Staff shortages | UK workers dealing with 'unmanageable' workloads

New research has revealed that nearly two-fifths of workers are reporting “unmanageable” workloads because of staff shortages.

TotalJobs surveyed over 2,000 British workers and found that 38% were buckling under the strain of their workloads, with almost half (47%) begging for additional staff to be hired to make their workload more manageable. As a result, 78% of those surveyed says they’ve experienced burnout symptoms related to work since the start of the year.

Although these statistics may have been exacerbated by the pandemic and subsequent Great Resignation, both of which have seen a huge exodus of people from the labour market, the problems British workers are experiencing with “unmanageable” workloads are nothing new.

“Job expansion” has become the norm in recent years; it’s increasingly common for an employee hired to do a particular job to find that their responsibilities increase, often without a commensurate rise in pay. Writing in her blog Culture Studies, and reported on LinkedIn, former Buzzfeed journalist Anne Helen Peterson says : “Workers have no choice but to hunker down and do it, because if you don’t, you’re “not a good culture fit.”