Work overburden – Is it inevitable, should it be glorified? Or is it rather an ignored source of truth?

In a newspaper article, it was stated that in the medical industry in Germany work overburden is being ‚glorified‘. The story was about women engaging in a surgical career successfully, but who are then more or less mobbed and pushed aside, once they become pregnant and mothers. And if you are not permanently available to at least 130 % or more at any time, you are not seen as somebody seriously pursuing a surgeon’s and scientist’s career.

From my long experience in large IT organisations, I know that they are not the only industry where work overburden is being ‘glorified’. In IT professions at all levels of the hierarchy, work overburden is a more or less normal state for many. For the doctors, it is the high need for surgeries across the country that pushes work hours. For IT professionals, it is the growing customer demand and a fast technological change clock rate that makes them sit longer and have meetings for long hours, even during the most beautiful warm summer evenings. 

Glorification

Is it like that? Really? Are these the real causes, and that’s it? Let’s look at this from a different angle. And I want to use the newspaper story about women’s careers as surgeons to make a start: In Germany, meanwhile, more than 70 % of graduates in human medicine are female, and there is indeed a high need for specialised and qualified surgeons in the hospitals. Basically, in that situation, you can’t afford to let talented, engaged, and motivated women behind and push them out of the operating theatres, because they have a baby. Btw., ethically and from a fairness perspective, this is highly questionable, of course.

But for the moment, I want to stay with simple business logic and value creation perspectives. And then you end up here: The still big majority of 78% male surgeons are spending 10 or 12-hour days in the operating theatres, because there are not enough qualified surgeons to cover the demand for surgeries. So this is, to some degree, self-made work overburden, because the chief doctors are actively pushing highly qualified and talented women out of the operating theatres. Is this being discussed as an ethical and fairness issue? Yes, a bit. Is it being seen as a business issue? Not really. Because, indeed, work overburden is seen as a part of the normal life and ‚professional pride‘ of doctors. Conversations with doctors in my private environment confirm this. Because you can’t let the patients wait, because it is so important to save lives and health, because they are the cream of the crop of the most difficult and admired professions in the country. And, yes, all that is true. They are doing highly qualified, difficult work and are doing so much good to so many people with that hard work. But all of these statements also come as a reflex so fast, so indisputable, that it prevents these doctors from objectively looking at this as a serious, unsolved problem of how they organise this important work. 

Btw. also from my own experience and the experience of others, I can say: Patients are waiting so much and so long in these high-end hospitals. So, all the work overburden does not even make the promise true, “we can‘t let patients wait”. Very obviously, there is a pretence. And that pretence has a cost. 

Work overburden kills productivity and quality

So why is overburden an issue beyond the question of whether the surgeon can spend leisure time earlier on a warm summer evening? Let’s look at that briefly: 

Overburden creates stress. Overburden tires those who carry it. Overburden makes people rush and hurry. Overburden leads to prioritisation and re-prioritisation and pushing things to the waiting bench. Overburden leads to start-and-never-finish actions. Overburden leads to repeated requests because they are missed or not done the right way. Overburden does not leave space for reflection, learning, and communication beyond the pure doing of the job. And long-term chronic overburden makes people give in, in the sense of: They will just try to survive the day and the week, with no energy left to try to do things better or to talk about recurring issues for example. No energy or goodwill left to collaborate, to support others beyond what is in their own job description. In consequence, all this leads to a higher chance that mistakes and errors happen. And it leads to much lower chances and less possibilities that things can be improved over time.

And that is the same in both types of jobs: For surgeons, it might be small complications, with low or no impact on patients. Sometimes it might be bigger complications, with a serious impact on patients. And that will result in rework or even bigger trouble when patients have issues afterwards. Or it might be much less, but also that will leave traces: Shouting at subordinates or nurses. Slowly losing patience to talk to patients as you should and would like to. The result: Trust fades away, and the cooperation between all these roles suffers, which makes work more difficult in the end: Patients keep asking questions and complaining. Nurses and assistant doctors only do what they are told, and will not take any responsibility or initiative themselves anymore. They might even leave the job. 

