The Two-Job Job: Role Sprawl, Hidden Workload, and How Leaders Can Redesign Work Before It Breaks People

[00:00:00] Think about how you introduce yourself at work lately. Like, I'm the senior engineer, but I also manage vendor relations now. Right. The classic, also. Yeah, exactly. Or maybe, I run the clinic, but I'm also unofficial IT. If you are habitually using the word also to describe your daily reality, you don't really have one job anymore. You have two. You really do. And today, we are going to figure out how to fix that before it literally breaks you.

[00:00:26] It's, well, it's a profound shift in the modern workplace. And if you're listening right now and feeling completely overwhelmed by that, you know, that invisible second job, I want to set the tone immediately. Please do. Because people are stressed. Yeah. What you are experiencing is not a failure of your personal time management. It is not a lack of resilience. It is a structural failure of work design. Okay. Let's unpack this. Because that distinction, that changes everything.

[00:00:55] To guide this deep dive, we're looking at a single, incredibly timely source. It's a fantastic piece of research. It really is. It's a 2026 paper by Dr. Jonathan H. Westover in the Human Capital Leadership Review. It's titled, The Two-Job Job, Role Sprawl, Hidden Workload, and How Leaders Can Redesign Work Before It Breaks People. And I mean, the sheer scale of the problem he outlines is just stunning.

[00:01:18] Yeah. The paper draws really heavily on the Korn Ferry Workforce 2026 survey, which looked at over 16,000 professionals globally. Oh, wow. 16,000. That's a huge sample. It is. And the data paints a picture of a workforce that's just, well, stretched beyond its elasticity. 61% of those respondents reported that they are currently carrying the responsibilities of more than one distinct role. 61%. So the majority of the workforce. Exactly.

[00:01:46] And 62% said their workloads had become significantly heavier over just the past two years. And people are hitting the wall, right? Like the survey tracks a massive drop in motivation, falling from 71% in 2024 to just 61% in 2026. Yeah, it's a steep drop. People are doing more, but they are caring less simply because they're stuck in survival mode. Which means I think we need to clearly define the core vocabulary Dr. Westover uses here.

[00:02:15] What exactly separates this new phenomenon, what he calls role sprawl, from just, you know, being busy? The distinction is vital. Role sprawl is fundamentally different from job enlargement. Okay. How so? Well, enlargement is a deliberate planned decision by a manager to broaden your role to help you develop new skills. Like giving you a stretch project.

[00:02:38] Right. And sprawl is certainly not a promotion, which typically comes with a new title, structural authority, and you know, a pay raise. Right. The pay raise being the key part there. Exactly. Role sprawl happens by accretion. It is a quiet, structural creep. Creep is a good word for it. Yeah. A colleague leaves and you are asked to take on a few of their tasks temporarily. Or a software system updates and suddenly the data entry that used to belong to finance drifts over to you. Just millimeter by millimeter.

[00:03:07] Yes. You absorb these tasks until your one job literally becomes two. But it still wears the title and the salary of one. It sounds exactly like an old smartphone operating system. Oh, that's a good comparison. Like you never officially opened these background apps, but they just keep accumulating. They sit there in the background, quietly draining your battery until the entire phone unexpectedly shuts down. You didn't ask to launch them, but they're running anyway.

[00:03:33] If we connect this to the bigger picture, that battery drain is exactly what organizational psychologists have been warning us about for decades. We are just seeing it now at an industrial scale. Right. There's this foundational study on workplace stress by Robert Kahn back in 1964. 1964. Yeah. Wow. So we've known about this for a while. Oh, absolutely. He identified three distinct threats. Role overload, where expectations exceed your time. Role conflict, where expectations compete with each other.

[00:04:02] And role ambiguity, where it's not even clear what is expected of you anymore. And sprawl hits all of those. Role sprawl triggers all three simultaneously. Let's make that real for a second, right? Role conflict isn't just having two things to do. It's when your boss demands a 20% increase in your output, but the compliance department just rolled out a new five-step approval process that slows your production down by 30%. Right. You're caught in the middle. You are biologically and procedurally incapable of satisfying both demands. Exactly.

