Beating the Christmas Crunch Period: Workplace Anxiety and Dyslexia | Succeed With Dyslexia

For a lot of us, the end of the year is a time where we feel more than a little stressed: as well as all the commitments of the festive season, we’re also seeing more than a few extra-short deadlines drop into our inbox.  Everybody likes having things all wrapped up by 5pm on the 24^th of December to ensure a fresh in-tray come the new year, but the reality is that many of us end up sweating a little as we push towards our goals— and it can take a toll.

We call this festive push the ‘Christmas Crunch’ period. And we need to remember that it can exert a dramatic amount of pressure on us in our working lives, especially when we've got dyslexia.

Employees with dyslexia often suffer from burnout and workplace anxiety at a higher rate than their neurodivergent peers. Constant masking, reading pressures and the general day-to-day of working with dyslexia all have their effect, and they can impact negatively on stress levels in the first eleven months of the year, but a sudden increase in workload and expected work speed in December can cause many colleagues to spiral or feel paralysed by the work they’re expected to do.

So what can we do to beat the anxiety during a work surge?

Most corporate workplaces have some kind of December crunch, running from around Black Friday if they’re retail-based to the end of the working year.  It’s the nature of an age-old seasonal economic relationship, and as much as we might want to avoid a Christmas Crunch, it’s likely to happen to one extent or the other. There are, however, a few ways that we can make sure that we’re not applying huge amounts of pressure to colleagues who might be feeling the strain anyway, due to the ways that dyslexia effects their lives.

• Most colleagues would agree that it’s better to have a moderate push for three months rather than an intense push for one. Plan and implement early, and assign tasks early where you can, especially if you’re not directly waiting on Q4 or year-end data to start working. Get in place what you can even if you are— it’s easier to just input the new figures when they arrive rather than draw up the whole base analysis.

• Another way we can help is making sure that we’re supporting dyslexic colleagues who might struggle with organisation or be feeling the effects of burnout-releated executive function problems. Implement a task management system and use traffic-light coding to help your team prioritise: red for ones that have to be over the line by the 24^th, amber for ones that have more leeway, and green for ones that can run into the new year. Review it frequently, too- if a deadline can move and pressure drop off on one project, it means another one can be pulled into its priority zone, so make sure to communicate changes like this.

• Check in with your work squad regularly, and make sure that they’re feeling comfortable. If things are getting too much, people might refrain from opening up about it because they don’t want it to feel like their dyslexia is having an impact on the whole team. If people do feel like they’re drowning, try to redistribute tasks where you can, or reassess and negotiate more reasonable deadlines with project owners. Keep the door open, and make sure colleagues know it’s open, too— and when you need a break, make sure you're taking one.

• Take an early impact approach to new accommodations: it’s never too late to seek assessment and implement assistive solutions into the workplace, but having all of this in place by the time your industry’s work surge rolls around can have a huge positive impact on employee mental health. As well as boosting performance, the right accommodations can increase confidence too, and they’re an important part of supporting mental health as well as reading and writing when the going gets stressful, so if you feel like you need help then there's still never been a better time to ask than right now.

Some people with dyslexia thrive in high-pressure short-time projects… and some don’t. Support is vitally important both here and across the board, and The Christmas Crunch period is often intense for everybody. It can be difficult to feel festive when your inbox is overflowing.

All we can do is assign reasonable deadlines, make positive changes, and if things don’t complete in time, chalk it up to experience and implement better for next year— whatever stage you’re at as a team, it’s still not worth spending Christmas with your laptop set up on the dining table. 

Merry Christmas, from all of us at Succeed With Dyslexia. We’ll see you in 2023!