Overtime at work can quickly lead to burnout, reduced productivity, higher costs for employers, and lower morale. With some focused overtime management and targeted reduction strategies, both employees and companies can benefit. Implementing ways to reduce overtime while still meeting deadlines and goals takes thoughtful planning and commitment from leadership and staff.
Defining Overtime
Companies should clearly define what constitutes overtime. While there may be necessities requiring hourly employees to work over 40 hours per week, salaried employees may have less clarity on overtime versus extended work hours expected as part of professional duties. Clear classification of overtime for all employees allows tracking overtime management and setting reduction goals. Having a clear company-wide definition also allows for consistent policies, tracking, and governance of overtime across all levels and roles.
Causes of Overtime
Leaders should thoroughly analyze what causes overtime in their organization. Common causes include understaffing leading to individual overwork, inefficient processes and procedures that extend work hours, overpromising on deliverables without understanding capacity, lack of communication between interdependent teams, inadequate planning and scoping of projects, insufficient employee skills and training, and poor time management practices. Pinpointing organizational causes of overtime through anonymous surveys, analysis of past overtime usage, and manager feedback pave the way for targeted solutions.
Negative Impacts of Overtime
Allowing consistency over time can significantly impact individuals and organizations in detrimental ways both in the short and long term. For employees, lack of personal or family time, increased stress and fatigue leading to physical and mental health declines, higher injury rates both inside and outside of work, more illnesses due to suppressed immune systems, and plummeting job satisfaction and engagement are some of the personal consequences.
For employers, frequent overtime leads to less focused and productive work during normal hours, higher turnover and recruiting costs as employees leave for better work-life balance, escalated insurance and healthcare costs, increased paid sick/disability leave usage, a need for temporary hires to support overburdened teams, and damage to the organization’s reputation as a good place to work. Tracking and regularly communicating the widespread negative effects of unchecked overtime helps leaders at all levels recognize the far-reaching human and business impacts overtime has beyond just direct wage costs alone.
Company-Wide Buy-In
Once root causes are determined and negative impacts clearly outlined, obtain company-wide buy-in at all levels to make serious changes geared towards overtime reduction. Leadership should explain the rationale and context around competitive pressures and proposed changes to reinforce the cultural shift to reasonable workloads and sustainable timelines expected going forward.
Middle managers play a critical role in supporting these cultural changes by assessing current work streams in their teams and actively modeling balanced behavior in their own work practices rather than perpetuating overwork norms themselves. Employees at all levels have an obligation to speak up in collective and anonymous ways on unrealistic deadlines, follow new time management directives and self-care encouragement, fully utilize paid time off benefits without guilt or passive-aggressive behavior from peers, and regularly suggest additional ways to reduce organizational sources leading to overtime at the organization based on their unique daily insights.
Ways Leaders and Staff Can Work Together to Manage Overtime
There are several ways to reduce overtime, which both managers and employees can do to govern, track, and reduce much overtime with time.
Leader Approaches
- Hire more people to spread out work at a reasonable, stable level
- Offer cross-job training to increase backup between connected teams
- Use automated time logs tied to payroll to spot overtime patterns
- Make official approval systems for overtime instead of leaving it up to staff
- Review and adjust procedures to increase efficiency and provide staff support systems
- Allow shift flexibility like 4/10s or adjustable start/end times
- Actively tell staff to use paid time off for mental health days
- Make realistic budgets, deadlines, and milestones based on the current number of staff
- Keep open conversations for employee feedback on workloads and staff needs
Staff Approaches
- Ask for training to improve personal and team time management abilities
- Learn other jobs when possible to help others when needed
- Speak up in meetings if deadlines seem unrealistic before committing to them
- Follow all official processes to complete work efficiently
- Take regular breaks to maintain energy, focus, and resilience
- Use calendars, alerts, and status updates to prioritize and stay organized
- Plan PTO ahead of time to rest and prevent burnout
- Give regular ideas to managers to improve processes causing overtime.
Having leaders provide support, accountability, and flexibility, along with staff speaking up on challenges while actively managing their own workload and capacity with tools available, leads to better collaboration around healthy overtime management over longer periods of time. The key is consistency, accountability, open communication, and shared investment at an organizational level into overtime reduction as a value, not just a one-off push.
End Note
Once strategies are implemented for a period of at least a quarter, thoroughly evaluate progress by pulling overtime usage reports and collecting anonymous employee feedback on workload. Identify what implementation tactics are working well and what still needs refinement. Set specific benchmarks for incremental overtime hours reduction over the next quarter, six months, and year with realistic milestones the manager can be held accountable to delivering on through their oversight of personnel and projects. Continued tracking against these defined goals keeps all parties focused on and accountable for sustained, incremental progress around cutting back overtime over time.
ProHance for Effortlessly Managing Overtime
For additional support, inefficient overtime tracking, policy governance, and data-backed reduction goal setting, the ProHance software offers robust features to help organizations thoroughly analyze overtime root causes and make correlations between increases in overtime and business KPI impacts like reduced output, higher defect rates, or increased employee attrition. With customizable overtime policies, automated shift conflict identification, overtime cap notifications, and detailed cost analytics, ProHance gives essential oversight and control capabilities to overtime management efforts for optimal, maintained results over periods of time, not just short-term gains. Sign up today for a free demo to learn more.
