In this article we will pay attention to one segment of the previous article which deserves further clarification.
So, we will be discussing the meaning of workload.
Let us sum up our earlier notes on the subject.
Our starting point and our focus is the job and with the job related job advertisments.
Job advertisment states the position a company is seeking to occupy, a list of tasks as well as the list of the responsibilities a potential candidate for the job is expected to carry.
In such a way, the candidates for a job can ascertain if this job description and the additional information given fits her or his criteria or the perception of the job she or he had.
This may be used for the purpose that hte potential candidate creates an image about the future workload if she or he chooses to apply and eventually get to fill in the position.
As highlighted in the previous article workload is greatly determined by the job advertisment.
Job advertisment, listing the objectives and responsibilities actually determines the expected workload of the advertised position.
You may ask to whom is that relevant and how does this conclusion stand?
Well, it is relevant to anybody who previously worked in the industry the add is for.
Everybody who has the experience in the industry is able to conclude what is expected of her or him.
Therefore, in such a way somedoby applying for the position may assess if she or he would be able to handle the tasks related to this position.
And you may wonder how may the apprentices know something from the add?
Well, it is only fair to say that they will not know.
They will have to guess.
But, given the case that the add amost always states if it is the position for apprentices or not.
After all, for already some time there exists a trend.
This trend consists in the engagement of the students in the industry in which they tend to work proffesionally after they finish their studies.
That has multiple advantages.
For the purpose of this article we shall mention just two.
In many countries one of the many problems for people entering into the labor market is to get employed for the first time.
Engagament in the industry and the recommendations a student may get from her or his principal greatly contributes tha she or he will have the upper hand at an interview.
But not just that.
On the other hand, by gathering the experience during the studies, the students who apply for the apprentice position know what to expect of the duties and resposibilities.
Having covered that, now we may continue to the examination of the workload meaning.
Workload meaning
Workload has two determinants.
We require both of them to ascertain the workload meaning.
As we said, job advertisment will list the major tasks that the worker is expected to take on as well as determine for which level this tasks are suited.
The latter may be determined by the responsibilities a worker will have on the workplace from an add.
This is all that is needed to determine the workload meaning.
So, on one hand we have the amount of tasks a worker may be burdened with.
On the other hand we have the difficulty of this tasks and the importance which the successful accomplishment of these tasks has for the company.
Therefore, these two part of workload that we have to observe is quantity and quality of workload.
At the baseline, workload is always measured against time consumption.
Actually, that is the only thing that matters.
The main drive of every worker is to accomplish her or his tasks in as little time as possible.
The reason for that is simple, evading the rumination about the jos still left from the previous days or to evade staying after working hours.
Quantity of work
This determinant of workload is focused on the amount of work as its basis.
Amount of work relates to the number of tasks that an employee has at hand.
As you could have predicted, the amount of work is different for every and each position.
However, this is still not even close enough to ascertain workload.
The reason for such a statement is that the amount of work by itself is a rather bad indicator of workload.
Said in an other way, amount of work has low informational value.
This means that we have to enrich the amount of work with some further data to be able to determine the workload meaning.
So, we have to ask ourselves according to which factors can we further observe the amount of work.
The ones that first come to mind are:
- Repetitiveness of the tasks
- Frequency with which new tasks arive or are assigned
- Deadlines
Repetitiveness
The discussion on the quantity of workload has to take into account the nature of the tasks for which the worker is resposible for.
Some jobs are of that sort that the worker is burdened with just one of many similar tasks which repeat themselves over and over.
Such is the case with jobs in production lines or with some jobs in administation in general.
This jobs are by definition repetitive and because of their nature they are able to wear the worker down after some time.
For some time their exist scientific proof about the downsides of doing the same tasks over and over again with the negative impact on human psyche.
However, repetitiveness of the tasks leaves some space to the workers to adjust the technology of accomplishing the tasks.
This boils down to performing the tasks with more speed and accuracy.
Technology of doing something is nothing else than the organisation, the set of steps and an order in which they are arranged in order to accomplish a job.
Having that in mind the amount of work measuring in time units needed to perform a task may be slightly reduced by adjusting the technology of performing the job.
In such a way the effective amount of work becomes smaller.
Different situation is in a workplace where workers are confornted with original, unique or irregular task or tasks.
If these tasks aren’t demanding and may be easily accomplished using the knowledge required for a certain position, than he effective amount of work should not be too high.
However, in case of a certain new project the situation may be different altogether.
The work on a project may be time consuming.
