Unless you have been living under a rock, most Australian leaders are acutely aware of the introduction of more specifics about what constitutes a psychosocial hazard in the workplace. One of the specifics includes unreasonable job demands.
Small legal issue: these are not super clearly defined. Great for lawyers, less so for leaders. And to make matters harder for leaders, this typically lies in the perception of the person impacted. So one person can perceive a certain level of workload to be totally fine, but if another person perceives a particular situation not to be ok, then the leaders could find themselves a little distracted with a lawsuit they didn’t see coming. Not ideal.
The challenge hits close to home for professional services
This is a big one for accounting and law firms to grapple with at the moment. While these people have always had the expectation of dealing with high job demands, how much is too much?
Many Partners are reporting that “discretionary effort” just isn’t where it used to be. Where people used to ask for more work if they were finished by around 4.30pm, that’s no longer happening. Partners are also reporting that people are taking longer to do things than would normally be expected, so chargeable time may be up on the surface, but that can’t all be billed to the client, hence profitability isn’t quite where it could be.
Meanwhile, junior staff are claiming they’re overwhelmed by workloads that, on paper, don’t look unreasonable compared to industry standards.
The reality is that perception is often the biggest issue around workload – not necessarily the actual volume of work itself.
Here’s what’s really happening with workload perception
While employers are now worried about ticking the box to make sure they are seen as compliant in the quest to avoid these psychosocial hazards, one thing that’s often overlooked is that evolved leaders can now go a long way to helping themselves and their teams by understanding what actually drives the perception of workload overwhelm.
Because here’s the thing – it’s not always about the actual volume of work. It’s often about how that work feels to manage.
Bear with me…
When someone feels like their workload is unreasonable, it’s usually because of one or more of these factors:
Lack of clarity about priorities – They have 15 things on their list and genuinely don’t know which three are most important. So they spend cognitive energy all day second-guessing themselves instead of just getting stuff done.
Constant interruptions – Every time they get into flow, another email, Teams message, or “quick question” derails them. Their brain never gets to settle into productive work mode. And to make it worse, often people are causing their own distractions! If they are responding to every notification (including the non-work-related notifications) on multiple devices in real-time, this drains so much cognitive energy. It’s no wonder they feel overwhelmed by their work.
Declining mental health – So much research is supporting declining mental health. So psychological capital, which includes self-confidence, is absolutely on the decline too. When we overestimate a problem in comparison to our ability to deal with the situation, we go into the unproductive side of the stress curve. This means we are spending more energy being stressed, and then more energy being stressed about being stressed. It’s no wonder productivity is going down, yet perception of the workload is going up.
All of these create what I like to call “cognitive overhead” – the unnecessary energy credits spent managing work rather than doing work.
And there are so many more ways than what I’ve mentioned here that your people are doing this every day without leaders and teams even knowing that it is happening.
The framework for reducing perceived workload pressure
Instead of just reducing the actual workload (which isn’t always possible anyway), smart leaders focus on reducing the cognitive overhead. Here’s how:
Remove decision fatigue wherever possible Clarity is kindness. Our accountability frameworks are designed to remove all ambiguity about deliverables so that it’s much easier to know what to work on, and our cognitive energy optimisation frameworks are helping people with exactly when and how they should be doing their work to get it done in less time with less effort.
Create communication protocols. Stop the constant interruption cycle. Set up agreed times for checking messages, and make it ok for people to have focus blocks where they’re not expected to respond instantly. I’ve seen productivity increase by 30% just from this simple change.
Help people understand their psychological capital. When people understand that declining self-confidence affects how overwhelming work feels, they can start to manage it. Coach your team to recognise when they’re overestimating problems and underestimating their ability to cope. Simple reframes like “I have a lot on but I’ve got this” instead of “I’m so overwhelmed” can shift someone from the unproductive to the productive side of the stress curve.
Why this approach matters more than ever right now
The psychosocial hazard legislation isn’t going anywhere. And with the current job market, you can’t afford to have your best people burning out or feeling like their workload is unreasonable – whether that perception is accurate or not.
But here’s the thing that most leaders are missing: you have way more control over workload perception than you think. And it doesn’t require hiring more people, reducing revenue, or compromising on client service.
It requires getting smarter about how work gets managed and how people feel about managing that work.
The firms that figure this out will have a massive competitive advantage. They’ll retain better people, avoid compliance issues, and probably see productivity improvements as a bonus.
The firms that don’t will keep throwing money at the problem – hiring more people to do work that could be managed more efficiently, dealing with higher turnover, and potentially facing the legal issues they’re trying to avoid in the first place.
Your next steps
Start by thinking about how much ambiguity people are dealing with, and then whether or not you’ve coached them on how to maximise cognitive energy and psychological capital?
The answers will tell you whether you have a workload problem or a workload perception problem. And trust me, it’s usually the latter.
Of course, if you’d like to find out more about how to improve performance with less effort why not either book a Performance Call or sign up for our next 20/20 session or one of our open workshops here.