Fatigue – Staff burnout
by Anthony Demangone
I recently spoke with a good friend who is the CEO of a credit union. I asked him what he struggled with, as CEO.
Staff burnout, he said. Almost without hesitation.
Since the crisis began, he’s been asking his staff to do more, with less. They are successful, but cracks are beginning to show. And he worries how much longer things can stay the same.
Does that sound familiar? I bet it does. We struggle with that at NAFCU, as well.
Fatigue, it turns out, is a real threat to productivity. This article (HBR.org) by Tony Schwartz does a great job of highlighting the issue.
One CEO of a multinational company told me that just dealing with time differences had left him so exhausted he was seriously considering quitting. Another CEO at a much-admired company told me that for the first time, he’s losing truly valued employees who say they simply can’t take it anymore. In a recent survey at a third organization, over 80% of the top 400 leaders reported they spend the majority of their days feeling negative emotions, fueled in large part by overload and overwhelm. (Emphasis added.)
I’ve written about this before. In a post about “decision fatigue”, I wrote about research that showed how decision making abilities break down people are overloaded by problems.