Fixing the Overload Problem at Work
Companies keep burning out their employees — and promoting ‘balance’ doesn’t help. Work redesign offers a better solution.
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Image courtesy of Neil Webb/theispot.com
The way that companies expect employees to work isn’t working. Despite growing awareness of widespread and chronic overload and its ill effects, companies often expect professionals and managers to be “on” well beyond traditional work hours — attending meetings at night, responding to requests on weekends and during vacations, and monitoring their phones, texts, and emails whenever they are awake.1 Many people become exhausted and burned out struggling to meet such expectations. The result is an overwhelming, demoralizing sense that the demands of work are unrealistic and cannot be met with the resources at hand.
Of course, overload is not restricted to salaried, white-collar workers.2 But we have found that they are acutely susceptible. In our survey of more than 1,000 of these workers in the IT division of TOMO, our pseudonym for a Fortune 500 company generally viewed as a good employer and a decent corporate citizen, 41% of the division’s professionals and 61% of its managers agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that there is “not enough time to get your job done.”3
Escalating work demands and the exhaustion they produce surfaced repeatedly in the 400 interviews we conducted with TOMO employees from 2010 to 2014. For example, Vanessa, a director at the company, told us that she expects her direct reports to “be accessible 24-7, 365 days a year.” If they aren’t going to be available outside working hours, she said, “they need to let me know.”
Jonathon, a manager who reports to Vanessa, shared multiple stories of work encroaching on his home life and volunteer activities. He said he often takes late-night work calls, some of which wake his wife. Despite the success he has attained at work, Jonathon said he is steering his children away from professions like his that are prone to overload. He believes it is an unhealthy and unsustainable way to earn a living.
References (14)
1. L.A. Perlow, “Sleeping With Your Smartphone: How to Break the 24-7 Habit and Change the Way You Work” (Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2012); and E. Reid and L. Ramarajan, “Managing the High-Intensity Workplace,” Harvard Business Review 94, no. 6 (June 2016): 84-90.
2. The 2018 General Social Survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago reveals that 35% of employed Americans agree or strongly agree that there is “too much work to do it well” in their current jobs, up from 27% in 2002 and 2006. This data was retrieved by using “overwork” as the search variable at https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org.