It may require working in teams, what implies coordination coordination of the activities of team members.
The role of the team members may include a list of tasks, which may be successfully accomplished in cooperation with other team members.
In this situation a worker does not have any pattern of previous accomplished similar tasks in order to use that to save time while performing the tasks.
Also, a worker is not in a position to experiment with the technology of performing the tasks.
Well, this is so because the steps that the team members are expected to take are previously set and action of one member on its own hand could disrupt the operations which are underway.
The one thing a worker may to is to concentrate on her or his own previous experience in general.
Also, a worker may want to contribute to the overall cooperation of the team members to secure the effective execution of the tasks.
In such a way a worker may gain in saving in the efficient amount of work.
Let us now head on to the next factor of quantity of work which contibutes to the workload.
Frequency with which new tasks arive or are assigned
The second important feature related to the quantity of work is the frequency of assigning new tasks.
Often, the overall workload is not determined just by the number of the tasks a worker currently has, but rather by the consecutive influx of new tasks.
This means that the flow of the workload if even more important in determination of the workload than the current one.
Thus, if the number of the tasks with which two different workers on the same workplace are burdened with is similar, the conclusion on who of them has the greater workload will depend on the fact who gets a greater influx of the new tasks.
A further conclusion may be exposed.
That relates to the fact that even the workers who started with just a few tasks may end up having a significant workload if there is a high frequency of new tasks assigned and objectives to be met.
If you thought of stress, this is one of its most common triggers.
We have personally suffered stress several times due to this factor as a great contributor to work overload.
Regarding frequency, it is also fair to say that today there exists and are is function in many workplaces sortware that monitors overall workload of each worker.
We can say this to be thru from our own examples.
One of us previously worked as a court advisor with two other female colleagues.
The computer controlled how many cases each of us still has in which a certain decision needed to solve the case wasn’t yet delivered.
After the software noticed that the number of cases of one of us started to drop, it would assign new cases to us.
However, this has one obvious downside.
You can try guessing what it is.
Guessed?
Well, the main problem is that such a software punishes those workers who work most dilligently.
The lazy colleagues will always have the same number of tasks unfinished, while the tasks of the dilligent ones will start to drop and she or he will be burdened with the new group of tasks.
This was the reason of a quarell between me and the female colleagues.
Around 2016 I was very surprised how the number of cases which I had to deal with rose steeply for a few months.
Back then, I wasn’t aware that we even had a software tracking the number of cases that each of us had.
Well, as you can imagine I swiftly became aware of that.
So, one day when I entered my office, a skyscraper of cases waited on the table.
I lost it instantly.
Stress, what can you do?
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So, I took the phone and asked the ones that were competent for assignment of the cases to me and colleagues what is happening down there.
Well, I thought they were competent, I did not know before that that they just did what the software told them to do.
So, long story short it, turned out that the one of the colleagues was much slower in delivering the decision ih her cases than me and the other colleague.
So, a quarell followed and the order has to be restored. The end.
So much about the frequency of the assignment of the tasks.
We will now continue to the last feature we want to discuss in frame of the quantity of work.
Deadlines
You may wonder how do deadlines fit in the discussion about the quantity of work.
Well, let us elaborate.
We will begin with one simple obvious statement, as follows:
Almost every task has to it attached a moment, day or a month when it needs to be finalised.
Therefore, it is self evident that tasks have deadlines.
It is a common and predominate case that a worker has multiple tasks to accomplish and objectives to meet.
Let us bring one step closer to the realistic conditions on the most workplaces.
The real situation on the workplace acknowledges the existence of many tasks among at least two have a deadline that falls on the same day.
This greatly disables the possibility of a worker to distribute his or her work equally through a given period.
Let us add to this another condition to make this elaboration entirely resemble the real life workplace.
This condition recognises that deadlines for the whole sum of the tasks that a worker has at hand fall very closely to each other.
For this reason, deadlines greatly determine the minimum amount of work that a worker has to take care of.
In a modern world this minimum required amount of work due to deadlines is often to the point of exhaustion.
Having in mind that the deadlines for many tasks fall on the same day and that the deadline for the whole sum of the tasks that worker at hand fall very close to each other the amount of work always tends to be be high.
Smells like stress in the air, right?
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Now, we move to the other feature of workload meaning.
Quality of work
Quantity of work takes a horizontal view on the tasks and objectives.
It puts the accent on the workload seen through the number of tasks at hand or tasks to come.
On the other hand, when we talk aobut quality of work, we are taking a look at the workplace vertically.
