Loading team with too much work

 

What happens when you load your team with too much work and unrealistic goals:

 Honest People

• Will be able to cope for sometime and then burnout would start
• ‘Innovation’, ‘work quality’ will take a back seat
• Eventually they would either leave or become ‘clever’ - read below

Clever people

• Will utilize the situation to have good repo in organization
• They will pick a lot of things, even if they are not able to manage them all.
• Result - Lot of things would be half done or done with bad quality. But these problems are ignored and even rewarded, as theoretically the person is doing a lot and not complaining.

Slackers

• They know how to slack even with more work.
• Most of them would go on long leave or take frequent leaves.
• In some companies they are often moved to other ‘easy’ projects (bringing further burden on Honest people). In few, they are asked to leave, which is often a long road anyways.

Even though above eventualities are well known, overloading team members is very common technique, as it gets short term benefits of lot of work getting done. 

Few managers/leaders don't care about long term damages as by that time they move to different position, but hurting the organization in the process. Some don't have the long term vision, or simply deny any kind of damage due to the practice