How can we make museums better places to work? As of March 2024, I am in the midst of a deep dive into museum organizational culture. Look for much more on this topic coming soon to the Museum Questions Blog.
If you work in a museum, please help me out by sharing your stories related to museums and these six causes of burnout:
- Unsustainable workload
- Perceived lack of control
- Insufficient rewards for effort
- Lack of a supportive community
- Lack of fairness
- Mismatched values and skills
If you run a museum, please help me out by allowing me to interview you about workplace culture, your approach, and challenges at your museum.
All stories and interviews are anonymous unless you tell me otherwise. And you can ask me not to share your stories even anonymously. Thank you for helping me better understand the specifics of organizational challenges in museums!
Read related blog posts:
How can different groups in the museum agree on impact?
This post is by Robert Weisberg, the author of the blog Museum Human. I have had the pleasure of talking to Rob about museums, museum problems, and how we can do better. Last week, he shared my post on “Museums as Workplace Communities” on Museum Human. A little more about Rob: Robert J Weisberg (he/him/his)…
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How can workplaces function when employees are recovering from recent COVID trauma?
This post was first published on Museum Human. I have had the pleasure of a few conversations with Rob about the state of museums, and as a result, we are sharing some of each other’s ideas on our blogs. Stay tuned for a post by Rob on alignment and impact, which will appear here next…
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What is Burnout? A Conversation with Mike Murawski
Last week I had the pleasure of talking to Mike Murawski about burnout for his Agents of Change conversation series. You can listen to our conversation here. We came together to talk about burnout because it’s such a pressing topic in museums right now. I hope my previous post on burnout, along with Mike’s interview,…
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What Is “Burnout”?
Burnout was a hot topic in 2023. Attention to burnout was prompted by COVID-19, which made nearly everybody’s life more complicated and difficult, and post-COVID changes to the work environment and feelings about work.1 But even before 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) included burnout in it’s 2019 revision of “International Classification of Diseases.”2 And, further…
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What does good staff training look like?
At the PlayHouse, we brought on two new managers this week. These managers are responsible for supervising front line, daily operations – things like opening and closing registers, making sure the museum is ready for visitors when we open, and toys and exhibits are cleaned and sanitized at the end of the day, and throughout…
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Museum Questions 