Your leadership team says that everything is green across the board. However, the twist to this scenario is that three of your best employees are secretly seeking to leave the company.
Most SaaS leaders learn about team workload visibility issues in the same way – when burnout drives someone to resign, or when performance dips unexpectedly.
You look at the dashboards that indicate the rate at which tasks are being completed, the velocity of the sprints, and the time it will take to complete the project. All seems to be fruitful.
Your teams met their deadlines. There are no red flags in stand-ups. Then a key employee experiences burnout, or an entire team fails to meet a critical deadline. That’s when you know the warning signs were never there to begin with.
*Teams Look Busy, Productive, and "Fine"
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Your engineering team meets all its deadlines. Your sales team records all their calls and updates their deals. Your customer success team is responsive to support tickets in a timely manner. By all the numbers you're keeping track of, everything is looking great.
But here's the problem. That's just an illusion. Finished work doesn't tell you how many tasks are piling up.
Hitting sprint goals doesn't tell you that your senior developer is doing twice the mental load of everybody else. Fast response times don't show that your customer success lead is working until midnight to keep those numbers up.
Most tools tell you what got done. They don't show you the pressure that is building up behind the scenes. You see the results, but you don't see what it took to get there. That is the gap where burnout starts to grow.
The numbers back this up. Gallup research found that 76% of employees are burned out at least occasionally.
Even worse, 28% say that they feel burned out "very often" or "always."
The cost is huge.
Burned out employees can cost companies $3,400 to $14,000 for every $10,000 they earn. That's because they're less productive and more likely to leave.
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