Employee Burnout Is a Problem with the Company, Not the Person (hbr.org)

Employee burnout is a common phenomenon, but it is one that companies tend to treat as a talent management or personal issue rather than a broader organizational challenge. That's a mistake, reads an article on HBR. From the article: The psychological and physical problems of burned-out employees, which cost an estimated $125 billion to $190 billion a year in healthcare spending in the U.S., are just the most obvious impacts. The true cost to business can be far greater, thanks to low productivity across organizations, high turnover, and the loss of the most capable talent. [...] When employees aren't as productive as they could be, it's usually the organization, not its employees, that is to blame. The same is true for employee burnout. When we looked inside companies with high burnout rates, we saw three common culprits: excessive collaboration, weak time management disciplines, and a tendency to overload the most capable with too much work. These forces not only rob employees of time to concentrate on completing complex tasks or for idea generation, they also crunch the downtime that is necessary for restoration.

Comments

Re: Sounds like you're the problem

[Hadlock]

Finance companies are required by law to make their employees take 5 days in a row off, specifically for this reason, to ensure continuity of business processes in case you get hit by a bus. If you're the only one who knows how things work for day to day processes, there's serious flaws in your organization.

Re: Sounds like you're the problem

[Rastl]

I think its less for 'hit by a bus' and more to remove you from the environment long enough that any fraud/embezzlement schemes you might have fall apart.

If your fraud scheme falls apart in 5 days you set it up wrong.

It might sound useless but I worked at a bank where an AVP got called into the office on the 4th day of his mandatory 5 day vacation. Turns out he had been kiting checks for a client and because he wasn't there someone else caught on. He was escorted out again.

For IT this gets a little trickier since we tend to build a LOT of automation and have remote access to systems. So even if we're not in the office there's a very good chance that someone who is doing illegal things would have their bases covered per networkBoy's comment. But the people who handle money all day tend not to have our options.