Anyone who talks about workload in organizations usually gets the same reflexes back. Capacity needs to be added. Better planning is needed. Smarter collaboration is needed. Or a welfare program, task force or additional consultation structure is put in place to relieve the pressure.
Understandable. But mostly wrong.
Structurally high workloads are rarely primarily a personnel problem. It is much more often the visible symptom of a system that is poorly designed. The problem is not the employee, but the way work, priorities, decision-making and improvement are organized.
That sounds more uncomfortable than calling for people to become more resilient. But it is more honest. And more strategically relevant.
Busyness is not yet performance
Many organizations are not overloaded because people are doing too little. They are overloaded because the system wants too much at once. New priorities are added, old ones rarely stopped. Projects run alongside the line, improvement programs on top of operations and reporting on top of real work. Busyness is then mistaken for commitment. A full agenda feels like progress. Until the stretch is gone.
The real problem is that organizations often confuse workload with ambition. As if high pressure is the inevitable price tag of growth, change or transformation. But that’s a fallacy. Ambition without system capacity leads not to acceleration, but to attrition. First in execution, then in quality, eventually in motivation.
How organizations organize their own workload
If you look closely, you will see that workload is usually designed in three places.
The first is stacking. When everything is important, nothing really becomes a priority. Teams are constantly switching between files, departments and urgent requests. This not only increases the workload, but also the mental strain. Every switch takes energy, concentration and time. The result: longer processing times, more errors and a sense of permanent backlog. Not because people are lazy, but because the system forces them to work piecemeal.
The second is slow and diffuse decision-making. In many organizations it is not sufficiently clear who decides what, within what frameworks and based on what criteria. This creates queues. Decisions are pushed through, wrapped up in coordination or parked in new consultations. What was meant to be due diligence ends in administrative friction. Work waits. Pressure mounts. And those who see the agendas filling up quickly think that solutions are being worked hard on, when in fact the real cause is that no one dares to choose.
The third is perhaps the most underrated: improvement is organized as extra work. Many change programs are still placed on top of daily operations. Employees have to do their normal work as well as participate in sessions, implementations, pilots and progress meetings. In this way, change does not become a relief, but an extra burden. As if an organization wants to climb out of a hole by throwing another scoop of work on top of it.
This is why it is so misleading to discuss workload only in terms of capacity. Of course there are situations where extra people are needed. But structurally high work pressure usually indicates something else: too much managerial friction, too little focus in choices and too little design quality in the work itself.
The leadership question behind overload
The real leadership question, then, is not: how do we get the pressure manageable? The real question is: what part of this pressure have we organized ourselves?
That requires different leadership. Less firefighting, more systems thinking. Less stacking, more scrapping. Less tuning, more deciding. Less controlling, more clear frameworks.
Leaders who really want to reduce workloads do not start with a welfare campaign, but with design choices. Which initiatives do we stop? Which meetings don’t add value? Which escalations actually belong lower in the organization? Which reports exist primarily to manage uncertainty? Where do unclear roles make work unnecessarily burdensome? And perhaps the most painful question: where have we confused busyness with performance?
Workload does not disappear by making people run harder in a poorly designed system. Workload decreases when the organization is designed to be simpler, sharper and more predictable. When priorities really are priorities. When decisions fall rhythmically and clearly. When teams can act on their own within clear frameworks. When improvement becomes part of daily work instead of an extra program.
That’s not a soft subject. That’s hard public administration.
Because an organization with structurally high workload not only loses energy. It loses quality, speed, reliability and ultimately credibility. To customers, to employees and to itself.
Workload is therefore not an HR issue at the periphery of strategy.
Workload is a design flaw at the heart of the organization.
And so a board question.
Reflection question: where in your organization is workload still being fought with extra effort, when work redesign is the real solution?
