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My current manager got me to agree to sign my offer letter with his answer to my question, "How do you promote a healthy work life balance within your team?" His response to me was, "I can't promise you that you'll never go past 40 hours. But I will promise you that this company has put in the investment to ensure we have redundancy within our teams, and that working more than 45 hours will be incredibly rare. When it does happen, I can also promise you that I will be working more hours than I ask of any one of my team members." I was sold after that, and he's walked that talk for the past year I've been here.
Consider that you may be there to help bring light to this issue. As painful as it might seem, start with understanding what work can wait and what boundaries you can put in place. Do this with eyes wide open and clarity to the business— X task will not get done until Y date. If that is unacceptable to the business, then you have a capacity problem (you know you do, but we are proving it out for others). As a new manager, you can play the „new“ card and start informing the business that working at over capacity at the level is not and should not be normal. Sometimes we overwork because we don’t want to be a burden and the work must be done. However, letting things hit the ground selectively to bring attention to this is the only long term solution.
I had a new manager come in and ask me what was taking all my time. I tracked my work for two weeks and brought a chart of the types of tasks I was doing and how long they took. I showed that the job as they described takes 50-60 hours per week. She immediately understood the issue and started building a business case for hiring.
People and businesses don’t make change without a little pain. If they show they aren’t interested in any change, then leave. Good luck.
How refreshing to see you want to right size the workload, and my comment is meant to be sincere. That has been the mantra in my company “right sizing” the workload but it’s a work in process. Management wants to focus on efficiencies and technology (both of which are extremely important) but they also need to look at everyone’s workloads - theirs included. I work in a department with a lot of managers and if you look at head count only, there’s no reason why everything shouldn’t get done. But some people are overloaded to the gills but others not so much.