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Overworked and underpaid! That is often the response – usually jocular, but sometimes with a suggestion of truth – from an employee when an acquaintance asks: “How are things at work”?
Leaving aside the “underpaid” complaint – but remembering that the two are likely to be connected – what about the “overworked” grievance? Many employees feel that they just have too much to do. Whatever the reason – their own inefficiency, the employer not sharing out job roles fairly or just the fact that some jobs demand superhuman efforts to get things done – overwork can lead to stress-related health problems. People just get “burned out”. Before these health issues manifest themselves, possibly with employees taking long absences from work or leaving their employment altogether because of stress, shorter-term absences are likely to occur.
Absenteeism, whether long term or short term is damaging for employers and efforts can, and must, be made to tackle the root causes of actual or perceived “overwork.” A perception, rather than an actuality of overwork, might occur if the employee is disgruntled at what he or she sees as an imbalance between the effort they are putting in and the reward they are getting out, compared with the experience of their co-workers – in other words, fairness. Effort reward imbalance (ERI) is one of the most well-known job stress frameworks for assessing and changing potentially damaging working environments.
Strain is typically associated with excessive job demands or “role overload”. But what if the problem is not “overload” but “underload”? What if the employees’ difficulties stem from a feeling that their skills are being...