Here is an article written by John Boudreau for Talent Management magazine. To check out all the resources and sign up for a free subscription to the TM and Chief Learning Officer magazines published by MedfiaTec, please click here.

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Employees are tired, but hard work is not to be avoided. The key is neither to push employees beyond their limits nor to demand so little you can’t compete.

We all experience the demands of the 24/7 workplaces. The opportunity to work where and when we wish often evolves into the reality of being on all the time. Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE, said, “There are 24 hours in a day, and you can use all of them if you want.” Technology creates massive productivity enhancements, but at what cost? Is fatigue just something each employee must deal with, or is it a legitimate focus for talent managers? Recent reports of air traffic controllers falling asleep on the job, for example, offer a vivid warning of the costs and risks that employee fatigue can cause.

So, we must ask ourselves, are work requirements that lead to stress and burnout a threat to organizational sustainability? At the Center for Effective Organizations, we are studying the factors that will shape the future of the HR profession. In our discussions with leaders across a wide array of organizations, they frequently point to the fatigue factor as one of the most important, yet most ignored, potential threats to talent management and organizational sustainability.

The answer likely isn’t that organizations should strive for a stress-free workplace — that’s impractical. Yet, it is not sufficient to just leave this issue to chance, or to continue to demand more and more from our employees. Talent managers have to find the balance.

I worked with a mining company on a project to improve its human capital planning and discovered the organization was facing a shortage of mining engineers and rising turnover among its existing engineers. The company was making do with the engineers it had, which meant giving every mine the necessary engineering attention, but nothing more. To do this, the company had to rotate engineers across the mines at a faster rate than if it were fully staffed. As a result, these engineers were constantly on the move. They were under more pressure, seeing their families less and traveling far more than if the company had a full complement of engineers available.

How could talent planning address this? We turned to another vital asset — the trucks that haul ore and other materials around the mine. Let’s say a mine needs four trucks, which allows each truck to be driven at the optimal speed, keeps wear and tear at optimal levels, and allows optimal maintenance. Truck health is measured relentlessly, including real-time speeds, lubricant deterioration, tire pressure and running hours. A mine manager could make do with only three trucks if they are run a little faster, are allowed to depreciate more and if the manager delays maintenance. This would probably even save money — in the short run. Yet, all those aforementioned measures ensure mine managers never do this. They are held accountable for optimal truck usage, not short-run expedience.

So, why would a company tolerate a shortage of engineers, with the resulting pressure, stress, health issues and turnover, when it would never allow that for trucks? This is even more troubling because research in industrial psychology and human resource management has indicated measures of stress, engagement, satisfaction and intention can cause employees to leave their organizations. Such measures are seldom in the lexicon of an organization’s leaders or talent management systems, yet they provide the same early warning about the deterioration of the mining engineer as the maintenance measures provided for trucks.

Yes, employees are tired, but hard work is not to be avoided. The key is neither to push employees beyond their limits nor to demand so little you can’t compete. Equipment optimization means finding the level of usage and maintenance that is best for the truck and its role. Employee optimization means addressing the fatigue factor analytically with human capital planning and measures, not just opinions or hope.

Human beings are not trucks, but doesn’t talent deserve rigor on optimum health and productivity? Shouldn’t employee fatigue be as much the focus of leader decisions as truck depreciation?

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In my opinion, the single best source for information, insights, and recommendations on workplace fatigue is Tony Schwartz’s The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working: The Four Forgotten Needs That Energize Great Performance, recently reissued as Be Excellent at Anything: The Four Keys To Transforming the Way We Work and Live and published by Free Press (2011).

John Boudreau is professor and research director at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and Center for Effective Organizations, and author of Retooling HR: Using Proven Business Tools to Make Better Decisions about Talent. He can be reached at editor@talentmgt.com.