How to manage overload by working smarter rather than harder

This post is written by Zoltán Vitus, Agile Coach, Federal Office of Information Technology, Systems and Telecommunication (FOITT), Switzerland.

• The problem: Overload at work has to be properly managed.

• Why it matters: It impacts motivation at work and in personal life.

• The solution: Doing the right things right.

Most people do not enjoy overload at work. Some others can work and think better under pressure. Nevertheless, any complex system having to function above 80% of its capacity for a longer period will break down. Think of it like this: anyone climbing above 7,000 metres of altitude will eventually need an oxygen mask for surviving.

Government employees are definitely exposed to such situations, especially during crises like the one we have experienced for the past two years.

At the Swiss Federal Office of Information Technology, Systems and Telecommunication (FOITT) we implemented organisational measures and methodical frameworks for addressing such issues.

Generally, it is a good thing when an organisation has more work to be done than the amount of available resources. This motivates us to prioritise, to organise and reorganise around business value. Therefore “doing the right things right” and involving the customers from the very beginning is the smart way forward. Lightweight agile frameworks like scrum help in this endeavour: the scrum master ensures that things will be done right and the product owner makes sure that teams are doing the right things.

Hitting the wall

Nevertheless, as we experience a large load of digital transformations in every government agency, we need to scale and extend our internal capacities (mainly for “new business”) by hiring an external workforce (mainly for “old business”). We try to manage this challenge by empowering the line managers (we call them chapter leads) as professionals specialised in the pure people management of the internal and external workforce, including setting up medium and long-term procurement frame agreements.

Working smarter implies prioritization of work and an intelligent balancing of the load. This can be achieved by adopting and adapting lightweight agile frameworks centred around customers (citizens as well as Federal Departments) and by fostering specialised people management and procurement experts for efficiency, stability and scaling. Strong cooperation with external partners for flexible extension of the work power is necessary. These are some of the things we tried here at FOITT in order to keep employees and customers happy. And we started to see some good results: we could staff new scrum teams within six to eight weeks, and managed to significantly improve customer satisfaction surveys about product development.

👋 You can create a post like this one! Share your thoughts with a community of public servants. Learn more

(Image Credit: Unsplash)