First recognize “burnout” also leads to suboptimal work output. People too attached to work will become bad at prioritizing what’s most important to work on. It also encourages a “hero” mentality from this employee, which might lead to resentment from other employees.
So it’s both employee mental health and org health.
At Shopify we have a culture of “protecting each other’s downtime”. I think thats super important for a remote company to fight burnout.
How do you do this?
Set a really strong example with your own downtime. If you have weird working hours make it clear when those are and only work then unless you need to.
Keep public slack channels or other work comms quiet outside work hours. Don’t DM unless absolutely necessary. Council employees to disconnect by NOT putting slack, email etc on their phones and disable GitHub email notifications. Actively tell people too chatty outside work hours to take some time off.
If people DO get a big idea over the weekend, encourage them to try strategies like writing it down and try to encourage taking breaks and developing outside interests.
If they DO just need to work on the idea or a deadline, try to encourage them to run silent” and not spam public channels or other employees outside work hours. Encourage them to also set the tone with work boundaries.
Under all of this is hiring the right people. If you have a few star performers and one or two bright stars, you’ll setup a situation where only a few people care about their work. They’ll feel pushed to work a lot to maintain quality. Surround them with great people that also want their downtime, then it can work out.