Burnout in HEI’s is becoming more common, but it’s not simply a consequence of workload. It emerges from the way the system shapes behaviour – and that means as a manager you have a much bigger role to play than you might realise.
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How can you reduce workload and burnout in your team?
Burnout in Higher Education and other complex organisations emerges from systemic pressures, not just the volume of tasks. By giving staff the agency to set boundaries, question assumptions, and negotiate priorities, as a manager you can prevent your team from overextending themselves to prop up an unsustainable workload.
If you can find a moment to step back this year, it’s a good opportunity to reflect on how your team works, and why everyone is so exhausted.
Universities are particularly good at creating the conditions where people become exhausted, not because anyone intends it. Nor because leaders are trying to burn people out. It’s an emergent quality of the system.
HE is full of intelligent, capable people who care deeply about what they do. Who want students to succeed, want their colleagues to succeed, want to be helpful and who want to do good work.
Those are exactly the qualities that make universities such rewarding places to work.
They’re also the qualities that make it surprisingly difficult to say no, and then for people to struggle with overload.
The cost of caring
The statistics are worrying, but the more interesting question is why that feels so acute right now.
Because there are lots of reasons why saying yes has become the default, and why institutions are creating the perfect conditions for burnout.
Professional Services colleagues are often incredibly aware of the service part of their role. They’re knowledgeable professionals, yet many find themselves culturally conditioned to be endlessly responsive and agreeable. In many institutions, academic primacy and highly structured hierarchies reinforce that dynamic: saying yes can feel like part of the job.
For early-career academics, the dynamics are different but no less powerful. If you’re on a fixed-term contract or uncertain about your future, is it really safe to say no? Becoming indispensable can feel like the sensible strategy.
Then there are the students.
People want to support them because they’re the next generation, and helping them flourish is central to the purpose of universities. At the same time, increasingly we have come to think of students as customers. Those are two very good reasons to keep saying yes.
The shifting ground beneath HE
None of that is new.
What has changed is the context.
Budgets are tighter than they have been for years. Revenue streams feel less certain. Competition for students has intensified. Recruitment freezes and headcount reductions mean many people are covering work that previously sat elsewhere. New regulatory requirements demand ever more monitoring, reporting and accountability. Systems that were merely frustrating when workloads were manageable become exhausting when everyone is already stretched.
And, of course, many people are anxious about job security.
Put all of that together and you have the perfect conditions for your team to compromise other parts of their lives, not because they don’t know how to look after themselves, but because they’re trying to do a good job.
The myth of the finished to-do list
At ThenSomehow, we’ve spent years helping people work smarter. That usually starts with becoming clear about your capacity, creating boundaries and learning how to defend them.
The difficulty is that, in university life, there is always more work than you have time to do.
There is always another meeting, another committee, another proposal, another student needing support. Even when you think you have everything covered, something unexpected pulls the rug from under you: a supplier changes their terms in unacceptable ways with days lost negotiating and researching alternatives, a colleague takes parental leave, a recruitment fails after all that effort. The work never really finishes. In many ways it is the definition of a Sisyphean task. The years roll round inexorably.
When there is more work to do than time available not all of it can get done. If you don’t choose your priorities, circumstances will choose them for you.
That’s why we think autonomy is the ultimate workload reduction tool. Not because it reduces the amount of work, but because it allows people to make better judgements about what matters most.
Reframing expectations with ordinary questions
It starts with surprisingly ordinary questions.
- What time are you going home today?
- How often are you prepared to work late?
- What have you decided won’t get done this week?
Those aren’t questions about working to rule. They’re questions about agency.
It’s amazing what an inescapable deadline can do for productivity. For example, parents collecting children from school become remarkably good at prioritising because there simply isn’t another option. During Covid lockdowns many of us experienced the opposite: without external boundaries, work had a habit of expanding to fill every available hour.
How to help your team reclaim their agency
As managers, we think you have a responsibility to help people reconnect with that sense of agency.
