It causes stress, burnout and doesn’t actually improve productivity, but there are ways HR can counteract a trend towards chronic busyness.

Dr Michelle McQuaid knows the warning signs well.

“Everything coming across your email, over the phone, on your desk is urgent,” is how the founder of The Wellbeing Lab describes it to HRM.

“When that to-do list feels absolutely untameable, where you feel like you’re running every day in a constant race to try to get things done, and as fast as you’re clearing things off, more things are arriving with competing deadlines.”

It is called “urgency culture”: a sense of unproductive busyness pervading an organisation that pegs all tasks as urgent and all time as scarce. The heightened connectivity and increased competitive pressures characterising the contemporary workplace exacerbate the problem.

“It can feel like we’re on a constant, hyper-vigilant, stress alarm,” McQuaid says. “And that’s why we’re seeing such high rates of burnout in people.”

According to research McQuaid conducted with AHRI in 2023, 54.4 per cent of team members in Australian workplaces report feelings of burnout, with that figure rising to 68.8 per cent among leaders. A 2024 report from Gallup found that 48 per cent of Australians experience daily feelings of stress — compared to a 41 per cent worldwide average.

So what can HR professionals do to combat urgency culture in the workplace?

1. Conduct a temperature check with your teams

If left unattended, urgency culture might only come to attention when resources dwindle, to-do lists mushroom, and work begins to feel unsustainable.

“But often by then, we’re already starting to feel overwhelmed and anxious and exhausted, and that can leave us less resourced to be able to have the conversations we need,” McQuaid says.

“One of the best things we’ve seen teams put in place around psychosocial safety is, in team meetings, having a weekly check-in.”

Find out how everyone on the team is feeling, she advises. Ask what the balance is between job demands and job resources in their world this week.

“Without that kind of regular temperature check happening in teams or between leaders and their staff members, it can be really easy not to spot an urgency culture until we’re starting to feel completely overwhelmed and exhausted,” she says.

2. Find out where the urgency is coming from

“As HR professionals, we need to think through a systems lens,” McQuaid says.

“If you’re starting to notice urgency culture around your workplace, think about what that looks like through an ‘us’ lens – do we have an organisational-level urgency culture problem emerging?”

That could be coming from an executive, board or shareholder level, and might require conversations about how resourcing levels are imposing unsustainable burdens.

“Our job is then to be saying that we have a potential psychosocial risk being created here by the urgency,” McQuaid says.

“One of the interesting challenges here for us as HR leaders is whether we have got our executives setting that tone in the culture. Are they in a value mindset – valuing the work our people are doing – or are they in a task-based mindset?”

Then again, the pressures might be coming from certain leaders or teams rather than from the executive level.

“If that’s the case, are those leaders okay?,” McQuaid advises exploring.

“Is it that there’s some genuine urgency in their part of the business – and how as HR do we make sure they’ve got the resources and the support they need to navigate that period – or has this become a way of leading?”

“If you have a lack of role clarity, the first thing you tend to do is to create more work than needs to be done – and more urgent work – because you’re covering your bases just in case.” – Dr Michelle McQuaid, Founder of the Wellbeing Lab and the Leaders Lab

3. Understand the importance of role clarity

At times, however, leadership can be doing everything right, but individual employees – perhaps out of job-security concerns or worries about the value they’re delivering – might create unnecessary urgency that ripples through an organisation.

“Are we giving our individual team members the skills they need to be able to prioritise their workloads, and, if they are struggling, to be able to ask their leaders for help?,” McQuaid asks.

Leaders are often surprised, she says, by how intertwined urgency culture, burnout and lack of role clarity are. Her research with AHRI shows that lack of role clarity is the most frequently experienced psychosocial hazard for workers who feel burned out.

“If you have a lack of role clarity, the first thing you tend to do is to create more work than needs to be done – and more urgent work – because you’re covering your bases just in case,” McQuaid says.

4. Add a “hope buffer” to tasks

Leaders can demonstrate good behaviour in their own work, McQuaid says.

“We should be role-modelling commercial intelligence alongside emotional and psychosocial intelligence,” she says.

“In order not to burn my people out and exhaust those resources, I need to be thinking about what the demands of the market and our clients are, what the resources that my people and I have available are, and how I find the best fit between those things.”

McQuaid finds it useful to add a 20 per cent buffer to any task she or her team takes on, in case it proves unexpectedly complex or time-consuming.

“If we’re done sooner, that’s a delight, and we’ll have more capacity. And if not, then at least we haven’t created that ripple of urgency through the chain of people needing that task,” she says.

“It’s my hope buffer of 20 per cent – because I’m always overly hopeful about how fast I’ll get things done.”

5. Measure the improvements

A workplace that responds positively to the signs of urgency culture will see the benefits, and McQuaid points to particular metrics to measure these. Absenteeism, for instance, should go down.

“When people are in an urgency culture, they are more likely to be at risk of burnout, so you’re going to see more illnesses, worn-down bodies, worn-down stress systems,” she says.

“Engagement metrics are another one. It’s really hard to stay engaged if we’re constantly feeling overwhelmed and anxious.”

She also expects to see a shift from valuing being busy for the sake of being busy.

“Busy, in and of itself, is not necessarily a measure of productivity,” McQuaid says.

“When I walk into my team, I want to hear people talking about working on this great project right now, or that this client loved this piece of work that we just did. To me, those are commercially valuable ways that my people are seeing how they work.”

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