I keep hearing some variation of the same concern: “We keep getting more and more work, but we have basically the same staffing we had fifteen years ago. I’m afraid people are going to burn out because the workload keeps increasing and nothing ever comes off the list.”
That is a legitimate concern, but I also think there is more to it than simply saying that people have too much work. Sometimes people do have too much work. Sometimes the organization really has taken on more responsibility than its existing resources can reasonably handle. And sometimes the problem is that nobody has stopped to ask a very basic question: What are we going to stop doing?
There is another part of this conversation that I think gets overlooked. As the quantity of work increases, the quality of the work tends to decrease. That isn’t necessarily because people don’t care anymore or because they suddenly became less capable. It is often because there is a finite amount of time and attention available to do the work properly. When we keep increasing the quantity of work without increasing the capacity to perform it, something has to give, and quality is often one of the first casualties.
Something new comes along, and we add it to the list. A new reporting requirement gets added, a new program gets added, a new customer expectation gets added, a new compliance requirement gets added, or somebody decides that the organization needs another meeting, another form, another process, another database, another performance measure, or another layer of documentation. Each individual addition may make perfect sense when it is considered by itself. The problem is that the old stuff usually stays.
I Keep Seeing These Dedicated, Hard-Working Team Members Get Disillusioned With Their Work
Pretty soon, people are being asked to do everything they were doing fifteen years ago plus everything that has been added since then. Then somebody wonders why employees seem overwhelmed, why things aren’t getting done as quickly as they used to, or why the quality of the work isn’t what it used to be. We may tell ourselves that people simply need to work harder or become more efficient, but there is a point at which efficiency improvements stop compensating for an ever-increasing workload. At that point, asking people to produce more does not necessarily produce more good work. It can simply produce more work that is completed less well.
“Do More With Less” Is A Mantra Of Morons
This is where I think we need to challenge one of the most persistent fantasies in organizational life: “Do more with less.” I have always thought that phrase was a psychotic fantasy – a “Mantra of Morons,” as I noted in a couple of my books and in other articles. People cannot continually do more with less. At some point, something has to give. We can sometimes find a more efficient way to do something. We can eliminate unnecessary steps. We can use technology to automate part of a process. We can reorganize the work. We can improve training. We can eliminate duplication. Those things can increase productivity, and they are worth doing. But they don’t repeal the basic reality that people have a finite amount of time, attention, and energy.
If you have less staff and more work, you cannot simply declare that the remaining people will produce more and expect the same quality of work. You can ask them to try, of course, and for a while they probably will. People are remarkably willing to stretch when they care about the work, their coworkers, and the people they serve. They will stay late. They will skip lunch. They will take work home. They will come in early. They may get divorced. They may ignore their children. They will find ways to cover vacancies and increased workloads because they don’t want the organization or the people depending on it to suffer.
But that isn’t the same thing as having increased capacity. It is borrowing from the future. Eventually, the accumulated workload begins to show up in the work itself. Details get missed. Decisions get rushed. Communication becomes shorter. Follow-up gets delayed. People begin doing what is necessary to get something off the list rather than what is necessary to do the job as well as it could be done. Quantity has increased, but quality has begun to decline. Read my article, “Choose Your Inconvenience“
That creates an interesting problem for organizations because the additional work may make the organization look more productive on paper. More reports were completed. More cases were processed. More customers were served. More projects were finished. More meetings were held. More tasks were checked off the list. But if the quality of those things has declined, have we actually improved the organization’s performance?
I don’t think we can answer that question simply by counting how much work was completed. Quantity is relatively easy to measure. Quality is often much harder to measure, and that can create a dangerous illusion. We can convince ourselves that we are accomplishing more because we are producing more things, even while the people doing the work know that the things being produced aren’t receiving the attention they once did.
This is where I think management and leadership matter. Management involves planning, organizing, leading, and controlling, and part of managing is making choices about limited resources. Time is a limited resource. Attention is a limited resource. Energy is a limited resource. So is the capacity of the people doing the work. We cannot keep treating those things as though they are unlimited simply because the organization continues to find new things it would like to accomplish.
If we tell people that everything is a priority, we haven’t really established priorities. We have simply told people that everything is important and left them to figure out how to get it all done. When that happens, something eventually gives. Sometimes it is quality. Sometimes it is customer service. Sometimes it is timeliness. Sometimes it is communication. Sometimes it is safety. Sometimes it is the employee’s personal life. Eventually, it can become the employee. Read that: “Everything is important … except your mental and physical health … “
That is why I think there comes a point when a true adult decision-maker has to step up and say, “No more. Either we cut the workload, or we’re going to burn people out.” I don’t mean that as an excuse for people who simply don’t want to work. I mean it as an acknowledgment of reality. If the organization has more work than its existing staffing can reasonably accomplish, somebody has to make a decision about what will not be done.
