How Hobbies Help With Team Burnout

When I joined Wrike and had my meet & greet meeting with my new team, I was amused. During that introduction, I met people who studied Finnish and Japanese, travelled to far and fabulous destinations, sang, played guitar or electro music, led online communities, studied philosophy, crafted custom accessories, collected and customized board games, did climbing, and participated in racing.

It was the best group of people who were contributing to the team every day. But it got me thinking — why are hobbies and external interests so important to creating a great team?

Work gives and takes energy

The first reason is obvious: you spend mental energy on your tasks at work, on collaboration, on meetings, on context switching, and so much more.

In turn, you gain energy from the satisfaction of achieved goals, completed tasks, received recognition, being appreciated, and effective teamwork.

Remote work has changed the definition of satisfaction

In a good team, people work for the benefit of their teammates. Being a FE developer, I often worked off-clock just because our QAs also worked late and collaborating together helped us to achieve our goals and feel awesome. When I took on a Scrum master role, I spent a lot of time preparaing for retrospectives and 1:1 meetings to make sure the team had everything we needed.

A truly great team is one where satisfaction comes from teamwork. Teamwork is defined with time spent working together. That time is defined with a number of collaborative tasks.

Working remotely has made work more individual, with every team member having their own separate tasks. They still can collaborate across different functions (like developers and QA). But there’s nothing like random discussions, knowledge sharing or even mob programming that was much easier to achieve when people were working from the same room.

Recognitions, appreciation, and teamwork are felt differently now. And completed tasks and achieved goals often exist just in your laptop.

People became alone both physically and psychologically. Work still takes a lot of energy, but it’s much harder to get it back being remote.

Hobbies help people to adapt

Remote workers need energy sources other than just work. It can come from family and friends, or it can be something creative, like working with your hands. Whatever your hobby, it should be something that exists just for you.

Hobbies give a lot of energy that can’t be gained from work anymore. People want to get this energy.

Hobbies change the definition of motivation

People are often motivated by their most energetic area, and this is usually their hobbies, not their work. And that’s fair enough.

This has to be accepted and leveraged by teams and their leaders. People still can be motivated by their professional development — but it’s important to look at the wider picture of how this fits into their daily life.

Some developers can be motivated by creating a working code — but, likely for them, coding is also a hobby, and they may switch to their own coding project after work.

It’s hard to motivate people with some virtual goals that exist, are being measured and discussed just in their laptops.

They also can’t be motivated by good work energy anymore, staying alone.

Energy is essential to survive in uncertainty

Creative work is, by nature, uncertain. How to do the regular task, what management decision to take — it requires mental energy and stamina to complete. If you’re out of energy, uncertain workloads and tasks can lead to burnout.

When uncertainty grows, with changing priorities and waiting on strategic decisions, it becomes even harder to draw the energy to keep moving forward. It’s risky to rely on energy coming from your work when things are uncertain. Try to look outside for more inspiration.

Interesting people tie the team together

The more team members have their own sources of energy outside of work, the more sustainable the team is. Every hobby they have brings energy back into the team. The more interesting people you have in your team, the more energy they bring.

More energy you have, the more chances there are to adapt to any difficulties.