Most managers already suspect which person on their team is carrying too much. What they do not have is a process. Knowing how to review workload at work is the difference between a vague worry you carry around and a documented check you can act on, repeat and show to someone else.
This guide sets out a workload review you can run with your team this month. It covers what a workload review is, how fair demand differs from simply feeling busy, the six things worth measuring, what Australian work health and safety law expects, and what to do with what you find. It is general information for managers, not legal advice.
What This Guide Covers
- How to Review Workload at Work: What a Workload Review Actually Is
- Busy vs Overloaded: Why They Are Not the Same
- The Six Elements of a Fair Workload Review
- What the Research and the Code of Practice Say
- Signs Your Team’s Workload Needs Attention
- How to Review Workload at Work: 7 Practices
- Workload Reviews in Hybrid and Remote Teams
- Common Myths About Workload Reviews
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Where to Start
How to Review Workload at Work: What a Workload Review Actually Is
A workload review is a structured check of whether the demands placed on a role can reasonably be met in the hours, with the skills and with the resources available. It looks at quantity, pace, difficulty and emotional load, and it compares what the job description says with what the job actually takes.
In Australia, job demands are a recognised psychosocial hazard. Safe Work Australia’s Model Code of Practice: Managing psychosocial hazards at work names high job demands, low job control and poor support as hazards a person conducting a business or undertaking must identify and control, so far as is reasonably practicable.
That duty is why a review matters. It is not a wellbeing nicety sitting beside the real work. It is part of managing psychosocial hazards at work the same way you would manage a trip hazard or a faulty ladder.
Busy vs Overloaded: Why They Are Not the Same
Busy is a full calendar and a long list. It can be energising. People often do their best work when the pressure is real and the finish line is visible. A busy fortnight before a product launch is not a hazard.
Overloaded is different. It is demand that outlasts recovery, with no realistic way to meet it and no control over how. The tell is not the volume of work but the absence of an end and the absence of choice. People stop making decisions and start triaging.
This matters for the review because asking “are you busy?” will get you a yes from everyone, every time. You need questions that separate healthy pressure from sustained overload, which is where managing job demands at work begins.
The Six Elements of a Fair Workload Review
1. Quantity
How much work is assigned, and how long does it genuinely take? Compare the hours the role is paid for with the hours the output requires. If a role consistently needs ten unpaid hours a week to stay afloat, the design is wrong, not the person.
2. Pace and deadlines
Look at how many deadlines are externally set, how often they move and how much notice people get. Unpredictable pace is harder on a nervous system than high pace. A steady heavy load is usually more sustainable than a lighter one full of surprises.
3. Complexity and skill fit
Work that sits above someone’s current skill is heavier than its hours suggest, because every task carries an extra layer of figuring out. So is work far below their skill, in a different way. Check whether the difficulty of the work matches the training people have actually had.
4. Emotional and cognitive load
Some work costs more than its calendar entry. Distressed customers, complaints, bad news, safety incidents, back-to-back decisions. Count these separately. A role with four difficult conversations a day is not comparable to a role with four spreadsheets.
5. Control
Ask how much say people have over order, method and timing. The same demand lands very differently depending on the answer. Control is often the cheapest thing you can give back, and the fastest to improve a score.
6. Support and resources
Does the person have the tools, the information, the budget and the access to you that the work requires? Workload problems are frequently resource problems wearing a disguise. Three hours a week chasing an approval is three hours of workload.
What the Research and the Code of Practice Say
The six elements above are not arbitrary. They reflect decades of occupational health research, beginning with Robert Karasek’s demand-control model in the late 1970s, which found that high demands are most damaging to health when paired with low control over how the work is done.
The World Health Organization’s guidelines on mental health at work reach a similar conclusion: organisational interventions that change working conditions, including workload, are recommended alongside individual support rather than instead of it.
The international standard ISO 45003 gives the management-system version of the same idea, asking organisations to identify psychosocial hazards, consult workers and review controls. Our explanation of why ISO 45003 matters for your business covers how that works in practice.
Signs Your Team’s Workload Needs Attention
- Emails and messages routinely sent late at night or on weekends by the same two or three people.
- Leave accrued and not taken, or leave taken and interrupted by work calls.
- Quality slipping in ways that surprise you, from people whose work is usually careful.
- Meetings shortened or skipped because nobody has time to think, only time to produce.
- People stop raising problems and start apologising for them instead.
