Hi!

Burnout is often discussed as an issue for individuals to manage. But during our April Comm Convo, Beyond Self-Care to Structural Change, the discussion focused on the systems, expectations, and leadership habits that shape how sustainable our jobs are.

Our speakers Arran Attridge (Attridge Communications), Nikki Little (Franco), Amanda Guisbond (Iambic), and Barbara Palmer (Broad Perspectives Consulting) discussed how burnout develops inside comms teams, why urgency drives our profession, and where leaders can influence team capacity, boundaries, and ways of working.

Watch the replay here.

Here are our top 10 takeaways from the conversation:

1. Reframe how you define burnout beyond hours logged (friction vs. flow). For many communicators, it's less about how much they're working and more about the quality of that experience. Persistent stakeholder churn, repetitive revision cycles, and misaligned collaboration drain energy in ways that a heavy-but-energizing workload often doesn't. Measuring outcomes over output applies here too.

2. Recognize that high performers often hide burnout by continuing to deliver. The erosion shows up subtly first: slower decision-making, less creativity, small mistakes, and a gradual loss of the energy someone once brought, which is why knowing yourself and your people well enough to catch those shifts early matters.

3. Ask whether a crunch is "for now" or permanent before absorbing it. A sprint with a visible end point feels manageable in a way that open-ended overload does not, and naming that distinction out loud, for yourself or your team, changes how the load actually lands.

4. Consider right-fit work a structural burnout prevention lever at the organizational level. When comms teams are persistently working on misaligned accounts, programs, or initiatives, burnout accelerates at the source, and no amount of individual resilience compensates for that mismatch over time.

5. Build the trade-off conversation into how work gets scoped. Framing capacity discussions around outcomes (three things done well versus 10 at 50 percent) anchors the conversation in business results rather than putting people in the position of simply saying no.

6. Distinguish between glass balls and rubber balls before deciding what can drop. Being intentional about which commitments have real consequences if delayed versus which ones can shift is a discipline worth building, and actually letting some rubber balls drop is often the only thing that prompts an honest conversation about capacity and resources.

7. Treat meeting hygiene as a capacity tool, rather than a scheduling preference. "No agenda, no attenda" is a real policy: knowing the purpose, your role, and whether someone else could cover frees up decision-making bandwidth and quietly returns control of the calendar.

8. Time the delivery of your work as strategically as you produce it. Sending a deliverable at 4 p.m. invites a response that pulls you back in during protected hours; being deliberate about when you surface work gives you more control over when the feedback loop actually starts.

9. Examine which sources of pressure are self-generated. Some of the weight in our roles comes from a communicator's own expectations. Pausing to ask whether something is genuinely wrong or just not your way, whether in editing someone's draft or reacting to a strategic direction, is worth the moment it takes.

10. Know what actually helps you disconnect, and treat it as operational. The "This is PR, not the ER" mantra remains a useful gut-check on urgency, and identifying the specific activities that genuinely break the mental loop is as much a work strategy as a personal one, especially in biopharma, where the mission can blur those lines.

Burnout can be a tough topic to discuss openly in our profession. By hosting conversations like this one, our goal is to help create more realistic and sustainable expectations for ourselves and our teams.

Lynnea

P.S. - In our monthly Comm Convos, we address the issues we most commonly hear about across the T2B community. Don’t miss our May event, Reaching and Valuing Every Generation, this Thursday. Register here.