Our research found that senior executives now receive 200 or more emails per day. Together, these structural and cultural factors lead to fragmented calendars and even fragmented hours during the day. Many corporate cultures require collaboration far beyond what is needed to get the job done. It manifests itself in endless rounds of meetings and conference calls to ensure that every stakeholder is heard and aligned. Excessive collaborationĮxcessive collaboration is a common ailment in organizations with too many decision makers and too many decision-making nodes. 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. 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. In our book Time, Talent and Energy, we note that when employees aren’t as productive as they could be, it’s usually the organization, not its employees, that is to blame. Once executives confront the problem at an organizational level, they can use organizational measures to address it. Executives need to own up to their role in creating the workplace stress that leads to burnout-heavy workloads, job insecurity, and frustrating work routines that include too many meetings and far too little time for creative work. 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. 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. 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.
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