Office Workhorses: Will They Be Needed?

Working extra hours to finish a rush project on time. Providing a new team member with advice on how to handle a situation with the boss. Pulling data to help support a presentation from a colleague on another team.

More and more people see themselves as the “office workhorse”—as someone who takes on extra work for collective, but not individual, benefit. Just over 60% of employees in a new survey describe themselves this way, saying they perform between three and six (or more) additional duties outside of their defined role. To be sure, firms have long relied on the extra efforts of a minority of high-performing individuals to create value. Think of the colleagues who always seem to volunteer to lend a hand, or the ones who perform the invisible little tasks that hold a team together.

But Dennis Baltzley, global head of leadership development solutions at Korn Ferry, says while office workhorses are indispensable, they’re also a risk. “If you lose them, the business may suffer,” he says. And according to the survey, these workers may start heading for the exits—if they aren’t already. Even if psychological theory says people benefit from helping others, more than half of office workhorses, feeling their contributions are undervalued, are burned out, while one-third are considering leaving their jobs.

Where being an office workhorse was once a badge of honor among boss-pleasing overachievers, data suggests that people aren’t volunteering for extra work so much as it is being thrust upon them. Mass layoffs—in industries like technology, consumer products, and financial services—are partly responsible for turning people into unwilling workhorses, says Kate Shattuck, managing partner at Korn Ferry. “People are working beyond max capacity,” she says. Data shows that the altruism of office workhorses is waning as well, with 53% asking for a raise to compensate for responsibilities they’ve taken on freely in the past.

Flo Falayi, a senior client partner in the Leadership and Executive Development practice at Korn Ferry, says leaders are partly to blame. From an organizational perspective, he says, reliance on a small group of “go-to people” could put the company’s success at risk. “Leaders aren’t developing or increasing the band of accountable and reliable people they can go to,” says Falayi.

Experts are quick to point out that not everyone who claims to be an office workhorse is one. Baltzley notes that people usually do a poor job of evaluating themselves. There’s even a name for this tendency: It’s called the “better-than-average effect,” and it shows that the majority of people tend to rate themselves as above average in most things. “Many of us want to be seen as central to the business, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we are,” he says.

And in the future, they may be less essential. Artificial intelligence will soon take over many administrative, logistical, and other routine tasks that managers have typically relied on office workhorses to handle, says Miriam Nelson, a senior client partner in the Assessment and Succession practice at Korn Ferry. As a result, leaders may not need to lean on them as much. Indeed, companies have been slow to hire back workers following two years of layoffs and are instead looking for other ways to boost productivity and efficiency. “There will always be people who are inclined to take on tasks left undone,” says Nelson, “but the burden of having to do so may decline over time.”

Learn more about Korn Ferry’s Leadership and Professional Development capabilities.

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