Hiring Is Not Always the Answer When Your Team Is Overwhelmed
At the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey, I had an almost instinctive response whenever an employee came to me saying they were overwhelmed. They would tell me they could no longer keep up, that part of their workload had become too heavy, that they disliked certain tasks, or that they simply needed someone to help them.
Too often, my first reaction was to hire another person.
Looking back, I understand why. When you are running a business and dealing with a hundred different problems yourself, hiring can feel like a quick and reassuring solution. Someone is short on time? Give them support. A department is falling behind? Add another person. An employee has been struggling for weeks? Reduce their workload.
It usually comes from a good intention.
But I learned, sometimes the hard way, that adding another person does not necessarily solve an organisational problem. Worse, when the initial diagnosis is wrong, you may simply be adding another cost to a problem that remains completely unchanged.
Feeling overwhelmed is a signal, not a diagnosis
Today, when someone tells me they are overwhelmed, I obviously start by listening.
But I no longer treat that feeling as the final diagnosis.
What someone feels should be taken seriously, but the manager’s responsibility is to understand what is actually creating that feeling.
I usually start with something very concrete: time.
Is this person genuinely working beyond their normal hours? Are they regularly doing overtime? Are their working days objectively too long?
Then I look at the work itself.
In an administrative position, for example, how many emails are actually arriving every day? How many cases are overdue? Are deadlines being missed? Is work piling up week after week, or are we simply facing two or three unusually busy days?
That distinction matters.
A company should not permanently change its structure to solve a temporary problem. Many businesses experience peaks in activity. Good management also means being able to absorb those peaks without automatically turning every short-term increase in workload into another permanent position.
And when the numbers are not enough, I go and watch the work.
Literally.
I may spend several hours, or even several days, alongside the person. I observe how they work, where they are interrupted, the order in which they handle tasks and the difficulties they encounter.
Very often, that is when the reality becomes far more interesting than simply hearing, “I’m overwhelmed.”
When hiring someone solved absolutely nothing
One situation in particular taught me a lot.
I had a manager who regularly came into my office saying that he had too much work. He increasingly disliked certain tasks, particularly making phone calls, and kept asking for more support.
At the time, I was extremely busy myself.
I did not take enough time to question the diagnosis I was being given.
So I hired someone to help him.
A few months later, he was still overwhelmed.
The work was not progressing significantly faster, and all we had really done was add another person to the organisation.
It was only after he left the company, for other reasons, that I fully understood my mistake.
I temporarily took over part of his responsibilities and realised that the workload I had been told was almost impossible to manage was not actually the main problem.
By reorganising priorities, delegating differently and, above all, making better use of the tools we already had, the work gradually became much simpler.
We never replaced him.
Later, we were even able to reduce the team further, until one well-organised person was managing a scope of work that had previously involved several people.
It was not because that person worked three times faster.
The difference was the way the work was organised.
We already had an ERP capable of automating part of the workload. Yet some tasks were still being tracked through Excel, documents were being printed one by one and follow-ups were being handled manually.
The person who later took over the work used the system much more effectively: automated reminders, centralised information, planning directly inside the software, less printing and fewer duplicate entries.
The tool had always been there.
What changed was the way it was used.
I also take my share of responsibility for that.
If an employee is not using a tool correctly, a manager has to ask whether they have been properly trained and supported.
But there is another reality as well: sometimes people resist change because they do not want to learn a new method, because they feel comfortable with the way they have always worked, or because they see automation as a threat to their own role.
Management also means being able to tell the difference.
Productivity does not mean asking people to work faster
I learned the same lesson in the kitchen.
At one stage, we did not always have a proper production plan prepared in advance. Employees would arrive in the morning and then work out what they needed to produce.
Questions naturally went back to the kitchen manager, who could lose a significant part of the morning simply assigning tasks and answering people.
We were also producing too much on an order-by-order basis.
Imagine six separate customer orders, all containing tuna sandwiches. We would complete the first order, then the second, then the third, essentially repeating the same production cycle each time.
Eventually, we changed the way we thought about production.
Instead of organising everything purely by customer order, we grouped similar products together.
If the day required 200 tuna sandwiches across all the different orders, we would produce the 200 sandwiches together and then divide them between the relevant orders afterwards.
It sounds obvious when written down.
But when dozens of small inefficiencies like this happen every day, they eventually represent a huge number of wasted hours.
Through changes like these, we were sometimes able to complete the same production with around six people instead of eight, without asking those six people to work harder or faster.
We had simply removed part of the disorder.
That distinction is important whenever we talk about productivity.
