Why More Staff Will Not Solve the Administration’s Overload

A skills shortage is the most obvious explanation for an overloaded administration. It falls short.

In conversations with senior managers in the public sector, one sentence comes up especially often: we simply do not have enough staff. This explanation is tempting, because it is easy to state and hard to disprove. Almost every administration can point to unfilled posts, high sickness rates and a skills shortage in individual areas. The skills shortage is real. As the sole explanation for the structural overload of public administration, it falls short.

A Lasting State With Structural Causes

Public administrations have been in a state of permanent overload for years. This is not a short-term phenomenon, not the result of economic fluctuations, and not the outcome of individual poor decisions by individual senior managers. The overload has fundamental structural causes. Almost every level of the administration shows a similar picture: a continuous rise in tasks, growing regulatory requirements, rising expectations from politics and the public, alongside limited staff, financial and time resources. What stands out above all is how persistent this burden is. Anyone who explains this state purely through a lack of staff is assuming that adequately filled posts would resolve the problem. Experience shows a different picture. Even administrations that manage to fill vacant posts rarely report noticeable structural relief.

Why Additional Staff Miss the Real Cause

The reason lies in the nature of the overload itself. It arises as the result of a system in which task volumes keep growing and standards keep tightening, without leadership and politics systematically questioning this development. New tasks are added, old ones remain. Regulatory requirements become denser, but processes are rarely adjusted to match. In such a system, additional staff first tie up capacity for induction, coordination and alignment before they become effective at all. If the task volume keeps growing at the same time, new staff at best offset part of that increase. The underlying imbalance remains in place.

This dynamic also explains a phenomenon many senior managers know from their own experience: new posts get filled, yet the expected relief fails to materialise. The reason is rarely the performance of the new colleagues. It lies in the fact that the task volume keeps growing while the organisation is simultaneously trying to induct the new staff and integrate them into existing workflows. In the short term, the coordination effort rises, and noticeable relief only sets in with a considerable delay, if it sets in at all.

Efficiency as a Leadership and Steering Decision

This is exactly where a misunderstanding arises that weakens many efficiency initiatives from the outset. Efficiency is often understood as a cost-cutting instrument or a technical optimisation problem. Well-intentioned improvements then have little effect, and in some cases even create additional work. Efficiency begins as a leadership and steering decision. Which tasks does the administration carry today that it no longer needs to carry in this form? Which standards were adopted over time without their benefit ever being reviewed again? Additional staff do not answer these questions. They require a deliberate examination of the task portfolio itself.

This is precisely the space my book Effiziente Verwaltung opens up in its first chapter. It deliberately begins with a precise mapping of the problem: the structural overload as it is experienced across the country. The aim of this chapter is not to assign blame or point to shortcomings in particular areas, but to describe the starting position with precision. This stocktaking lays the foundation for understanding efficiency, in the chapters that follow, as a steering task for leadership rather than something delegated to individual cost-cutting targets.

What Senior Managers Should Actually Check

For senior managers, it is worth establishing a starting point ahead of workforce planning. An honest task review reveals which services are genuinely still needed and which are continued out of habit. Such services often stem from earlier political decisions, one-off special requests from individual departments, or standards that made sense at a particular point in time and have never been reviewed since. An analysis of standards shows where requirements go beyond what is legally necessary. A review of processes reveals where coordination loops cost more time than the underlying task itself.

These three perspectives, task review, standards analysis and process review, come before workforce planning. They provide its necessary foundation. If a vacant post is filled before this review has taken place, the new employee often simply inherits the same task profile under which their predecessor was already overloaded. The overload just moves on rather than being resolved. Without this clarification, every additional post remains a short-term fix for a task volume that keeps growing.

The Right Sequence Makes the Difference

For senior managers, this means a shift in priorities. Attracting staff remains important, particularly given demographic change in the public sector and the visible competition for skilled staff. It has its full effect once it meets a task volume that has already been critically reviewed. Administrations that first put their tasks, standards and processes in order, and only then build up staff in a targeted way, report a noticeably different effect from new posts. The new staff then reinforce an organisation that has already been relieved, rather than entering an overloaded system.

This sequence determines whether an administration keeps operating at its limit or regains its capacity to act. Any senior manager who treats staffing levels as the only lever will work past the actual cause and, despite considerable effort, achieve little structural relief. Anyone who puts the task portfolio in order first creates the precondition for every new post to actually make a difference.