How to Get Your Boss to Lessen Your Workload
Your fears may prevent you from telling your boss about what you face and the reality that you cannot bear your workload. You feel that you are totally exhausted however, you cannot say a word. If you tried to tell your boss that you cannot afford your workload, then you may face many problems that affect your career such as delaying or canceling your promotion, decreasing your salary, reducing working hours or even being fired which will be the biggest shock in your life. But sooner or later you have to talk and tell your boss about what you face or you will find yourself lost and suffer whether it is from your physical and mental health or from the quality of your work product that may come to be unaccepted. But how to talk to your boss and how to ask him\her to lessen your workload. Here are few tips that will help you to ask your boss for solving this problem.
– Choose a suitable time: Choose the most suitable time for talking to your boss. Make it clear for your boss and show him\her that the workload, the pressure and the amount of responsibilities that you bear affect the quality of your work product to be lower than it should be.
– Do not blame your boss: While you are talking to your boss, do not use any words that blame him\her for being unfair with you.
– Specify what you can do: Tell your boss about the workload that you can bear and the responsibilities that you can take in without affecting the quality of your work product.
– Determine the time: Schedule your tasks and tell your boss about the time that you need for performing them and doing your work to finally have them done with a high quality without having your performance affected by the overload of the work and duties.
– Share it with your colleagues: Ask your boss to allow you to share your work with your colleagues who do not have the same workload or the same amount of tasks and who have the skills that allow them to take in the responsibility of a part of your work such as typing or analysing.
– Refuse without saying “no”: Instead of saying no for additional work and requests of your boss, you can simply refuse through telling him\her that doing this work will prevent you from performing other tasks and will take time.
– Do not show your depression: Trying to express your depression and show the effect of workload on you will show your boss that you are not capable of taking in the responsibility and that you are not efficient enough to bear the workload. Try to concentrate on the effect of the overload, from which you suffer, on your boss’s work and company and not on your life and health.
– Worry about your boss’s work: Make your boss feel that you care about the quality of the work and the success of his\her company instead of trying to show the effect of the overload on you.
– Suggest solutions: Before making the decision of talking to your boss, you have first to think of a number of solutions to suggest when you talk to him\her about the amount of responsibilities and tasks that are required from you.
– Ask about priorities: When your boss ask you for doing many tasks especially new ones that are impossible to be finished within the deadline, then you can ask him\her about the importance of these tasks, their deadline and if you can delay them or do them at another time.
– Do not say “yes” all the time: Accepting all the tasks that you are asked for will increase the pressure and affect your performance. Instead of accepting all of these tasks, you can only accept those that you can complete within or before their deadline.
