You’re not alone – work now stinks now.
If you have trouble getting something done, because too many people were involved, being hung by emotion and conflicts in your workplace, or just waving under the weight of too many tasks in one day. . . Congratulations! You experience work intensification – the Gally Trend that we are not talking about enough.
Researchers in Europe have looked into this phenomenon For many years. They probably play it into three things happen, often all at the same time.
Firstly, workloads are just too heavy – too many tasks in too little time. Every task has a version of this. You can be invited for too many meetings or asked to pack too many warehouse pallets in an hour.
Secondly, the work is too dependent – it costs too many people to have a certain task performed. When Jamie Dimon is famous complained About a single decision that 14 committees needed for approval, interdependence was the issue.
Thirdly, workplaces have become emotionally challenging. Since COVID-19, for example, coarseness towards front line has employees increased- And people feel it.
To better understand how this problem influenced the workplaces, the consultancy firm Anthroom Insight worked together with Patrick Hyland, an organizational psychologist in April 2025. We have investigated 1,000 employees, ranging from entry-level employees to the C-suite level in five different industries. Our findings were striking. A quarter of the respondents always felt overwhelmed or often overwhelmed and felt overwhelmed at least part of the time. More than half (62%) experienced tasks. More than a quarter was beaten by bureaucracy and a lack of priorities. Almost a third had to do with angry colleagues, bosses and/or customers.
The harmful effects of work intensification
For employees work intensification Floats Burn -Out and has a negative influence on mental health. It can even send the record levels of executive sales that we see in the CEO And CFO Roll.
Work intensification can also influence productivity. At first glance, this seems a bit counter -intuitive. Perform more tasks, get more done, more productivity, right?
It is the middle part of that sentence where things break down. Performing more tasks does not mean that it is done more. First: the tasks can be a bad idea to do in the first place. In an era when We spend up to 60% of our time on “work on work” (Communication and coordination around what we are actually trying to do), our time is wasted by some of the tasks that we perform. If the work is intensified because of ‘work on work’, then we simply consume more empty work calories and we are not working on healthy productivity.
Work intensification also comes from a collapse of prioritization – and there too, productivity erodes quickly. As the saying is, if everything is important, nothing is important. If too many tasks come through too quickly, the most important will be lost. People are overloaded cognitively. For example, we struggle To remember lists For longer than seven items in our head (that is why American telephone numbers are seven digits long). If you have 14 priorities – all emphasized – your brain will go up. And it can tap the wrong task.
Look at the other two dimensions of work intensification – excess mutual dependence and very emotional working conditions – and the productivity consequences become even clearer. Nobody has ever made an organization more productive by making processes more complicated.
We can also have a number of cultural myths from the startup world (or frankly films) those workplaces where passionate bosses scream and pour out their hearts, are more productive. In fact, all that screaming just runs up more cognitive space for the unfortunate people who are shouting.
Rumination-where your brain can no longer stop with a traumatic event is a well-documented impact of poor emotional interactions at work. As one study Found, ruminating unpleasantness at work can not only affect the sleep of employees, but also of their partners. All that screaming is no one positioning to work effectively.
What to do about work intensification
Work intensification may seem daunting, but there are concrete strategies to combat it.
On an individual level, this can mean more active conversations with leadership about your workload to improve what is crucial. It may mean that it can be politely canceled for overly complex processes where possible, or reduce your involvement in those processes. It may mean that setting up a few firewalls between yourself and very emotional situations – or have strategies to manage those you cannot avoid.
For example, it is great not to report to mediate arguments at work, even if this is something you can do. You can ask the participants in meetings that are involved in a conflict to “take the offline” and not to make the rest of the group switches to an emotional exchange.
Teams can also tackle work intensification. Regular and clear conversations about roles, responsibilities and what is actually on everyone’s board can help reduce overtime, process complexity and even emotionally charged interactions. Discussing priorities is good “work on work” – not wasted time. It is okay to do a negative perspective – understanding “the essence of strategy is what you don’t do.” If teams have a clear picture of what is not worth doing and those who do not have to be involved, the work intensification can be reduced.
Finally, organizations can combat work intensification with the right mindset shift. Start with the principles that not all work is good work, not everyone has to touch everything, and not everything has to be an emotional crisis, and a number of different decisions follow logically.
We are plagued by bad myths: that overtime must be cherished, that collaboration always means in the same room, and that extreme emotions ensure extreme results of fuel. As soon as we understand that this behavior does not really stimulate the right results – and in fact the opposite behavior is actually more productive – a whole new series of possibilities that opened.
As our research has shownJust being aware of the three components (surplus tasks, surplus mutual dependence and excess emotion) and passionate fighting of it, a 119% is more likely to feel very effective. In other words, if you know exactly how the work breaks down and actively fighting back. . . You make real progress.
#fight #work #intensification