Is 3% of Your Team Carrying 30% of the Work?
Underneath the hood of most organizations, a small number of employees are carrying a disproportionate share of the collaborative load.
And it’s a measurable pattern, not a feeling: research across 300+ organizations found that just 3 to 5 percent of employees produce between 20 and 35 percent of an organization’s valuable collaborative output.*
This is a real, structural concern (not to mention a human one) that’s only getting worse.
Collaborative work – meetings, emails, requests for input – has grown by 50 percent or more over the past two decades. At some companies, it now eats up 80 percent of an employee’s week, leaving a fraction of their time for the work they were actually hired to do.
It creates a domino effect: as these “extra milers” help others, they get even more requests, leading to bottlenecks, stress, and burnout.
What this looks like inside a company
Picture a busy kitchen during dinner rush.
Every line cook checks with the head chef before plating, not because they lack the ability to prepare the food, but because the head chef is the one person everyone has learned to defer to.
At first, it works. Then the requests stack up faster than the head chef can answer them, orders back up behind every question, and the food the head chef was supposed to be cooking themselves never even gets started.
That’s a close approximation of what happens inside organizations that reward helpfulness without managing its cost.
The employees who say yes most often become the ones everyone habitually routes through. Every project waits on their input. Every handoff assumes their availability.
And here’s the kicker: these employees, despite being the most valued and most in-demand by their colleagues, consistently report being the least satisfied and least engaged people on their team.
The organization sees a dependable go-to person. What’s actually happening is a bottleneck wearing the costume of competence.
Why organizations don’t see it
The people carrying this load don’t show up as outliers in the data leaders are tracking.
They don’t get flagged in headcount reports or org charts as anything unusual. What they show up as, instead, is dependable, someone a manager can hand something to and trust that it will get done.
That reputation is earned, and it’s also precisely what puts them at risk. Organizations are frequently unaware of who these central, overloaded employees even are. The informal network doing the heavy lifting stays invisible to the formal one measuring performance.
Consider a standard performance metric: it tracks output, not the informal load required to produce it. A team hitting its numbers can (and often does) still have a structural fault line running underneath it.
What this changes about the conversation
The instinct, once this pattern is visible, is to intervene person by person: give the most overloaded employees a lighter workload, or more recognition, or both.
The more structural approach is mapping how collaborative demand actually distributes across a team, and redesigning workflows so dependency doesn’t collapse onto a handful of people by default.
That’s an entirely different starting point, one that begins by asking who the system has made irreplaceable, and whether that was ever a deliberate decision or just what happened while nobody was paying attention.
*Research by Rob Cross, Reb Rebele, and Adam Grant, published in Harvard Business Review and expanded in Cross’s subsequent work, including a University of Virginia interview on the study’s findings.
Related:
The Cost of Carrying On: How Burnout Shows Up in Your Bottom Line