Workplace stress and employee's burnout
is known to cause additional costs of up to $190 billion a year to the US economy alone. As results show, the idea to squeeze enormous inner resources from workers to make your business more profitable is both cruel and ineffective. Nevertheless, we keep seeing headlines like the recent one:
"Young bankers have an absurd work life". It's not just about the fact that some companies push employees in this way. Young entrepreneurs can get stuck in a draining lifestyle to present themselves in what is perceived as the best way to partners, employees and investors. It's not just about getting "used to it", but rather about the inevitable consequences of over-using and over-stretching ourselves.
It's an obsolete methodology that can indeed lead, in the short-term, to very high levels of performance, but which inevitably turns people out or burns them out. Instead, it's much more constructive to create a balanced and sustainable framework where we do our best because we feel at our best: after all, any form of true lasting performance must rely on our maximum energy and potential, whilst any form of success must be first defined by how we feel.