Not by telling them what their boundaries should be, but by creating the conditions where they can make thoughtful decisions for themselves.
That begins by checking assumptions.
One of the patterns we often see is that people assume what’s expected of them without ever testing those assumptions. The system teaches compliance, so questioning can feel uncomfortable.
Questions managers should be asking:
- As a manager, are you exploring those assumptions with your team?
- Are you talking about expectations around availability, priorities and capacity?
- Are you helping people negotiate work, rather than simply absorb it?
Putting on your consulting hat
One of my favourite questions, borrowed from my colleague Moyra, comes just before you agree to a new piece of work from a manager or colleague: “What change are you hoping this will create?”
It’s such a simple question, but it often changes the conversation completely.
Sometimes their request is exactly the right one. Sometimes though there is a better way to achieve the outcome. And sometimes the person asking realises they aren’t actually sure why they need it at all.
That’s what we mean when we suggest putting your consulting hat on: curiosity is often more valuable than compliance.
The same applies when priorities collide. Instead of simply accepting another piece of work, what would happen if someone felt able to say: “I can absolutely do X. It does mean I won’t be able to do Y. Which matters most?”
That’s not being awkward, that’s exercising professional judgement.
Another question for managers is how well you’re equipping your teams to access information and relationships beyond their immediate reporting line.
How often do people comply because they don’t know who to ask?
How often do inefficient workarounds survive because nobody feels able to question them?
Encouraging informal networks across teams and faculties gives people permission to understand the wider system, challenge assumptions and solve problems together rather than simply working around them year after year.
The danger of holding a broken system together
There’s one final thought that is worth reflecting on.
Many people quietly stretch themselves to stop a struggling system from breaking. It’s admirable, but there’s an unintended consequence.
While you’re successfully holding everything together, nobody can see how fragile the system really is.
When you finally can’t hold it any more it breaks – and so do you. It’s only then that the alarm is raised and help arrives. Too late for you. Instead you could consider stepping back, let it break now, and watch the rush of attention and resources the issue suddenly receives, this time before you break.
Sometimes as a manager you accidentally collude with the very problems you’re trying to solve. It is only when something does fail, that organisations finally appreciate the effort that went into holding it together.
Distributed leadership in practice
None of this is about creating a community of rebels, we’re advocating clarity not anarchy.
The clarity to question assumptions. The courage to negotiate priorities. The confidence to exercise professional judgement. And the autonomy to say, “If I do this, I can’t do that.” The right to set boundaries and protect them. Because that’s what distributed leadership looks like in practice.
Ultimately, wellbeing isn’t something that can be handed down through a policy or resilience training initiative. It emerges when people have enough agency to do good work, the confidence to make good decisions and, at the end of the day, go home on time.
Key Takeaways
- Burnout is a systemic issue: In Higher Education, the drive to care for students and colleagues often results in an inability to say no, making doing too much the default.
- To-do lists are infinite: With shrinking budgets and increased compliance, workloads will always exceed available time. Prioritisation is not optional; it’s a necessity.
- Autonomy empowers priority-setting: Giving teams the agency to ask “What won’t get done this week?” shifts them from blind compliance to exercising professional judgement.
- Curiosity over compliance: Encourage your staff to question the “why” behind tasks and negotiate the deliverables before merely absorbing more work.
- Stop masking broken systems: Overextending to hold flawed systems together hides organisational fragility. Sometimes, allowing a process to fail is the only way to get the resources required to fix it properly.
👉 If this resonates – and you’re navigating issues of burnout or lack of agency in your team, or change and leadership questions in your institution – here’s how we help:
- Helping teams resolve the dynamics that get in the way of change
- One-to-one mentoring for individuals facing leadership challenges
- Supporting and inspiring cross-functional rapid improvement teams
- Teaching skills for working smarter
We’d be glad to talk about how to support your teams to work together better. Send us a message or book a call here.