How to battle work intensification

Fast Company

12 hours ago

It's not just you—work kind of stinks right now.
If you're struggling to get something done because too many people were involved, getting hung up by emotion and conflict in your workplace, or just swaying under the weight of too many tasks in one day . . . congratulations! You're experiencing work intensification—the gnarliest trend we don't talk about enough.
Researchers in Europe have been looking at this phenomenon for many years. They pin it down to three things happening, often all at once.
First, workloads are simply too heavy—too many tasks in too little time. Every job has a version of this. You might be invited to too many meetings or asked to pack too many warehouse pallets in an hour.
Second, work is too interdependent—it takes too many people to get any given task done. When Jamie Dimon famously complained about a single decision needing 14 committees for approval, interdependence was the issue.
Third, workplaces have become emotionally challenging. For example, since COVID-19, rudeness toward frontline workers has increased —and folks are feeling it.
To better understand how this issue was affecting workplaces, in April 2025 consulting firm Anthrome Insight partnered with Patrick Hyland, an organizational psychologist. We surveyed 1,000 workers ranging from entry-level employees to the C-Suite levels in five different industries. Our findings were striking. A quarter of respondents always or often felt overwhelmed and half felt overwhelmed at least some of the time. Over half (62%) were experiencing task overload. Over a quarter were getting whacked by bureaucracy and a lack of priorities. Almost a third were dealing with angry coworkers, bosses, and/or customers.
The damaging effects of work intensification
For employees work intensification drives burnout and negatively affects mental health. It may even be driving the record levels of executive turnover we're seeing in the CEO and CFO roles.
Work intensification can also impact productivity. On the surface, this seems a bit counterintuitive. Do more tasks, get more done, more productivity, right?
It's the middle part of that sentence where things break down. Doing more tasks does not mean getting more done. First off: the tasks may be a bad idea to do in the first place. In an era when we spend up to 60% of our time on 'work about work' (communication and coordination around what we're actually trying to get done), our time is being wasted by some of the tasks we undertake. If work has intensified due to 'work about work,' then we're just consuming more empty work calories, and not engaging in healthy productivity.
Work intensification also comes from a collapse of prioritization—and there too, productivity erodes fast. As the saying goes, when everything's important, nothing's important. When too many tasks are coming through too quickly, the important ones are bound to get lost. Humans get cognitively overloaded. For instance, we struggle to remember lists longer than seven items in our heads (which is why American phone numbers are seven digits long). If you have 14 priorities—all emphasized—your brain is going to tap out. And it might tap out on the wrong task.
Look at the other two dimensions of work intensification—excess interdependence and highly emotional working conditions—and the productivity consequences become even clearer. No one ever made an organization more productive by making processes more complicated.
We may also have some cultural myths from the startup world (or honestly movies) that workplaces where passionate bosses scream and pour their hearts out are more productive. Actually all that running around yelling just eats up even more cognitive space for the unlucky folks being yelled at.
Rumination—where your brain can't stop going over a traumatic event over and over—is a well-documented impact of bad emotional interactions at work. As one study found, rumination from unpleasantness at work can not only affect the sleep of employees, but of their partners too. All that yelling is not positioning anyone to work effectively.
What to do about work intensification
Work intensification can seem daunting, but there are concrete strategies to combat it.
At an individual level, this might mean more active conversations with leadership about your workload to hone in on what's crucial. It might mean politely opting out of overly complex processes when possible, or lessening your involvement with those processes. It might mean setting up some firewalls in between yourself and highly emotional situations—or having strategies to manage the ones you can't avoid.
For example, it's okay to not volunteer to mediate arguments at work, even if this is something you are capable of doing. You can ask meeting participants embroiled in a conflict to 'take it offline' and not make the rest of the group spectators to an emotional exchange.
Teams can tackle work intensification, too. Regular and clear conversations about roles, responsibilities, and what's actually on everyone's plate can help mitigate overwork, process complexity, and even emotionally charged interactions. Discussing priorities is good 'work about work'—not wasted time. It's okay to take a negative angle—understanding 'the essence of strategy is what you don't do.' If teams have a clear view on what's not worth doing and who doesn't need to be involved, work intensification can be reduced.
Finally, organizations can combat work intensification with the right mindset shift. Start with the principles that not all work is good work, not everyone has to touch everything, and not everything has to be an emotional crisis, and a number of different decisions logically follow.
We are plagued by bad myths: that overwork is to be cherished, that collaboration means everyone in the same room all the time, and that extreme emotions fuel extreme results. Once we understand that these behaviors don't really drive the right outcomes—and in fact the opposite behaviors are actually more productive—a whole new array of possibilities open up.
As our research showed, simply being aware of the three components (excess tasks, excess interdependence, and excess emotion) and passionately combatting them makes one 119% more likely to feel highly effective. In other words, if you know exactly how work is breaking down, and you actively fight back . . . you're making real progress.