? Are you engaged? Are you even interested?

When I inherited the design and research team at Xero, we were in a real pickle.

Our attrition rate was climbing, the entire design leadership team had either quit or was about to quit, and relationships were strained across the business. It felt like a pivotal moment in time as a leader.

This was a role that I knew would require every ounce of creativity that I had, so keeping my own oxygen mask on was paramount because in order to be successful, my baseline had to be stable and strong.

I can distinctly remember one time being on a global design all hands call. Things up until that point had been hard, and I was hitting a breaking point. So, I took myself off of mute a couple of minutes in and told the team that I would be leaving early to go to a yoga class. That was a game-changing moment for our organisation.

Showing vulnerability and trusting the folks on the call to respect that vulnerability meant we had reached a new level in our relationship, and I had personally demonstrated what I needed from others in order to help me show up and do good work.

It’s not selfish, or slacking off. It’s owning your situation and then letting others know it’s completely appropriate to own theirs as well.

Know — and more importantly, ask — for what you need

Knowing what you need is one thing, and most of us do. The harder part is asking for what you need.

I like to think about it as building awareness around what does and doesn’t work for you. For example, if Zoom calls affect how you work, move to ‘walk and talk’ meetings instead, or think differently about how many meetings you take each day.

While these are specific examples, this thinking can be applied to many scenarios.

In a previous role at Microsoft, I decided to get my yoga teacher training certificate. It was something I could do mostly outside of business hours, but it did require one Tuesday afternoon each week. I had just had my first kid and was also navigating design management for the first time in my career. As a Type A personality, I was unsettled, stressed out and scared of what was ahead.

Yoga training was a reliable and trusted place to find balance in an otherwise completely terrifying new era of people management and motherhood, and despite being completely demanding on my mental and spiritual growth, it was also my reprieve. It provided me with the right backdrop to learn how to be a better manager, deepening my empathy towards my team and helping me reframe situations with them which in turn allowed us to think more creatively in how we solved problems.

I’m not saying everyone needs to get a yoga teacher certification, but I do think everyone needs to ask themselves what they need creatively depending on where they are in their career. Then, they need to talk to their manager about it and build it into their work week.

Whether you are new to the design and research world or a seasoned leader, our personal growth plays a huge role in our jobs, so seeking the right balance can be the difference between being miserable or finding joy in what you do.

Let things break

In technology circles, this concept is known as ‘fail fast’, but the sentiment is slightly nuanced — to let things break, early.

When I suggest that design teams just let a situation break, there’s a very visceral reaction to it. A fear of failure creeps in; one which often short-circuits the ability to let the situation actually break.

When you let things break, you let things change — and change is what most situations need in a culture of busy. With change comes opportunity; an opportunity to shift perspectives, create a new structure around how you work and therefore allow for more creativity.

I had the good fortune of starting my career at Amazon. At that time, the entire company fit in one building and we were at the very beginning of the tech industry’s UX journey. It was brutal and exciting at the same time. We spent long hours chartering new territory around what it means to do design in tech, alongside exploring ways to build product.

During my time there, I was tasked with redesigning the entire Marks & Spencer website on the Amazon platform, and as the project progressed, it became increasingly apparent that we were not going to succeed. There were too many moving parts and unknowns, with not enough resources — leading to something that’s familiar territory even in 2021.

My manager at the time, Tamara Adlin, kept saying ‘you have to let it break, let things fall down so that the right change can happen’. I resisted, hard. When I started to reach a breaking point, though, I realised that what she was saying made total sense.

Do I let the project break, or do I let the project break me?

Well, I let the project break. But if I’d let it break early enough, I may have seen — or even been — the change that was needed for success. If we let ourselves break, we’re of no help to anyone, much less ourselves. Signs appear much sooner than we think if only we allow ourselves to tune in enough to listen.

So, here we are, sitting firmly in this culture of busy and depleting our creativity stores like a well. But I believe that we can be the change; that we can unlock more creative prowess by understanding what we need and then setting up the right boundaries and channels to help us thrive.

If we can pay much closer attention to what is happening in our bodies and minds, we can enable better decision-making, and positively impact how we work, how we hire, how we build teams and how we grow leaders.

Want to work somewhere where creativity is embedded into the culture, and not just a buzzword? We’re hiring design and research roles across Australia, New Zealand, Canada, US and UK—I hope you’ll join us!