[00:04:32] And that leads us to the job demands resources model, or the JDR. It's a framework explaining that every job consists of demands, which cost you physical and emotional energy, and resources, which help you meet those demands. And resources isn't just money, right? No, not at all. Resources here means autonomy, supportive leadership, clear boundaries, and functional tools.

[00:04:53] When your demands skyrocket due to role sprawl, but your resources remain static or even shrink, you are on a direct, unalterable path to burnout. So the background apps are draining the battery. But what are the specific environmental triggers that are suddenly forcing all these apps to run at once, right now? The paper identifies four main drivers of this modern sprawl. The obvious culprit starting us off is head count cuts, what companies politely call de-layering.

[00:05:22] De-layering has become the dominant corporate strategy of the mid-2020s. We've seen massive high-profile restructurings specifically aimed at cutting middle management to make companies, quote unquote, flatter. Flatter, right. The paper cites several prominent examples between 2023 and 2026. Meta flattened its organizational structure. Citigroup went through a massive overhaul, cutting its management layers from 13 down to just eight. 13 to eight. That's a huge cut. It is.

[00:05:50] Amazon increased its ratio of individual contributors to managers by 15%. Bayer cut 5,500 jobs, primarily managerial, to shift to a dynamic shared ownership model. Uber cut 20% of its managerial positions. But the underlying flaw there is that when you eliminate the manager, the actual work of managing doesn't just vanish into thin air. Precisely. The coordinating, the coaching, the cross-departmental prioritizing, that work still exists.

[00:06:18] It just crashes down onto the individual contributors who are left behind. So they have to manage themselves now. Yeah, they suddenly have to manage their own workflows on top of executing the actual work itself. And that bleeds right into the second driver, which is headcount restraint and unbackfilled attrition. Someone quits, and instead of hiring a replacement management says, we are freezing headcount for the quarter, so can you just cover their desk for a bit? Right, just temporarily.

[00:06:45] Fast forward a year, and that temporary work distribution has quietly become permanent policy. It becomes the new baseline. Then we hit driver three, which is generative AI deployment. And this one reveals a massive perception gap in the workplace. This one is fascinating to me. Yeah, according to the Korn Ferry data, 79% of CEOs see AI as a massive driver of efficiency. But only 51% of individual contributors agree with that assessment. Wait, I have to push back on that.

[00:07:13] Isn't AI supposedly the ultimate resource? Like it writes the code, it drafts the emails. Why is the very thing promised to make us faster actually adding to the sprawl? It is entirely counterintuitive until you look at the mechanics of implementation. The reality is that building, testing, and governing these AI tools generates its own massive stream of invisible labor. Invisible labor? Mm-hmm. Okay, explain that.

[00:07:39] Think about what it actually takes to use AI effectively in a corporate environment. You have to experiment with the prompts to get the right output. You have to rigorously review that output for hallucinations or errors. You have to coordinate with legal and IT to ensure the data you're feeding the model is compliant. Oh, true. The compliance alone is a headache. Absolutely. Yeah. And you have to adapt your entire workflow every single time the underlying AI model receives an update.

[00:08:04] That takes hours of deep, focused work, but it rarely shows up in an individual contributor's formal job description. So the CEO sees a magical efficiency tool, but the employee sees a demanding second job as a part-time AI systems manager. Exactly. That reframes it completely. The tool requires maintenance, and the maintenance is uncompensated labor. That perfectly contextualizes the fourth driver, which is coordination overhead.

[00:08:31] The sheer staggering amount of time we spend on work about work. The metrics on this are alarming. An Asana study found that knowledge workers now spend roughly 60% of their time just searching for information, chasing down status updates across different platforms, and switching between tools. 60%. That's more than half the day just looking for things. Yeah. And the Microsoft 2025 telemetry data makes it even clearer.

[00:08:57] They looked at anonymized usage data and found the average employee is interrupted roughly every two minutes. Let that sink in. Two minutes. If you're listening to this at your desk right now, look at your Teams or Slack icon. It's probably bouncing or flashing red right this second. That is coordination overhead in real time. It is unrelenting. The Microsoft data shows employees receiving 117 emails and 153 Teams messages on a typical weekday. How do you even get anything done? Well, you don't.