My preference would be to cut the workload until we have additional staffing. If we don’t have enough people to do everything, then let’s decide what is most important and do those things well rather than continuing to add responsibilities and accepting a gradual decline in the quality of everything we do. I would rather have an organization doing fewer things well than an organization doing everything badly because nobody was willing to make the decision about what could come off the list.
That can be uncomfortable. Organizations are often much better at adding responsibilities than removing them. Once a process exists, people tend to assume there must be a reason for it. Once a report exists, somebody expects to see it. Once a meeting exists, it becomes part of the calendar. Once a responsibility has been assigned to somebody, it becomes that person’s responsibility. Years later, nobody may remember exactly why some of these things exist, but everybody is afraid to stop doing them.
So the list gets longer, and the people doing the work are expected to absorb the difference.
The people doing the work are usually the ones who understand this best. They know which reports nobody reads, which meetings accomplish very little, which processes require three steps when one would work, and which things are being done simply because that is the way they have always been done. They also know what happens when another responsibility gets added to an already crowded workload. Unfortunately, their knowledge is not always part of the decision-making process. Someone somewhere decides that the organization needs to do something else, and the people at the operational level are expected to figure out how to fit it into the day.
More Work Usually Means Lower Quality
Then, when quality begins to decline, we sometimes blame the people doing the work.
We say they aren’t paying enough attention. We say they need better training. We say they need to manage their time better. We say they need to be more resilient. We say they need to communicate better. Maybe some of those things are true. But before we start fixing the people, I think we should look at the system in which those people are working. If we have continually increased the quantity of work without increasing the capacity to perform it, perhaps the problem isn’t that the people suddenly forgot how to do their jobs.
Perhaps we simply gave them more work than we gave them time to do well.
People can tolerate a demanding job for a long time when they understand why the work matters and believe that somebody is paying attention to the demands being placed on them. What becomes exhausting is the feeling that the workload is simply going to keep growing and nobody is ever going to make a decision about what can come off the list. There is a difference between asking people to stretch occasionally and building an organization around the assumption that everyone can stretch indefinitely.
They can’t.
Neither can an organization.
If the workload has increased substantially over the last fifteen years while staffing has remained essentially the same, we need to have an honest conversation about capacity, priorities, and quality. Perhaps we need more people. Perhaps we need better processes. Perhaps we need better technology. Perhaps we need to reorganize the work. Perhaps we need to eliminate work that no longer provides enough value to justify the resources it consumes. More likely, the answer is some combination of those things.
What I don’t think we can reasonably do is continue adding responsibilities to the list and then blame the people responsible for completing the list when they begin to struggle or when the quality of their work begins to suffer. If the work keeps increasing, somebody has to make a decision about capacity, priorities, and resources. Otherwise, we are simply transferring the cost of organizational decisions to the people who have to do the work.
So when somebody tells me, “We keep getting more work, we have the same staffing we had fifteen years ago, and nothing ever comes off the list,” I don’t immediately think that person needs to learn how to work harder. I think somebody needs to take a hard look at the list and decide what can come off it. If we don’t have enough people to do everything, then let’s do the best we can with the resources we have. If we need additional staffing, let’s acknowledge that and work toward getting it. Until then, I would rather see us do less with less than pretend that we can somehow continue doing more with less.
Someone Has To Make An Adult Decision
Because the objective shouldn’t be to produce the greatest possible quantity of work. The objective should be to accomplish the work that matters at a level of quality that the organization, its customers, and its employees can live with. At some point, a true adult decision-maker has to be willing to say, “No more. We’re cutting the workload until we have the people we need to do the rest of it properly.”
That isn’t failure.
That is leadership.
A Short Checklist for Reducing Workload
- List the work. Identify what the team is actually responsible for doing, including recurring tasks, reports, meetings, projects, and administrative requirements.
- Challenge the list. For each item, ask: Does this still need to be done? Eliminate work that no longer provides enough value to justify the time it consumes.
- Establish priorities. Identify what absolutely must be done and what can wait. If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.
- Reduce or simplify the work. Look for duplication, unnecessary steps, outdated processes, and opportunities to automate or consolidate.
- Match workload to capacity. Compare the remaining workload with the actual number of people and hours available to perform it properly.
- Protect quality. If increasing quantity is causing quality to decline, stop pretending the organization has additional capacity. Reduce the workload or add resources.
- Make the adult decision. If additional staffing isn’t immediately available, cut the workload until the organization has the capacity to do the remaining work well.
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Author’s Note: The content provided in this article is designed exclusively for educational and informational purposes, reflecting opinions shaped by decades of leadership training and organizational consulting experience. It should never be interpreted as formal professional advice. By reading or engaging with this material, you acknowledge that no professional-client relationship is established and that these insights do not substitute for tailored guidance from a qualified professional familiar with your specific circumstances. Consequently, readers are strongly advised to seek independent counsel from licensed legal, financial, medical, or other appropriate advisors before implementing any strategies or making decisions based on these perspectives. Ultimately, you assume full personal responsibility for any actions you choose to take or omit as a result of reading this material, releasing the author and publisher from any liability for outcomes arising from your reliance on the text.
