MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Fixing the Overload Problem at Work

The way that companies expect employees to work isn’t working. Despite growing awareness of widespread and chronic overload and its ill effects, companies often expect professionals and managers to be “on” well beyond traditional work hours — attending meetings at night, responding to requests on weekends and during vacations, and monitoring their phones, texts, and emails whenever they are awake. Many people become exhausted and burned out struggling to meet such expectations. The result is an overwhelming, demoralizing sense that the demands of work are unrealistic and cannot be met with the resources at hand.

About the Author

Erin L. Kelly (@_elkelly) is the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Phyllis Moen is a professor and the McKnight Presidential Chair in Sociology at the University of Minnesota. They are the authors of Overload: How Good Jobs Went Bad and What We Can Do About It (Princeton University Press, 2020), from which this article was adapted.

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