SUCCESS LIFE:Jonah Nyoni / Roseline Maideyi JUST imagine, you purchase a brand new Mercedes Benz and the manufacturer sets the service interval at 15 000km. A year later you start experiencing deteriorating performance, engine warning light frequently on, strange noises become familiar, smoking and steaming from the bonnet, you get vibrations and sounds when braking, speed starts picking up slower, it’s burning petrol quicker than before, instead of pumping clean droplets of water from the exhaust all you get is unpleasant exhaust fumes. You check your dashboard and eureka you know why. Service is due! Despite the clear warnings to service your vehicle, you convince yourself that the same old oil, filters and spark plugs will suffice even far beyond the 15 000km service mark. At 16 000km, your ill-serviced Benz develops new engine problems causing frequent breakdowns. Unfortunately if you do not act up and service it, your beautiful Benz will perform as good as engines during Charlie Chaplin’s era. What mechanics would call engine knocking in cars, we call burnout in humans. Most business leaders know and honour the principles of mechanics, but amazingly they overlook the fact that everything in life needs servicing. This article isn’t about a Benz or mechanics, it’s about the need for constant evaluation in organisations. Poor management and poor maintenance can only lead to poor performance. Poor performance is expensive; it incurs a lot of opportunity costs. Such is what happens in organisations that fail to prioritise occupational safety and health. If the socio-economic welfare of employees is terrible, don’t expect them to meet performance objectives. You may structure the best KPIs for the organisation, but employees experiencing burnout will hardly meet their desired targets. Burnout is real! Just like a Benz overdue in service, employees whose needs aren’t met will struggle to perform. Effects of occupational burnout to productivity The socio-economic situation of our nation and the globe is vastly dynamic, constantly changing and very unpredictable. A typical example is the COVID-19 pandemic which affected business in many organisations, leading to stagnant salaries while leverage was sought through price hikes. This makes survival very difficult for employees whose salaries were slashed or not cushioned. The retrenchment of some workers during this era left a burden to employees who survived retrenchment due to short staffing which increases the workload on the remaining staff. This creates the monster we are talking about in this article, burnout. Occupational burnout occurs when employees feel suffocated by too much workload or when their salaries are not guaranteeing them socio-economic survival. Occupational burnout also occurs when employees harbour a lot of grievances that are not considered or solved. Burnt out employees threaten the productivity and survival of any entity, a case study of our striking doctors evidences this. Burnt out doctors who are not happy with their salaries and welfare would