Understaffing is affecting businesses across the globe. In 2022, a survey of CxOs, directors, and VPs found that 78% of businesses self-identified as being understaffed. That’s 78% of businesses putting their employees—and their companies—at risk.
From stress to lost revenue and lower productivity, working understaffed has a lot of negative repercussions for a business.
We’ll look at some of those adverse effects and also dig into what you as a business owner can do to prevent understaffing. We’ll also share what you can do to manage an understaffed team effectively—because, despite your best efforts, you may find yourself with a shift or two that you can’t fully staff.
Understaffing occurs when a business has too few team members working to cover the business operations.
It often results in a negative impact on business operations. When a business is understaffed, there aren’t enough employees to cover shifts, affecting employee morale, customer satisfaction, and your overall business.
In recent years, understaffing has become a serious issue across many industries, including healthcare, food and beverage, and education. While the pandemic has been the kicking-off point, understaffing continues to disrupt business owners.
Being overworked and understaffed is an increasingly common phenomenon that takes a major toll on employees and organizations alike. The always-on work culture fueled by digital transformation and 24/7 customer demands has created unsustainable workloads for many teams. If left unaddressed, the impact of excessive work and inadequate staffing can be severe.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore the causes and costs of having too much work and not enough human resources More importantly, I’ll provide actionable solutions to help leaders cope with and mitigate employee burnout, attrition, and reduced performance
Key Signs Your Team is Overworked and Understaffed
How can you definitively recognize the symptoms of excessive workloads and insufficient staff capacity? Here are some of the most telling indicators:
- Employees are visibly stressed, irritable, and unhappy
- People are working extremely long hours, including nights and weekends
- Lots of missed deadlines, incomplete projects, and errors
- Customers frequently complaining about slow responses or mistakes
- Difficulty taking time off due to lack of coverage
- Constant fire drills as people scramble to catch up
- Low energy, lack of focus, high absenteeism at work
- Difficulty attracting and retaining top talent
- High turnover as burnt out employees quit
If several or all of these warning signs sound familiar, it’s very likely your team members have more work than they can handle. Ignoring the problem won’t make it go away – and it will almost certainly get worse over time.
Causes of Excessive Workload
Before we explore solutions, it’s important to understand what allows excessive workloads to develop in the first place. Some of the most common culprits include
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Inadequate staffing: Leadership fails to properly resource teams and workload balance is not a priority.
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Overpromising: Sales and business development teams make unreasonable commitments without internal alignment.
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Scope creep: Project requirements and responsibilities slowly expand without adjustments to timeline or resources.
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Inefficient processes: Tasks and workflows are convoluted, opaque, manual, or fragmented across too many tools.
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Insufficient skills/training: Employees lack proficiency in tools/technologies central to their role.
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Poor planning: Work is reactive rather than proactive and lacks meaningful prioritization.
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Constant interruption: Context switching and meeting overload prevent sustained focus and progress.
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Toxic culture: People feel pressured to overwork and are anxious about speaking up.
A combination of structural, operational, and cultural factors usually contribute to unsustainable workloads emerging.
The Costs of Overwork
Many organizations tolerate overburdened teams and don’t treat it like the emergency it is. But make no mistake – the consequences are severe. Excessive workloads and understaffing leads to:
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Burnout: Physical and emotional exhaustion often causing once high-performers to become disengaged, bitter, and cynical.
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High turnover: Workers quit in search of less stressful opportunities with better work-life balance.
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Low productivity: Overwhelmed employees lack the bandwidth and energy to operate at full capacity and innovation is stifled.
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Increased risk: Operating in crisis mode leads to mistakes, errors in judgment, missed requirements, and noncompliance.
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Employee health issues: Persistent stress and overwork can manifest in cardiovascular disease, insomnia, anxiety, depression, and more.
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Toxic culture: Resentment, distrust, and negativity spreads between leadership and staff.
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Damaged reputation: Customer satisfaction, brand equity, and public perception suffer.
Clearly, excessive workloads generate tremendous human and organizational costs. The risks extend far beyond temporary fatigue or frustration – this is a long-term threat to your company’s performance, culture, and competitiveness.
8 Ways To Manage Too Much Work, Not Enough Staff
With the warning signs identified and the multifaceted costs understood, let’s explore some of the top strategies and solutions:
1. Conduct Workload Assessments
Take time to thoroughly examine current work volumes, staff capacity, productivity metrics, and forecasts. Gather data and input from managers and team members. Make evidence-based decisions on ideal team size and composition. Assessment provides the necessary fact base to justify adding headcount and other changes.
2. Prioritize Ruthlessly
Evaluate projects and initiatives against business objectives. Is every item truly essential? Can any objectives be accomplished through other means? Eliminate redundant or marginal efforts and place focus only on vital priorities. Say no to non-essential distractions and scope creep.
3. Add Staff Strategically
Bring on additional team members, temporary contractors, or external partners to share the load. Focus first on recruiting for overburdened roles and critical skill gaps. But beware simply adding general labor – new staff should complement and enhance existing capabilities.
4. Automate Tasks
Leverage technology like robotic process automation (RPA), AI, and workflow tools to eliminate repetitive, manual work. Shift tedious administrative tasks off your team’s plate.Target processes prone to human error for automation opportunities.
5. Streamline Processes
Assess workflows with an eye toward simplification and friction reduction. Remove redundant approvals, convoluted procedures, and tools that don’t seamlessly integrate. Reengineer processes to be as efficient, mistake-proof, and painless as possible.
6. Provide Support Resources
Alleviate pressure on overburdened staff by providing tools and services that make their jobs easier. For example, bring on a virtual assistant to handle scheduling and travel booking. Implement new collaboration and task management platforms.
