An RI&E or a work experience survey gives you a structured insight into the energy and stress sources in your department. Signs of a disrupted workload balance can be recognized in the three sources for a good balance as follows:
- Work commitment: Insufficient insight into the need for deployment, high leave credits, increasing additional work/overtime, complaints from patients or other customers, increasing expenses for temporary workers, too much work in too little time, a continuously high work pace, too few employees at busy times, time pressure, agitation, insufficient/late care delivery, not (being able to) keep appointments, errors and incidents, pressure on treatment and attention to patients and colleagues, lack of safety net, transfer and coordination problems, communication problems, irritated atmosphere, arguments about details.
- Work-person: Knowledge and skills do not match the work, lack of adaptability to changes in the work situation or changing demand for care, lack of opportunities to organize one's own work, work stress signals, complaints due to physical/psychological overload, lack of clarity about tasks or priorities, misunderstandings about responsibilities, lack of social connection, playing things on the person and a defensive attitude against criticism instead of responding to business improvement opportunities and learning from mistakes, distrust, 'yes but' culture, (feeling of) insecurity, insufficient separation of professional actions and private situation, job insecurity, work-related (frequent) absenteeism.
- Work-private life: Too little influence on regular working and rest times, unclear agreements on flexible deployment, declining willingness to work more hours, inaccessibility of employees, gray absenteeism. Less employability due to, for example, informal care or other private circumstances.
Masking problems
Disrupted workload balance is often masked in the beginning by:
- The employee compensates for the excessive demands by investing extra time/energy in their own efforts.
- The employee takes home the excess work (e.g. reading and writing reports, updating files).
- The employee masks the too low requirements through window dressing (e.g. a desk with piles of documents, a calendar full of unnecessary appointments), irrelevant activities and activities that lead to undesirable role enlargement (e.g. interference in the management of other people's projects, excessive attention to procedures).
This behaviour of brushing away things makes problems invisible and can become normal behavior, which is difficult to change. It can further reinforce a taboo that rests on making the actual workload balance transparent and negotiable. By masking, work pressure problems can lead to long-term psychological overload (work stress) and an undesirable work culture. And so workload problems can develop into departmental problems unnoticed. Problems with the workload balance cannot be compensated for in the long term with all kinds of emergency bandages. Ultimately, this will not only lead to more and different complaints, but also to less productivity, counterproductive behavior and a disrupted organization.