When does being busy become a problem?

For middle managers, however, the pressure may have started well before September. Throughout the summer, many will have been keeping work moving while colleagues take staggered annual leave, absorbing additional responsibilities and managing teams with reduced capacity, as well as carrying out midyear reviews. When everyone returns, that workload does not necessarily disappear. Instead, unfinished projects restart, inboxes fill up and new priorities begin competing for attention.

Most of us will experience periods when work is more demanding than usual. The risk comes when a temporary peak in pressure becomes a sustained way of working, without sufficient time, capacity or opportunity to recover or receive support.

For middle managers in particular, it can sometimes be difficult to see when busy is beginning to become something more serious.

Middle managers absorb pressure from both directions

Middle managers occupy a unique position within an organisation. They are responsible for delivering their own work, meeting expectations from senior leaders and managing upwards, but they are also expected to delegate workloads, resolve problems and support the people below them.

Increasingly, managers are also being asked to play an important role in employee wellbeing. We encourage them to notice changes in behaviour, check in with employees who may be struggling, manage sickness absence sensitively and signpost people towards mental health support.

These are all important responsibilities, but they create an emotional workload alongside the operational one.

A manager may spend part of their day reassuring an employee who is struggling, another part resolving a difficult team issue, before moving immediately into a meeting and having no time left in the day for their own work.

If this becomes the norm, there is a risk that organisations focus so heavily on managers supporting everybody else that they forget to ask who is supporting the manager.

When does being busy become a problem?

There is an important difference between experiencing a busy period and becoming overwhelmed by sustained pressure. Short periods of increased demand can be manageable, particularly when somebody feels they have control over their workload and knows there will be an opportunity to recover.

Problems can begin to emerge when demands continue to increase but the resources available to manage them do not. A manager who covered additional work during August, for example, may reach September expecting some of those responsibilities to fall away. Instead, they may find themselves managing the backlog created over summer while also taking on new priorities. Recovery can then get pushed further down the list.

Over time, prolonged stress may begin to show up through changes such as increased irritability, difficulty concentrating, disrupted sleep, feeling emotionally detached from work or finding it harder to switch off at the end of the day.

These signs will not look the same for everyone and should not automatically be interpreted as burnout. But they can be useful signals that somebody’s current level of demand may no longer be sustainable.

Busy is not the same as burnout

Burnout is more than simply having too much to do for a few weeks. It can develop when workplace stress becomes prolonged and is not successfully managed, and is typically associated with exhaustion, growing mental distance or cynicism towards work, and a reduced sense of professional effectiveness.

That distinction matters for employers. A manager saying they are busy does not necessarily need a mental health intervention as they may simply need clearer priorities or more signposting or access to resources.

High performance can mask psychological strain

One of the challenges for employers is that somebody does not have to stop performing before they begin to struggle. Middle managers are often promoted because they are dependable, capable and able to manage responsibility. Those qualities can also make psychological strain harder to spot.

A manager may still be attending meetings, hitting deadlines and supporting their team while increasingly relying on longer hours, working through breaks or logging back on in the evening to keep everything moving. From the outside, they can look productive, but internally, they may be becoming increasingly depleted.

This is why performance alone should not be used as a measure of whether somebody is coping well. By the time performance drops significantly or somebody takes sickness absence, difficulties may already have been building for some time.

Do not make resilience the answer to an overloaded workload

When employees are under pressure, there can be a temptation to immediately reach for wellbeing interventions. Resilience training, mindfulness sessions and tools to help people manage stress can all have a place within a wider mental health strategy, in a preventative sense.

But employers also need to look at what is creating the pressure in the first place. If a manager is carrying an unrealistic workload, continually covering vacancies or trying to deliver ten priorities when there is capacity for five, teaching them techniques to tolerate that pressure does not address the underlying problem.

Give managers somewhere to take the emotional load

Supporting managers also means recognising that people management itself can be psychologically demanding. Managers may regularly hear about employees’ mental health difficulties, bereavements, relationship problems, financial concerns or other challenging circumstances.

They should be equipped to respond compassionately, but they should not be expected to become therapists. Clear boundaries matter and managers need to understand what their role is, what it is not and where they can escalate an issue when somebody needs specialist support.

They also need their own route to help. That could mean regular check-ins with their own manager that go beyond project updates, confidential access to mental health support, peer networks or opportunities for managers to discuss difficult situations with somebody appropriately trained to support them. No one should have to reach a crisis point before accessing help.

Use this as an opportunity to reset workloads, not just targets

The return from summer provides HR teams with a useful opportunity to look at what managers are carrying before the final months of the year begin.

Which teams have spent the summer operating with reduced capacity? Which managers have taken on additional responsibilities? What projects have accumulated? And what is now being added as final year planning begins? Those conversations do not need to wait until somebody says they are overwhelmed.

September will be busy for many organisations, getting back into the swing of things, but that does not mean employers need to remove every period of pressure or prevent managers from ever feeling stretched. The aim is to make sure that busy periods remain just that, a short amount of time where measures are in place to cope.