Context: remote work.
These are 2 questions so bare with me:
How do you deal with under communicating team member?
And what do you do when you have a burnout?

1. Open the communication yourself and demonstrate how it is done until they get it
2. Don't burn out. Look after your Health. Get more helping hands and don't overcommit and/or underestimate your work

What context is this team member? A coworker or someone you manage?

I think in either context it might be helpful to give them an example of the comms you’re looking for. When you come to me with a problem, I need you to tell me what you’ve tried, where *you think the issue is and why you feel you’re stuck. Or whatever situation your comms are about. You can’t expect someone who isn’t meeting a requirement, to know of said requirement just cuz. Some times you have to set a standard, and for some people you have to write it out in crayon. Set the standard, reciprocate the standard and give them an example of someone who you think excels at those kinds of comms.

As for burnout, is this your burnout or someone on the team is burned out?

@atrabilious it's a coworker.

And my burnout. I just feel tired and, although it is only my 5th month and there is a lot to learn about and enjoy... I find myself doing the minimal tasks to get through the day.

@waldz I think there’s two kinds of burnout. One is overworked, and welcome to technology. For some reason people think what we do is easy and want everything for $.05, yesterday. Then there is burnout from boredom. As creative people we need to feel challenged or we feel not being used to our best potential.

Figure out which one you are. If it’s too much work (my problem) try to assert that the load is too high. If it’s boredom, see how receptive your manager is to letting you do more of the things you want to learn or feel you’d be more effective at. Unfortunately both require “managing up”, which may be more uncomfortable if it’s only been 5 months.

@atrabilious that's really helpful. Thanks a lot. But can you "develop" 'managing up'... What does that exactly means? (Sorry English is my 3rd language)

@waldz it means teaching a manager how to manage…you specifically, but in general. Sometimes we have to teach managers how to handle things. Essentially they’re you a few years from now. There is no all knowing managers, so we “manage up”. It’s not an easy skill to learn for everyone. My boss thinks I have Jedi mind tricks…”well that’s a good idea, but what if we did this instead.”

@atrabilious oh I definitely understand that... Funny enough a senior guy (basically the CTO) left a couple months ago and the manager was in panic mode and going crazy, lot of meetings and trying to reorganize things... And I was like "god you need to read -the Phoenix project- for a starter, will give you an idea"... So basically self managing and prevent the actual manager from setting things on fire. 😁😁

I'm going to make a lot of assumptions here, so bear with me.

Probably doing minimal tasks to get through the day is your natural way of resting. Trust yourself. Observe your self. Don't judge yourself.

I say this because, that's my way of resting, and probably there are a lot of people like this.

The second assumption that I'm making is, also based on personal experience, worrying about doing minimal work is probably rooted in the desire to have peak performance all year round, and that's feasible for a group of people but not all of us.

So again, trust yourself and start observing, how long does it take you to gain back your peak performance mode. How long does it last?, and can you throttle yourself so that you are in a sort of good sustained performance vs peaks and sinks?

Forcing ourselves into peak performance constantly, is like trying to drive at a constant 6000rpm, it is not healthy, we're ordinary humans and we should take care of ourselves.