- Rising short-notice sick days, particularly Mondays and the day after a deadline.
- Handovers getting thinner, because nobody has capacity to document anything.
None of these is a diagnosis, and none proves overload on its own. They are prompts to look properly. If someone appears genuinely unwell rather than stretched, encourage them towards their GP or your employee assistance programme, and keep the workload conversation separate from the health one.
How to Review Workload at Work: 7 Practices
- Start with the written role, not the person. Print the position description and list what the role actually does now. The gap between the two documents is usually the whole story, and it keeps the conversation off personal capability.
- Ask people to track two ordinary weeks. Not a stopwatch, just a rough daily note of tasks and hours. Choose weeks that are neither the quietest nor the busiest, or the data will argue with itself.
- Score each of the six elements out of five. Have the person score it, then score it yourself, then compare. The disagreements are more useful than the agreements and tell you where visibility is missing.
- Count the invisible work. Onboarding a new starter, covering a vacancy, being the person everyone asks, running the social committee. Name it, size it and decide whether it stays.
- Ask what you would have to stop. If a new project lands, something goes. Make that trade explicit in writing so the decision belongs to the team rather than to whoever is quietest at the meeting.
- Give control back before you give resources. Flexible sequencing, fewer approval gates and protected focus time cost nothing and often relieve more pressure than an extra pair of hands you cannot hire for six months. It also reduces the drift towards burnout.
- Write down what you decided and when you will check. A review without a recorded control and a review date is a chat. Put the follow-up in the calendar before the meeting ends.
Consultation is part of the duty, not a courtesy. The people doing the work know where the hours go, and the review is more defensible when their input is recorded. This is one of the clearest expressions of why your team’s mental health is your business.
Workload Reviews in Hybrid and Remote Teams
Distance hides workload. You cannot see someone still at their desk at seven, and you cannot read the room when a project is quietly going sideways. Remote overload tends to show up late, as a resignation rather than a conversation.
Compensate deliberately. Review output expectations against hours rather than against activity signals, and resist judging effort by response time, which simply trains people to stay online. The specific pressures are set out in our guide to psychosocial risks in remote work.
Then model the boundary yourself. If you send messages at eleven at night, no stated policy will convince anyone they can switch off. Visible leadership behaviour does more for a positive work culture than any wellbeing calendar.
Common Myths About Workload Reviews
A workload review will open the floodgates. In practice, people ask for fewer approval steps, clearer priorities and a decision about what to drop far more often than they ask for more staff. The requests are usually smaller than managers fear.
If nobody has complained, the workload is fine. Silence is a poor measure. People under sustained pressure often stop raising things because raising things takes energy they no longer have. Absence of complaint is not evidence of safety.
Resilience training solves overload. Supporting individual capacity is worthwhile, and so is breathwork for stress. But it cannot substitute for fixing a job that takes sixty hours. Fix the design first, then support the people.
Only HR can run this. The direct manager sees the work most clearly and is usually the one with authority to change priorities. HR can supply the template and the record-keeping, but the review belongs to the line.
Frequently Asked Questions
How often should I review workload?
Twice a year as a baseline, and whenever something structural changes: a resignation, a restructure, a new system, a large client won or lost. Change is the trigger, not the calendar alone.
How to review workload at work when I cannot hire anyone?
Review anyway. Most of what a review produces is reprioritisation, removal of low-value work and restored control, none of which needs headcount. Record the constraint and what you did within it.
What if someone says their workload is fine and I think it is not?
Share what you have observed, without interpreting it. Note the specifics, ask what you might be missing, and agree a short check-in date. People sometimes need a second conversation before they say the first true thing.
Is a workload review a legal requirement?
WHS duties require you to identify and control psychosocial hazards, including high job demands, so far as is reasonably practicable. A documented review is a sensible way to show you did. For your specific obligations, take advice from your regulator or a WHS professional.
Where to Start
Pick one person this week. Not the one you are most worried about, and not your strongest performer, but a role you think is roughly typical. Sit down for forty-five minutes with the position description and the six elements, and score them together.
Change one thing as a result, and give it a fortnight before you judge whether it helped. Workload changes take a couple of weeks to show, because the backlog has to clear first. Judging it on day three will tell you nothing except that day three was still busy.
Then do the next role, and the next. Knowing how to review workload at work is not a project with an end date. It is a habit of looking honestly at what the job asks, and being willing to change the answer when it is more than anyone could reasonably give.
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