Overworked: A employee problem?

Do you feel overworked? It is increasingly common to find workers who complain about overwork and the difficulty they have in managing time by balancing their personal lives with work demands.

Usually, we believe that work overload is solved when the worker learns to manage his time, to prioritize and to define actions to achieve results.

The truth is that about the workload is that it is usually related to one of these factors:

-Failure in the design of the position.
-Excess of tasks and low focus on results.
-Structure not suitable for the expected result.
-Difficulty prioritizing tasks or activities that add value.
-Excess of steps or activities for the achievement of a result (bureaucracy and processes)
-Low scope in decision making (you have to consult everything)

It is very easy to blame workers, falling into the temptation of judging them for not knowing how to manage their workload, for the difficulty of delegating, for not knowing how to plan and endless arguments that make it easy to pigeonhole people as those responsible for overwork, however, we forget that this situation reflects the organizational culture and highlights an organizational problem that has its origin in the definition of job structure.

Unfortunately, it is the worker who suffers the consequences of the excess workload, we often find the following situations as a direct effect of the work overload:

-Work stress.
-Procrastination.
-Demotivation.
-Physical, mental and emotional exhaustion.
-Absenteeism
-Burnout

From Human Resources it is important to face this situation, demolishing the myth of the worker as responsible for everything that happens and taking action to impact at the organizational level through the definition of roles, organizing work to reduce bottlenecks, streamline decisions and manage processes with a focus on results and not on tasks that occupy time, overload and rarely add value.