🖤 Open Works #039 How To Diagnose And Fix Workload Issues In Your Org

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📚️ Recent Editions

If you’re new round here, not yet a subscriber or you straight up missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🧑‍🎨 Edition 38: How To Build An Innovation Engine - a change agent’s guide to borrowing good stuff from other disciplines…

🎯 Edition 37: Rolling Out KPIs in Product & Tech Without Causing A Mutiny - a practical guide.

💰️ Edition 36: How To Think About Executive Compensation - a mental model and stage by stage guide to approach it.

💭 This Week’s People Problem

🖤 Our Take On How You Solve

TL;DR:

The Root Cause Might Not Be Load

You’ve added people and improved systems, but “workload” is still the dominant signal in your 1-2-1s, listening tours and pulse surveys.

You’ve looked at the obvious stuff (headcount, tools, meeting hygiene, even async practices) but the noise isn’t shifting. Why? Because it’s probably not just about volume. It’s about perception, priority chaos, and the invisible work nobody’s tracking:

• Perception gaps - Teams don’t understand each other's load or impact

• Priority sprawl - No clear sense of what matters most

• Output blindness - Everyone’s working hard, but unclear what’s working

Let’s dive in with a few ideas on things to try

Step 1: Show Where the New Capacity Went

That feeling is real and if people can’t see the impact of new hires, resentment grows.

Run a Before/After Capacity Review

1. List key functions or teams

2. Show headcount then vs. now

3. Map what that extra capacity is enabling

Examples:

• “We added 2 engineers to reduce tech debt. Here’s the backlog change.”

• “We added a CS hire to triage tickets. Response time went from 36h → 10h.”

📌 Tip: Work with the leaders of each function (this is their story to own). Keep it concrete. Don’t say “more strategic work” instead, say “launched X, improved Y, cleared Z.”

Make Sure Hiring Was to Balance

One of the most common failure modes here: you hired to ease pressure, but targets quietly scaled too aggressively alongside headcount. So no one feels relief, just more expectations, more OKRs, more stress. That’s scope creep. If you want the team to feel the benefit of new hires, you’ve got to show where the pressure came off not where it got re-routed.

Step 2: Make the Work Visible

One of my all time favorite ideas is this concept of:

No matter what kind of problem you are facing, this is such a valuable starting point. Grab a whiteboard, story-map on a miro board, re-arrange some sticks and stones whilst out walking! Visualising the work helps you see the shape and size of the problem.

For something like workload, i’d remix a bit from the Lean toolkit and work with the team to do a bit of a calendar audit mixed with ‘Week in the Life Of Analysis’ so i can get some tangible data and start to hone in on whether this is a people problem, a process problem, a capacity problem or all of the above.

Workload Analysis

Map what people are actually doing to understand and improve how time is being spent.

Workload Analysis

Sample Column Definitions

Work Types:

• Reactive – Interrupt-driven (tickets, escalations)

• Deep – Problem-solving, coding, writing, design

• Coordination – Meetings, alignment, handoffs

• Creative – Strategy, planning, innovation

• Admin – Reporting, tooling, hygiene

• Comms – Slack, email, updates, decks

💡 Tip: You can colour-code your Google Calendar using this same key VA, NVAU, NVAA—to visualise where time goes in a week/month. 

Value Category:

• VA – Value-Added: directly creates customer or business value

• NVAU – Non-Value-Added but Unavoidable: admin, ops, compliance

• NVAA – Non-Value-Added and Avoidable: waste, duplicative work

  

  Coding up calendar with VA / NVAU / NVAA*

How to Do This With Everyone?

1. Prepare:

• Pick a timeframe (1 week)

• Share the template and explain tagging

• Reinforce honesty > polish

2. Self Diagnostic:

• Individuals reflect on last {4 weeks} and complete

• Tag with VA / NVAU / NVAA

3. Analyse:

• Review in 1:1s or team huddles

• Spot friction, duplication, or drift

• Categorise NVA:

  • NVAU → can we improve it?

  • NVAA → can we eliminate or redesign?

4. Act:

• Share insights together as a whole org.

• Crowdsource ideas for reducing low-value work

• Escalate system issues to leadership

📌 This activity also has the added benefit of being a great way to identify candidates for AI and automation  

Step 3: Surface Resentment, Without Creating Drama

Classic.

Both not got much visibility into each other’s worlds.

Both have aggressive goals.

Both feel misunderstood.

Both probably are misunderstood!

In my experience, you don’t fix this with facilitated empathy-building workshops or shadowing sessions. Good in theory but trying to get buy-in to spend time on that sort of thing if the entire system is under strain = tres hard.

So what can you do? Well you can work with the leader of each function and work hard to surface the right amount of context, fast and (my favorite…) make the tradeoffs transparent. This looks like:

Inject Lightweight Cross-Team Exposure

Instead of asking people to “walk in each other’s shoes” or have campfire style workshops…

Make sure everyone is clear on how each other adds value, how they work and what their goals are.

Posthog do this super well in their team profiles:

Get Functional Leaders to share with each other in public this kind of update.

• What we’re trying to get done

• What’s blocking us

• What tradeoff we had to make this week

• What win or what learn

This transparency is low lift, good practice anyway for leadership and helps everyone see the headlines of each team.

ENG might say things like:

GTM might say:

📌 Do this enough, and teams will start to build a better snapshot understanding of what other teams are carrying. 

Final Thoughts

When people say “others have it easier,” they’re often saying:

• “I don’t feel seen.”

• “I’m not sure this is fair.”

• “I don’t understand what’s changed.”

The answer isn’t always less work.
It’s visible work, shared tradeoffs, and system-wide clarity on what’s worth it.

• Show where the effort’s going.

• Expose invisible strain.

• Clear space with intention, not panic.

When you do that, teams stop side-eyeing each other.

📚️ Good reads and resources...

📔 Team profiles [Posthog]

📖 How to fix change fatigue [Open Org]

📖 How to fix cross-functional conflict [Open Org

📖 How to fix feuding teams [Open Org]

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