The UK has a damaging culture of over work with half of employees working up to four days of unpaid overtime a month. Excessive workloads and unrealistic expectations are undermining motivation , productivity and retention. There is an urgent need for better workload management.

So how do managers typically allocate work? In my experience in most cases it not very scientific. The work comes in and the manager allocates it on the bases of their view of who has the capacity and the experience. Only you may have notice some people get an easier ride , less demanding work, more flexible time scale. Your suspensions are correct the manager does not have confidence in their ability or trust them to deliver to a tight deadline. So work loads are not distributed evenly which can seem very unfair.

But the real problem is there is too much work however it is distributed. Typically the response is for the manager to pressurise a team member to take it on the additional work. If they fail they may end up doing it themselves! A colleague when, “asked” to take on an additional piece of worked replied that she already had a lot on and no spare capacity. Was this a priority and if it was what should she drop to undertake it? It was a fair question and brave of her to say so. The managers response was to say ,”Let’s discuss this after the meeting”.  The thing is it is the managers responsibility to determine the priorities, everything can not be a priority. Which is a tough one for some managers because they think everything is a priority. But an important part of the managers role is absorbing pressure and taking it off team members.

This scenario happens at all levels within an organisation. I remember in a fortnightly senior managers team meeting putting on the agenda an issue and giving a brief explanation as to its significance and the need to discuss a way forward. The Director asked me to produce a report . I suggested it be tabled for a month time but he insisted I bring it to the next meeting. In my mind I was thinking that the diary for next week was already full. I pointed out that I was interviewing next week which blocked out two whole days. So I would need to write the report the following week which wouldn’t give me time to share a draft paper with colleagues and incorporate their feedback. In response he simply reiterated he wanted a report for the next meeting. I can only assume he was making a point to the wider group that he wasn’t interested in ,”excuses” he wanted things done when he said.

Workload management should recognise it is unreasonable and ultimately unproductive to expect an employee to regularly work unpaid overtime, to routinely accept excessive workloads or to impose unrealistic time scales. Employees should be able to say no without suffering repercussions and managers should accept responsibility for identifying what won’t get done.