Improving productivity does not mean pushing employees until they are exhausted.
In some businesses, the pressure genuinely comes from insufficient staffing. But in others, what exhausts people is the way the work itself is organised: doing the same thing several times, searching for information, waiting for a decision, repeatedly asking the same questions, constantly switching from one task to another, or using three different tools to accomplish something that could be handled by one.
Poor organisation can be exhausting.
Adding more people to poor organisation does not necessarily make it better.
Not every problem comes from the organisation
There is also a more uncomfortable subject that managers need to be willing to discuss.
Sometimes an employee simply no longer wants to perform certain tasks.
I do not believe business leaders should pretend this never happens simply because it is a less comfortable thing to say.
An employee may be tired. They may be going through a difficult period in their personal life. They may need more training. They may genuinely be in the wrong role.
All of those situations deserve to be heard and, whenever possible, addressed.
But sometimes a person knows perfectly well how to do a task and simply no longer wants to do it because they do not enjoy it.
Work cannot always consist exclusively of the tasks we like.
Someone working in an administrative role may occasionally need to pick up the phone even if they prefer sending emails. An HR manager sometimes needs to call an employee when a real conversation is necessary. Someone working in a kitchen has to clean their equipment and workstation, even if nobody chose a career in food because they were passionate about cleaning.
Some tasks are simply part of the job.
In those situations, the manager’s responsibility is also to maintain the framework.
Train someone when they do not know how to do something.
Simplify a task when the process is unnecessarily complicated.
Listen when someone is genuinely struggling.
But also be willing to say: this task is part of your job, and it needs to be done.
For me, workplace wellbeing cannot be a one-way concept either.
A company has a responsibility to respect the people who work there: their health, their time, their limits and their needs.
But an organisation also has customers, deadlines, commitments and responsibilities.
Managers and colleagues deserve an environment in which everyone reasonably carries their share of the workload as well.
When some people systematically shift their responsibilities onto others, it is often the most conscientious employees who eventually pay the price.
One bad hiring decision cost me close to €100,000
I learned this lesson through a particularly expensive experience.
I estimate that one poor hiring and management decision cost me almost €100,000 in one year, directly and indirectly.
Around half of that amount came directly from the person and their employment cost.
But that was only the most visible part.
We had to hire additional people to compensate for work that was not being completed. Other employees had to absorb some of the workload. Some became demotivated. Absences increased. And poor decisions made within the role also had financial consequences.
That is why a bad hire or a bad management decision can cost far more than one person’s salary.
Someone in the wrong role can reduce the productivity of several other people around them. They can exhaust your strongest performers, shift responsibility onto others, create poor habits and gradually move an entire team in the wrong direction.
This does not mean dismissing someone at the first sign of a problem.
It means that a leader cannot allow a dysfunctional situation to continue indefinitely simply because they are afraid of having a difficult conversation.
Several times during my career, I have had to step back into a department myself, temporarily take the lead again and work directly alongside the team to get everyone moving in the same direction.
It is not always comfortable.
But leadership is not only about making comfortable decisions.
Sometimes the real problem is timing
There is another dimension that is often overlooked: time.
In a seasonal business, a team can be perfectly sized across the year and still appear completely overwhelmed during certain months.
That is where anticipation becomes essential.
When I know that an extremely busy period is coming a few months later, I prefer to use quieter periods to prepare everything that can reasonably be prepared in advance.
Administrative work, contracts, staffing decisions, schedules and operational preparation can often be moved forward.
That way, when the intense operational period actually arrives, the team can focus its energy on what truly matters.
The same principle applies to people.
A manager has to think about the team’s energy over several months, not only about this week’s output.
Holidays, recovery time and sometimes even placing a week of rest strategically before an intense period can be just as important as deciding whether to recruit someone.
You need to know when to push, when to anticipate, when to relieve pressure and when to let people recover.
So when should you actually hire?
Sometimes, of course, hiring is absolutely the right decision.
I am not suggesting that every staffing problem can be solved through better organisation.
When working hours remain excessive over a sustained period, when the volume of business is genuinely increasing, when good employees are becoming exhausted despite efficient processes, or when the company needs a new skill in order to support growth, then recruiting may be essential.
But today, hiring is no longer my first response.
Before adding another person, I want to understand the actual workload. I want to observe how the work is being done, review the priorities, look at the tools, question the processes, assess the quality of management and distinguish between a temporary difficulty and a structural need.
Because ultimately, this is one of the most important lessons my years as an entrepreneur have taught me:
Hiring should be the result of a diagnosis, never a substitute for one.