7. Review Capacity Weekly
Conduct regular capacity reviews with managers to stay on top of workload distribution across teams. Reassign resources quickly when any group nears max capacity. This prevents small problems from escalating into major resourcing crises.
8. Foster Open Communication
Encourage employees to share workload concerns and challenges. Have skip level meetings to surface issues that direct managers may be blind to. Take input seriously and act fast to address excessive workloads raised by the team.
Signs Your Workload Management Efforts Are Succeeding
How will you know if your solutions to overwork and understaffing are having impact? Look for these positive outcomes:
- Employees express greater comfort speaking up about workloads
- Managers proactively address resourcing issues before they escalate
- Once severely understaffed teams have reached healthier size and capacity
- People are energized by a renewed commitment to work-life balance
- Key metrics like turnover, absenteeism, and errors show improvement
- Customer survey scores related to responsiveness and quality improve
- Cross-training expands team agility and flexibility
While not solved overnight, excessive workloads can be methodically addressed through the tactics covered here. The ultimate goal is to build a culture focused on scalable capacity planning and sustainable work, not heroics.
Lead With Empathy
As you assess your overburdened teams and implement solutions, remember to lead with empathy. Acknowledge the human toll of extreme workloads and offer support. Show you are committed to making structural improvements to empower people.
With compassion for your team, decisive management, and laser focus on business priorities and capacity planning, you can contain excessive workloads. Don’t wait until burnout becomes rampant. Be proactive and persistent in aligning work with available staff and these efforts will bear fruit.
Key Takeaways
- Common warning signs like burnout and high turnover indicate your team has too much work for its staffing levels.
- Causes range from inadequate headcount to inefficient processes and tools.
- Consequences include health risks, attrition, errors, and reputational damage.
- Conduct thorough workload assessments and capacity reviews.
- Strategically add staff, eliminate work, delegate, and increase efficiency.
- Support employees with better tools, resources, and open communication.
- Keep workloads aligned with team capacity to avert burnout and turnover.
With a multi-pronged approach, what feels like an intractable situation of overwork can be systematically transformed. Your employees and organization will be healthier and more effective when workloads and staffing reach equilibrium.
Hire seasonal employees before the seasonal rush
Is your retail business always going flat-out during the holiday season to keep up with the rush? Or is your ice cream shop inundated with holiday-goers every year from June to September?
Start planning in advance if you know your business needs additional support during your seasonal rush. Share your job postings, contact your network, and start interviewing early.
If you find yourself in an understaffing situation but aren’t sure your business will need the additional support long-term, consider hiring temporary employees. Temporary employees are a great way to get over a short-term staffing shortage.
And you might even find your next full-time employee, aka a temporary employee who is just too good to let go!
Create a hiring process that helps find the right candidates
Everything from how you write your job description to where you post your jobs can affect who applies for your open positions. Having a hiring process that outlines precisely how you approach openings in your business can help you hire the right people.
What should you consider when creating your hiring process? These ten steps will help set you up for success when hiring new employees.
- Consider your hiring needs. Why are you hiring? How many employees are you looking to hire? What positions are you looking to fill? Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll have a better understanding of your hiring requirements.
- Write a fantastic job description. Your job description should accurately explain what you’re looking for in a candidate. A job description should give applicants a clear understanding of the job, giving you more qualified candidates.
- Advertise the position(s). It’s time to get onto your favorite job boards and start sharing the news that you’re hiring. Post on online job boards as well as any local job boards that are relevant to your industry.
- Use screener questions to identify the best candidates. Apply screener questions to your job postings to narrow down your search.
- Review applications. Review the applications that have come through and eliminate any candidates that don’t meet your requirements.
- Conduct phone interviews/initial screeners. A quick initial phone or video interview is a great way to narrow down your candidate pool. Have questions prepared to help you quickly determine who may or may not be a good fit.
- Move on to the interview process. You may only need one interview or require a few more to make a final decision. Whatever method you use, this is the stage of the process when you narrow down your focus to two to three candidates.
- Conduct background checks. Depending on your industry, this may be a legal requirement for the position. If you aren’t conducting background checks, skip this step and move to #9.
- Conduct reference checks. It’s always helpful to hear from past employers when hiring. Ask about job performance, experience, responsibilities, and any industry-specific questions related to the job. A great question is, “Would you rehire this person if you had the opportunity?”
- Make an offer. From here, the only thing left is to offer the job to your preferred candidate.
“I’m EXHAUSTED and OVERWORKED! Should I Quit?”
What if you have too much work and not enough staff?
Many workers and managers face a situation where they have too much work and not enough staff. Fixing the situation without expanding the team may require some compromises. When you’re understaffed, assess what your team is doing. Cut some of the work or meetings that aren’t essential and prioritize the tasks that advance the company’s goals.
What happens if a company doesn’t have enough staff?
If there are not enough staff on board to carry out tasks, then it will mean that a small number of employees have too much to do. Piling the work on a few will put pressure and stress on those individuals. They may become overwhelmed with the workload and hence suffer from stress-related problems, leading to poor performance levels.
What happens if you don’t have enough employees?
When you don’t have enough employees on a team, your progress will be slowed down by the loss of efficiency from having more work to do per person. This typically leads to stress and frustration among workers and increases their risk of burnout. It can also lead to poor quality due to inadequate staff training and oversight.
What does it mean if a company has too much work?
If you’re a team or department leader, at least once in your career you’re likely to encounter the challenge of having too much work and not enough staff to handle it. When this happens, it means the company is experiencing being understaffed, or short-staffed.
