Spotting team overload means a manager noticing that what the work demands has outgrown what people can give, before the consequences turn serious. The manager’s job is not to diagnose. It is to watch working conditions and behaviour, talk to people and point them to support, using the ICD-11 definition of burn-out published on www.who.int as a reference.
Quick Overview
What you will learn:
- How WHO defines burn-out, and what it is not
- Which signals in the team and in the way work is organised deserve attention
- Where to begin if you have never handled this before
- Where a manager’s role ends and HR and health professionals take over
Who this is for:
- Team leads and managers, including first-time managers
- HR specialists
- Project managers working against tight deadlines
Reading time: 7 minutes
Overload, burn-out and the limits of a manager’s role
According to www.who.int, ICD-11 lists burn-out as an occupational phenomenon, not as a medical condition. It is defined as a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, and it has three dimensions: energy depletion or exhaustion, increased mental distance from the job or cynicism about it, and reduced professional efficacy. WHO adds that the term should not be used for experiences outside the work context.
Overload is a broader and earlier condition: a team carrying more work than it can do well, for a long stretch. That is what a manager can actually see. Judging the health of a particular person belongs to a doctor or a psychologist, not to their line manager.
What a manager can notice
Signals in how work is organised. WHO’s fact sheet on mental health at work (www.who.int) lists psychosocial risks, among them:
- excessive workloads or work pace, and understaffing;
- long, unsocial or inflexible hours;
- little control over how the job is done or how much of it there is;
- an unclear role in the team;
- limited support from colleagues, or authoritarian supervision.
Signals in behaviour. Look for changes against someone’s usual way of working: constant overtime and replies to messages late in the evening, pulling back from discussions, cynical remarks about the project, comments like “nothing is going to change anyway”. These map onto the ICD-11 dimensions, but they are not a symptom checklist. Any single signal can have many causes, including ones outside work. Treat it as a reason to talk, not as a conclusion.
A model that organises what you see
The job demands-resources (JD-R) model by Demerouti and colleagues (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) sorts working conditions into demands and resources. In their study, demands were tied mainly to exhaustion and a lack of resources mainly to disengagement, with the same pattern in human services, industry and transport.
Maslach and Leiter (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) describe the Areas of Worklife model. It names six areas where a person and a job can be mismatched: workload, control, reward, community, fairness and values. For a manager, that works as a ready-made agenda for reviewing how the team’s work is set up.
Where to start from zero
- Look at the work before the people. Review the team’s load: task list, priorities, deadlines and overtime. Check whether one person has quietly become the bottleneck.
- Have one-to-one conversations. Ask about the work: what weighs most right now, what could wait, what is missing. Listen, and do not assess anyone’s health.
- Change demands or add resources. The JD-R model leaves you two levers: remove some demands (priorities, deadlines) or add resources (help, more say over how work is done, a clearer role).
- Point to support. If someone talks about lasting exhaustion or health problems, show where help is available: HR, the occupational physician, their own doctor or a psychologist, and an employee assistance programme if your company has one.
- Prepare yourself. The WHO guidelines on mental health at work, published in 2022 on
www.who.int, include manager training among their evidence-based recommendations, next to organisational interventions and training for workers.
Who does what
- The manager notices signals, talks to people, changes how work is organised and refers people to support.
- HR provides procedures, support programmes and data on overtime or absence.
- Doctors and psychologists assess health and propose treatment or therapy.
- Senior leadership decides on the resources without which cutting demands is often impossible.
Read Also
- Burnout: how to recognise it and prevent it, the employee’s view
- Information overload in remote work and how to manage it
- Non-verbal communication in meetings: why a single gesture proves little
Build Your Skills
Two courses go deeper: Building resilience and well-being of teams in the era of hybrid work and Coping with professional burnout, stress and difficult emotions. The first takes the team leader’s perspective, the second focuses on handling your own stress. Get in touch and we will tailor the scope to your organisation.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What exactly is burnout?
In ICD-11, as described on www.who.int, it is a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. WHO treats it as an occupational phenomenon rather than a medical condition.
How can you tell someone may be burning out?
ICD-11 names exhaustion, mental distance or cynicism about the job, and reduced professional efficacy, as described on www.who.int. A manager may notice how these show up at work, for instance someone withdrawing from discussions, but deciding whether it is burn-out is a job for a doctor or psychologist.
Are IT teams particularly exposed to burnout?
The ICD-11 definition is not tied to any sector, and WHO’s fact sheet on www.who.int notes that psychosocial risks exist in all sectors. Maslach and Leiter point out that most burnout research has looked at human service jobs, especially health care, so IT teams are best assessed on their own working conditions.
What can a manager do to prevent burnout in a team?
On www.who.int, WHO links preventing work-related mental health conditions to managing psychosocial risks, and recommends organisational measures that assess and reduce those risks, such as flexible working arrangements. In a team, that means reviewing workload regularly, keeping priorities and roles clear and making it safe to say there is too much work. None of this guarantees that burn-out will not occur.