We are interested on how do hierarchy in the company and the difficulty of the given tasks influence the total workload.
This will be our final contribution to the workload meaning.
Factor which we are going to elaborate are:
- Responsibilities
- Gravity
Responsibilities
As we discussed in one of our previous articles, most of the companies still operate on the hierarchy principle.
That aslo means the subordination principle.
In other work, in a company you will find super- and subordinated workers.
Each level of the hierarchy carries some level of responsibilities.
It is logical and appropriate to think, beacuse it resembles realitiy, that responsibility shrinks from top to the bottom.
So, how does responsibility contribute to the overall workload?
It does so in at least two ways.
According to the basic presumption we noted, the workers on the bottom of the hierarchy will have the least responsibilities.
That may have, again, two consequences, what actually depends on the given case or a company.
By having least responsibilites, although their tasks may be numerous, the workers on the bottom should always have power to rely on their superiors.
In a way, in companies which do not develop ownership for the result of work and just highlight monitoring, the subordinated workers will tend to use the fact that they couldn’t be blamed for a failure.
They are aware that they are able to ascribe their failure to their superiors.
In effect, that is how they lower their overall workload.
The second consequence relies on the fact that lew responsibility resembles low control.
Depending on the company, a superior may use his power to delegate much of the tasks to one or more of his subordinated workers.
In this way, the superior directly influences the workload of those workers, making it bigger or smaller.
As we go up the hierarchy ladder, the responsibilites start to rise.
First reason relates to the fact that the workers on higher levels of hierarchy have the obligation to control the lower levels.
The problem arises when there are multiple levels between a certain higher level of hierarchy and the bottom level.
This is so because a situation like this makes control and monitoring more complicated, making the workload bigger.
The other reason for the accumulation of workload relates to the fact that the worker on higher level of hierarchy are expected to possess knowledge specific to his level, but also govern the knowledge needed on the lower levels.
This is reasonable to presume, because a superior has to know how the processes in a company work in order for the business operations to run smoothly.
For this reason, it is reasonable to expect that the workload adds on quickly as we go up the ladder.
However, experience and reality sometimes tell a different story.
There case where there are multiple levels between a certain position and the bottom levels.
This situation threatens that the relation between these levels may be become too complex.
Beacuse of that it may come to be that a worker occupying such higher position may be in place to significantly alleviate some of the her or his workload.
She or he will mostly do that by hiring assistance possesing the knowledge and the ability to sum up the most important information from the lower levels and presenting it to this worker in a brief manner.
On the basis of this, the worker on this higher position in a hierarchy has the power to make informed decision without the trouble of gathering the needed information and sorting it.
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Gravity
The other factor that needs discussion is the gravity of each task and the objective that need to be met.
Our starting premise is that the amount of work is always viewed against the time resources needed to accomplish the tasks at hand.
Whenwe discussed quantity of work, we deliberately ignored this side of the coin to concentrate just on the number of tasks.
However, in reality, some tasks are more demanding then others.
If we again introduce the feature or the deadline in the story, it is easy to see, how the difficult tasks which require swift handling, along with the other existing tasks contribute to the overall workload.
Also, in the case of multiple more difficult tasks which need to be handled simultaneously, there is also the possibility that the other tasks have to be temporarily ignored.
This again raises the serious question of stress occurrence.
Difficult tasks contribute to the subjective perception of the workload.
It is so because time consumption connected with the proper accomplishent of such demanding task keeps the constant pressure on the worker to meet the deadlines of all the other tasks on the table.
Workload meaning explained
We have reached the point that enables us to fully understand the workload meaning.
Workload meaning pressuposes, therefore, two facts.
These relate to the tasks the worker is expected to accomplish and to the amount of control over the execution of his tasks.
So, workload represents the overall existing tasks to be finished and objectives to be met as well as those which are anticipated, viewed in order of their difficulty and deadlines for each of them woven with the degree of responsibility for the successful completing of these tasks and objectives.
Conclusion
Workload is one of the most discussed topics on every workplace.
Balanced workload distributed equally among the workers in the same department or sector greatly contributes to the happiness and self respect of the workers.
Also, this adds to the normal and mutually supporting relations between the superior and subordinated workers.
For this reason, the ability to distribute workload according to the needs of a company and according to the agreement and the special circumstances on a certain workplace greatly contributes to a healthy working environment and stress suppresor.
in any case, on almost every workplace stress may be rigth around the corner.
For this reason, always be sure that you are equipped with you Anti-stress app.
Thank you for staying through to the end.
See you in the next article on the major stressors at work!