Many finance chiefs are worried about employee burnout and stress as workers are asked to do more with less in the face of ongoing economic uncertainty. This also hampers CFOs’ ability to hire the talent they need, said John Gronen, CFO of e-invocing and “purchase-to-pay” automation provider Yooz.

“When you can't add additional headcount, you're asking more of the employees you have, and at some point, there's a limit to how far they want to go as well as how many hours they want to work, or how stressed they want to be for an extended period of time,” he said in an interview. “And so I think everyone I've talked to has been worried about turnover.”

Curbing employee, finance burnout  

While inflation has eased in recent months, prompting the Federal Reserve to slash interest rates from their historic highs with their September half-point cut, economic headwinds have continued to impact businesses — and how their finance chiefs structure their plans for the future. Many CFOs  are “being asked to do more with a smaller group, hold back on hiring until we really see where the economy is going to go,” Gronen said, citing conversations with fellow CFOs.

Yooz offers automated solutions for a business’s purchase to pay cycle, or the process between a purchasing decision all the way through to payment. Gronen was appointed finance chief for the Dallas, Texas-based company in May, according to his LinkedIn profile. He previously served as CFO for entertainment and gaming payments provider Sightline Payments, and also works with eGiftify as an investor and fractional CFO.

That economic murkiness has only added to CFOs’ existing worries: in a recent study conducted by Yooz, 88% of finance professionals said they were experiencing stress due to “shifting business priorities.” Meanwhile, 92% said constraints on their budgets were impacting their ability to meet their strategic goals, “likely due to operational limitations around available technology and employee headcount,” according to the study.

“Strategically, you're looking down the road and trying to guess more or less what's going to happen, so it does create some stress on the organization,” Gronen said. For example, finance leaders may not want to hire — or have the budget to be able to hire — as many people as they would like if the economy was thriving, something that can further tax already overloaded employees.

Talent shortages and the associated strain they put on existing employees have been top of mind for executive and finance leaders over the past few years, especially as pricing pressures compound the stress on workers.

Nearly 80% of employees reported experiencing burnout in the past year, hampering employee engagement and reducing productivity for a third of such workers, according to a recent report by CFO Dive sister publication HR Dive.

As such, CFOs are zeroing in on how to mitigate the stress on their existing employees and how to ensure they are receiving the support they need from the business, Gronen said.

Breaking the automation communication barrier  

One way to relieve such stress could be by implementing automation in critical areas: 70% of respondents agreed automation could help to significantly reduce or fully relieve the stress they are experiencing due to shifting business priorities, Yooz’s study found.

Automating manual processes can speed up the time it takes to finalize key tasks — for example, automating something like accounts payable can cut down the time to takes to process an invoice from an average of 10 to 12 minutes to one or two minutes, Gronen said. 

That has benefits beyond saving the company time; it also frees up those employees “to work on more value-added tasks for the organization, which also results in more employee satisfaction,” Gronen said, citing tasks such as vendor or pricing analysis that can better help the business craft effective strategies.

“You feel like you're contributing more to the organization than just sitting here scanning invoices and creating journal entries,” he said of employees. “And so, I think, any CFO who's really thinking about the health and welfare of their team and the organization as a whole should be thinking about, ‘how do I automate some of these tasks?’”

It’s important for CFOs to think ahead regarding how to implement automation, however, especially when it comes to its impact on employees. Finance chiefs need to be prepared to train and upskill their existing employees on new technologies, Gronen said.

“There is definitely a training curve that occurs with that, where you're going to have some reduced productivity, maybe, but you're planning ahead for that ideal state where the productivity is 10x what you're getting today,” he said.

Furthermore, CFOs need to work closely with other members of the C-suite, notably the chief information or chief technology officer, on such strategies, he said.

“It's important to be in lockstep with your CIO or your CTO, because you want to make sure, number one, they're spending smartly on what we need, but that they also have the tools you need,” Gronen said. “It is, to me, pointless to deny them tools that protect the security of your data or help you grow the business.”