Many of my career transition clients come to me in a state of burnout or breakdown due to being overloaded with projects at their job. They try to be team players and they generally like their work, but even when they clearly have a full workload, their managers continue to add more to their overflowing plate.
It doesn’t seem right, but it happens frequently. This post by New York Times bestselling author Dan Schawbel on LinkedIn caught my eye because it explained a trend I had been curious about for years.
From the article Schawbel quoted posted on Quartz here:
Lead researchers Sangah Bae of Northeastern University and Kaitlin Woolley of Cornell drew on 10 separate experiments with more than 4,300 managers and employees and found that managers tend to reach for whichever employee seems to enjoy their job most, again and again, until they’re carrying far more than a fair share of the work nobody else wanted.
It’s exactly the habit that’s pushing the best people toward the exit.
In the study, managers said they thought that if an employee enjoyed their job, they would be less likely to burn out. This was not the case when the employee was consistently the one chosen to take on more work. But did the managers realize the workload across team members was uneven? The researchers offered this explanation:
Researchers call the underlying error “motive oversimplification,” the habit of taking one true thing about a person and treating it as an explanation for everything else about them. A manager facing unplanned work typically narrows the choice down to two or three people and decides on the spot, without checking whether that same person already got the last few extra assignments. Most managers say they face this exact choice at least once a month. Nothing forces the pattern into view.
Left alone, the habit doesn’t fade. Researchers followed real managers making this same choice every day for a full working week. Even on their most balanced day, they still gave the extra work to the enthusiastic employee 61 times out of 100.
Companies risk losing their best employees because of this habit. When an enthusiastic employee gets dumped on, their job satisfaction drops much more than a less invested employee. The enthusiastic employee is much more likely to become an enthusiatic job seeker. From the article:
Give the enthusiastic employee an uneven share of the extra work, and their odds of looking for a new job jump by close to 40%. Give a less invested employee that same uneven share, and almost nothing changes for them. A company loses nothing by splitting the work evenly. Keeping it uneven costs the company exactly the people it can’t afford to lose.
There is a big lesson here: when there is extra work to be done – and there will be – make sure you and your managers spread it around. Don’t take the easy and lazy way out by assigning it to the most dedicated and agreeable person – or you risk losing them.
Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash
