Your subject matter experts are probably good at their jobs. Unfortunately, that may be exactly why everyone keeps interrupting them.
They are the people who know why the process works that way, where the exception lives, which policy version is current, and why the quick fix may create three new problems by Thursday. They answer questions, review documents, train new employees, solve escalations—and still have their own work to complete.
By November and December, that pressure often grows. Year-end deadlines, budget planning, employee vacations, customer demands, and holiday obligations compete for the same limited time and energy. SHRM notes that shortened work months and year-end deadlines can intensify workplace stress during the holiday season.
Burnout is not always someone announcing they have reached their limit before dramatically closing a laptop.
For SMEs, it may look like slower responses, shorter answers, missed meetings, reluctance to volunteer, or an ever-growing list of “I’ll get to that after this deadline” tasks.
Watch for signs such as:
These signs do not automatically mean someone is burned out. They may mean the organization has created a role that is carrying too much invisible work.
Gallup’s 2026 workplace research found that 40% of employees globally experienced significant stress the previous day. Organizations cannot eliminate every source of stress, especially at year-end. But they can stop adding avoidable friction to the people they rely on most.
Every organization has a Dave.
Dave knows the workaround. Dave understands the legacy system. Dave can explain the exception that is not in the procedure because nobody has had time to update it. Dave is helpful, dependable, and one message away from becoming the organization’s unofficial search engine.
That helps in the moment. It is also a bottleneck.
As we discussed in Every Organization Has a Dave (Until Dave Retires), knowledge that lives primarily with one person creates risk for everyone—including Dave.
You do not need a 14-month transformation plan in December. Start with a few practical steps:
Knowledge as a Product explores the larger principle: information is valuable only when people can find, understand, trust, and use it.
A responsive SME can look like someone with extra capacity. Usually, they are someone who has become very good at fitting urgent requests into an already-full day.
The end of the year is a good time to ask: Where are we depending on individual heroics when a clearer process, better resource, or shared knowledge system would do?
Helping SMEs is not about asking less of them. It is about making sure their expertise can help more people without requiring them to answer the same question 17 times this month.
MATC helps organizations capture critical expertise, reduce knowledge bottlenecks, improve documentation, and build learning and performance-support resources that help employees work more independently.
When your SMEs are overwhelmed, the solution is rarely to ask them to work harder. It is to make the knowledge they already provide easier for others to find and use.
Every Organization Has a Dave (Until Dave Retires)
Knowledge as a Product: How to Design Information People Will Actually Use
The Graveyard of Unread PDFs: Why Documentation Fails and How to Fix It
Myer, Kathryn. “How to Help Employees During the Stressful Holiday Season.” SHRM. 1/10/24. Accessed 10/8/26. https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/benefits-compensation/how-to-help-employees-during-the-stressful-holiday-season
“State of the Global Workplace 2026.” Gallup. April 2026. Accessed 10/8/26. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/697904/state-of-the-global-workplace-global-data.aspx