In IT organisations, it results in errors that happen while working on customer systems, leading to incidents and outages. Or you have unnoticed little configuration errors or suboptimal maintenance creeping into the systems, increasing the likelihood that later you see surprises (‚oh, this is not like the standard’ – ‚ah, weird system behaviours, I didn‘t expect that could happen’). Such deviations will make further changes, maintenance, and system restores suddenly complicated and laborious. It might be that IT-support and service experts don’t take the time to truly understand what the customer wants and needs – or to understand what issue the other guy in the other IT-department or at sales has, and why the hell he can not simply just do his job the right way?

These are some examples of negative effects that you don’t want to have in your working environment, because they make it more difficult to get good results, and the risk of issues increases. From long experience in production management, we know: If you push the utilisation of your people beyond 80% of their real capability, you will not get more output, but less. Productivity and quality go down. Or would you expect that a surgeon or IT-administrator will still be very fast and accurate in the 10th hour of hard work?

Learning from work overburden

Basically, you can’t afford to have such effects, especially if your hospital or IT-company is already working at the limits, in permanent work overburden, because that can quickly create situations and issues (like mass outages of systems, too many customers pressing and urging), that then finally and definitively exceed your capability to react and to stay in control – you end up in what you could call an ‚overburden meltdown‘. And if that does not (yet) happen, you can at least be sure that these effects generate enough inefficiencies to keep levels of work overburden high. It is a self-reinforcing vicious cycle. 

Thus, what is the solution to reduce overburden? To stay realistic: If you are close to that ‚overburden meltdown‘, you need to identify what helps to stabilise your situation. In IT, this is, for example, to install ‚early warning‘ structures and habits that bring new risks and issues to the surface early – before all customers are affected, for example. Or before half of your surgeons suddenly must stay at home with the flu. Then you look at these risks and issues and take action immediately to mitigate risks and impacts. That will keep your workforce away from even more overburden, and that might even uncover some sources of recurring issues.

But at the start, that is just a tactical need to survive and to stay in a space where you can still act and can still make choices. It does not solve the overburden problem for good. It does not sufficiently bring you on a road to uncover the root conditions of work overburden. 

Call a spade a spade: Work overburden is an issue

To start walking on that journey, there is a very essential first step. A step that does not cost you extra resources, or expensive material, or investments: Stop glorifying work overburden. Stop calling work overburden a normal and inevitable thing in your industry. Start naming work overburden what it actually is: An issue and a threat to your business, your value production, and your purpose. And as this has now been identified as a problem with serious impacts, you can start to ask: Where is this coming from? What is causing work overburden? Is it just all the load of new customers and customers’ demand? Or is it, – seen from a different angle – rather a problem of not being productive and proactive enough to serve these waves of demand? And look at the types of demand: Are you overwhelmed by incidents and customers escalating to get things fixed and back working? Then ask yourself: Are customers the cause of this? Well, no, not really – there is something that causes incidents that you might want to manage better in the future. Walk into the neighbouring department, sit down with them and ask them: What could I do to make work easier and more productive for you? Are there things that you would need from others? Are there pieces of work or requests coming to you, where information or preparation, or inputs from others are missing, and you can’t process them well? When you have shifts where customer requests are at 180% of what your team can possibly do in 8 hours, then ask yourself: What is wrong with how that demand is being channelled into your organisation and towards different shifts? 

To put it in a nutshell: Work overburden seen from a different angle is not normal, is not inevitable, and is nothing to glorify (at least if pushed to people in a way that they have no choice). It is an issue that you can’t afford for long-term success, and that issue wants to tell you something. Look at it, listen to it, understand how work overburden arises, with a perspective across the whole value chain, and considering all levels of decision-making and work.