Why overload has become the normal state in public administration

Anyone running a local authority or a public authority today knows the feeling: no sooner is one bottleneck cleared than the next one is upon you.

Senior managers in public administration have been reporting growing pressure for years. More tasks, more requirements, more expectations from politicians and the public, with resources that remain the same or even shrink. For a long time this counted as a temporary peak in workload, the consequence of a particular crisis or reform. By now a different picture has emerged. Overload is no longer an outlier that can be caught by one more special arrangement or a time-limited project. It has become a structural feature of day-to-day administrative work.

A condition that stays

The difference between an acute strain and a permanent condition lies in its recurrence. An acute strain subsides as soon as the triggering cause disappears. A permanent condition persists even when individual causes are removed, because the system itself is built in such a way that new burdens keep growing back. That is exactly what can be observed in many administrations. Task portfolios keep growing, standards and documentation duties become denser, and every new statutory rule brings additional checking and evidence obligations. Anyone looking for the one cause in this situation will not find it. Overload arises from the interplay of many factors that reinforce one another.

For senior managers this means an uncomfortable realisation: the familiar response patterns, such as extra staff for a transitional period or a project group to work off a specific backlog, only take effect in the short term. As soon as the special measure ends, the gap fills up again, because the structural drivers carry on unchanged.

Why this is not a question of individual failure

One important clarification first: overload on this scale is no sign that employees or senior managers are making too little effort. When you experience daily that the work does not get any less despite high commitment, it is tempting to read that as a personal shortcoming. That reading leads in precisely the wrong direction. The real problem lies in the system of task allocation and resource management itself. When tasks increase continuously without capacities, processes or priorities being adjusted accordingly, a gap between aspiration and capability is inevitable. That gap widens over time, regardless of how committed the people involved are.

This insight is a relief at first, but it also changes how solutions are approached. Anyone treating overload as an individual problem starts with motivation, time management or personal resilience. Anyone who recognises it as a structural problem has to start with management control: with the question of which tasks can actually be handled, at what priority and with what resources.

Why small improvements rarely turn the situation around

Many administrations respond to noticeable overload with isolated efficiency initiatives. A process is digitalised, a form simplified, an interface automated. These steps are sensible and necessary, but they do not solve the underlying problem as long as the workload behind them keeps growing unchecked. A single process optimisation creates breathing space at one point, which new tasks or additional requirements often use up again within a short time. That explains why many administrations achieve hardly any noticeable relief despite years of improvement efforts. The effort is real, the effect remains limited, because it starts at the surface rather than at the system logic behind it.

My book Effiziente Verwaltung (Efficient public administration) deliberately describes this connection in the first chapter, before there is any talk of solutions. The observation there is that efficiency is misunderstood as long as it is treated as an instrument for saving money or as a technical optimisation problem. Only once the structural loop of overload has been recognised and named as such can efficiency be understood as what it should actually be in public administration: a leadership and management decision, not a mere question of technology.

What follows from this for senior managers

For administrative leaders this first of all means a change of perspective. Instead of treating every new burden as an individual case to be caught by yet another special measure, it is worth looking at the pattern behind it. Where exactly are task portfolios growing fastest? Which standards and evidence obligations tie up a disproportionate amount of time without their benefit growing to the same degree? And where has the organisation so far taken no conscious prioritisation decision at all, letting priorities simply emerge, depending on who applies the loudest pressure?

These questions cannot be answered in a single workshop. They call for a systematic stocktake of the organisation’s own task landscape and the willingness to take management decisions consciously rather than leaving them to chance. That is precisely where the first, often uncomfortable step out of the overload loop lies. It begins not with a new method, but with acknowledging that overload is a manageable problem, not an unavoidable fate of public administration.

A look at your own organisation

In practice it helps to break the stocktake into manageable steps. It is worth beginning with an honest survey of which tasks have been added in the past three to five years and which have fallen away in the same period. In most administrations the balance is unambiguous: new tasks are added regularly, while hardly any task is ever formally dropped. This imbalance can be made visible without elaborate software or external consultants. A structured conversation with the heads of the specialist departments is often enough to identify the biggest drivers.

The second step is the question of prioritisation. Which tasks are legally mandatory, which follow from voluntary standards the administration has set itself, and which have become habit over time without their benefit having been reviewed since. This distinction creates the basis for conscious decisions, instead of pursuing everything with equal insistence. Administrative leaders who take this step consistently report, without exception, that transparency about their own task landscape brings noticeable relief in itself, because it takes the heat out of discussions and removes the pressure on individuals to justify themselves.