Speaking up about workload as a psychosocial risk

Over the past two years I've noticed many workplaces now suffer from an emerging psychosocial risk – workload overwhelm. We all had to up our game, pivot and take on additional duties during 'the Covid restriction years'. Now we are out of the restrictions the workload hasn't decreased, it seems to have sped up. More demands are placed on government agencies, councils and our healthcare sector clients. Demands to be on working parties for impending legislation changes, more requests for information as we go into an election year, restructuring and a slew of policy changes.

Many people are working at 110% or even more. This is unsustainable for the person, and the organisation. Some workplaces are offering resilience training, mental health first aid responders or wellbeing initiatives in response to this. On one level that's okay but the reason these are being offered is our workplace leaders are not assessing work overload as a serious risk.

We learnt how to pivot and reprioritise during Covid, and now we’ve moved into another new normal. As leaders we need to pivot again.  

We leaders need to learn to say no. Or, at the very least, question the value of increasing an already out of control workload.

Why is it so hard to say no, push back or question another piece of work dropped on us?

There are only so many hours of work available each week to each person in the team. If you ask people to do more, then they either must work more hours, or create efficiencies along the way.

If workloads are becoming unsustainable, it’s useful to do a stocktake with your team to understand what your team are working on, how long it takes your team to complete tasks, whether the current work is part of your organisation’s core business and whether it is aligned to the business’s values and goals.  

It’s perfectly valid to question your manager about an additional new piece of work. What’s the impact on your team and how it will affect staff wellbeing, overall morale, and other projects?

Unfortunately, it is often left to individuals to decide whether they should go the extra mile and accept more work than they can cope with. Senior leaders are required to manage workloads, so they are sustainable, and have measures to understand if it is staying within acceptable levels. Processes should also be in place so workers can raise concerns about their workload.

If you have no resource capacity it's prudent to ask, ‘If you want us to do this new piece of work, what are you prepared for us not to do?’

Know your purpose

Whether it's drafting legislation for parliament, running a district council, or a business like ours, going back to your core purpose is clarifying.

At Working Wise Ltd , we needed to prioritise too, asking ourselves what our core purpose was and who our offering was for.

We decided that our products and services were of most value to organisations that are already on their health safety and wellbeing (HSW) journey, not those just starting out. We've spent time refining our products and processes to not only make things more efficient but to provide more effective services for our clients.

We've also insisted that an organisation's leadership team commit to creating a HSW strategy to set direction and create better measurement and governance.

As an Officer or PCBU (Person Conducting a Business or Undertaking), you can’t discharge your Health and Safety at Work Act duties if staff are overwhelmed by the volume of work and could be harmed either physically or mentally.

We believe leadership is the key to responding to the psychosocial risk of workload. Leadership, of course, needs to be supported by project management and clear communication about the parameters of the work.  

What are we being asked to do?

When new work comes your way, it’s important to establish exactly what is expected and establish outputs. We’ve learnt the value of scoping projects, what's in and out, and how to stop scope creep. The most important thing is clear communication to establish what is required from the new request.

If you reach out to your colleagues, you might find the newly requested work has already taken place in another part of the organisation or can be completed in a much easier and cost-effective way.

All these learnings can be applied to any organisation as part of a risk assessment approach.

Unrealistic timeframes

It’s okay to push back on unrealistic timeframes. We still have clients expecting us to turn work around during the weekend or not understanding how long work takes to complete.

We do push back, mainly to role model good leadership and to manage expectations.

A big learning for us is we can’t be everything to everyone. And things we haven't done before, or haven’t done frequently, will always take longer.

Work pipeline

Sometimes it’s not the volume of work coming in, it’s blockages in getting the work done that creates time slippages. Years ago, I attended a lean course where we set up a production line making Lego widgets. At one point a person had to put three Lego pieces on the widget and this slowed down the whole production line. I've remembered this as over the years as people have complained about impacts other business units have on their production.

In a pipeline there will always be blockages, along with opportunities to streamline the processes.  The key is to work out what is causing the blockages.

We've been able to assist workplaces set up problem solving sessions between business units to streamline processes and improve workload and deadline issues.

Find the courage to question requests

As leaders we do have to ask hard questions and challenge the status quo. When I’ve asked managers why they don’t question impossible workloads, they often seem overwhelmed and the only response they can muster is, ‘We can’t do that.’

You might not be able to as a manager, but the Senior Leadership can, and should challenge unacceptable workloads. The answer might surprise you.

What does workload management look like in your organisation?