How We’re Tackling Burnout and Supporting Mental Health

May is officially Mental Health Awareness month, but for many of us the past 14 months have made it impossible to continue sweeping mental wellbeing under the rug. While the pandemic is hopefully coming to an end, the ramifications of the past year are profound.

As we’ve gathered recent employee feedback and kept our eye on larger trends, we know people are tired. Many of us have been experiencing burnout. Our resilience levels are low, and we need to replenish and take care of ourselves.

With that in mind, we’re doubling down on our existing efforts to help everyone establish better work-life balance in the face of the pandemic and beyond. Here are a few of the new initiatives I’m most excited to announce.

Taking Time Off to Truly Recharge
We’ve learned from employee surveys that it’s hard to truly unplug when everyone else is still working. With that in mind, we piloted bi-monthly office closures last summer to give everyone more long weekends and the feedback was resoundingly positive. In addition to our 19 annual company holidays, we’ve decided to take time off collectively. Similar to our annual end-of-year shutdown, our entire company will be closed from June 28th-July 5th this summer to allow everyone to truly unplug and recharge.

Investing in Mental Health and Wellbeing
Time off is essential, but so is actively prioritizing our mental health day to day. Our benefits support the whole-person and include a host of resources to improve wellness and combat stress and burnout, including

• Mental health platform Modern Health
• Annual stipend for health, wellness, childcare and much more
• Quarterly Thumbtack Bucks to hire local pros.

Helping Managers Grow in Unprecedented Times
Managers’ responsibilities have increased dramatically, as they supported their teams through the pandemic and transition to remote work. We want to support them and give them the tools they need to create safe and supportive work environments. We’ve partnered with executive coaching program BetterUp and Modern Health’s ‘Manager Circles’ to give our people managers personalized coaching and introduced new training sessions on learning how to recognize burnout in yourself and others and create a psychologically safe space.

Tackling Zoom Fatigue Head-On
We’ve always been intentional about creating an effective, efficient culture around meetings. But working from home has posed new challenges, and demands a new approach to protecting and valuing employees’ time. As part of our shift to a virtual-first workplace, we are establishing common meeting hours to help employees better manage their schedules — particularly while working across time zones — and have more focused meeting-free working time.

Our people are what makes Thumbtack such a special place to be and I’m proud of the way we’ve navigated adversity together as a team. As we re-architect our workplace, we are committed to providing employees with the most positive work environment possible so everyone can thrive.

If you read this and see yourself in this future at Thumbtack, check out our open roles at https://www.thumbtack.com/careers/.