Are you watching the (semi) burnout spiral in your department?

For the last year i have been saying the stress from my colleagues is palpable, and every time I make a joke about everyone being on the verge of burnout not a single person disagrees (I make it a joke, as I routinely do this in front of senior people too, so I'm not trying to get into deep conversations about it but just address the elephant in the room).

I will caveat all this by saying I am relatively junior in my role so I perhaps am just seeing what was always the case. But I'm in a permanent contract, in a uni that isn't having explicit financial problems to directly blame this burnout on. And my faculty does a great job of working to union regulations with workloads and not explicitly over burdening people. yes, there are still big issues with how this all works, but I really think we're in a better position that most unis. So I can't imagine how others are coping.

Any colleague I speak to is talking about their personal stresses that are directly linked to wider issues of cuts to NHS, social services, education. Life is genuinely tough. And our personal lives are always more important than our jobs. But I've seen this get worse and worse for 18 months...

And now it's impacting peoples work big time. Like even just simple things like how on the ball someone seems in their lectures. Or organising seminars. Or having meetings about things that should be standard for us in this job. never mind the quality of research publications, the additional citizenship stuff, everything. Everyone is too tired and the quality of their work suffers. And I don't blame them, I'm tired and also doing less quality work.

But what happens if this continues to spiral. Our jobs are all getting harder for many reasons, but if the great colleagues are too tired to deliver then we start picking up each other's slack.... But we don't have the time of energy. An example is if you're module leader and someone on your teaching team isn't delivering the same standard they used to, as module leader it's you who listens to student complaints.

I'm not really sure what the point of this post is. But just to say I felt this a year ago, but the last few weeks have confirmed it for me in things I have seen.

How do you keep yourself sane and grounded and focused on the right things to make the job the most manageable? Do we all just switch to 0.6fte contracts to try and keep our jobs and our sanity?