[00:09:26] The most telling indicator that capacity has completely ruptured is that they tracked a 16% rise in meetings starting after 8pm. After 8pm? Yeah. People are using the day to coordinate and using their nights to actually do their jobs. So the business is violently pushing all this excess work around the organization. But where does it actually land? Because businesses are made of people. Who absorbs this impact? That is where this becomes an issue of workplace equity.

[00:09:54] Because the sprawl does not distribute itself evenly. It flows like water to the path of least resistance. Which means? It flows to the highly conscientious, to the highly visible, and to those who feel the least empowered to say no. Oh. The paper cites compelling research by Cross and colleagues showing that in many organizations, just 3-5% of employees supply 20-35% of the value-added collaborations. 3% doing a third of the collaborative work. Yes.

[00:10:23] These people become organizational bottlenecks simply because they are competent and helpful. Wait, so if you're the high-performing, helpful team player who always says yes, you're actually the most at risk for this organizational punishment. Like, the reward for digging the best ditches is just a bigger shovel. It is. What's fascinating here is that it completely contradicts the traditional corporate narrative that hard work leads to a promotion. And it introduces a heavily gendered dimension as well. How so?

[00:10:52] Well, research by Babcock and others demonstrates that women are consistently asked to take on non-promotable tasks. You know, organizing the committee, mentoring the intern, fixing the broken process, far more often than men. And they accept those requests at higher rates, largely due to ingrained social expectations. So the system actively penalizes your competence and your willingness to help. Yes. This invisible second job widens gaps in advancement.

[00:11:18] The performance review systems only measure your primary job description. Right, this stuff on paper. Right. They don't see or reward the critical maintenance work you are doing to keep the entire department from collapsing. You are keeping the company running. But you are getting passed over for promotion because your core deliverables slipped while you were busy saving the ship. So the individual is drowning. But surely the company must be noticing a hit to the bottom line. All this maintenance work has to be cannibalizing real growth. Absolutely.

[00:11:48] The first major organizational cost is what Dr. Westover calls the activity productivity gap. What's that? 45% of corn fairy respondents reported being simply too busy to deliver meaningful results that actually contribute to business growth. Wow. They are living in a constant state of triage. When you are triaging, you protect the urgent immediate tasks and you let the important long term growth initiatives die. It's a complete time famine. A time famine that stalls innovation.

[00:12:15] The source details a fascinating study by Karuna Karan and colleagues looking specifically at AI implementation. Oh, going back to the AI driver. Right. They found that the hidden unmeasured work of AI experimentation added so much strain to already overloaded technical experts that it literally derailed ambitious AI initiatives. Yeah, because they just didn't have time. The experts just stopped trying to innovate because they physically didn't have the hours in the day to handle their core job plus the experimental innovation.

[00:12:43] Which inevitably brings us back to the human cost. What happens to the person executing all that maintenance while failing to innovate? Burnout. Christina Maslach's foundational research on occupational burnout identifies workload mismatch as one of its primary drivers. Right. Burnout isn't just being tired. It's what happens when you lose control over what tasks we can safely drop. And the reward you receive completely fails to match the effort you are expending. This triggers what the JDR model calls a loss cycle.

[00:13:12] I want to make sure we understand the mechanics of the loss cycle. This is where strain generates mistakes, right? Exactly. Like you're exhausted from a 10 hour day of context switching. So you send an email to a client with the wrong financial attachment. Now you have to send three more emails to apologize and fix it. Yep. That generates a mandatory meeting with your manager to figure out what went wrong, which pulls you away from your actual work, requiring you to work late again. Your exhaustion is literally generating more tasks.

[00:13:39] That is the loss cycle perfectly described. The work creates more work simply because you were stripped of the resources needed to do it efficiently the first time. So if we accept that this is a massive structural design flaw, the fix has to be structural. We can't, you know, life hack our way out of this with a better planner. We have to design our way out of it. We do. So how do organizations actually stop the bleeding? The very first step Dr. Westover prescribes is incredibly straightforward,

[00:14:09] yet culturally terrifying for most companies. Okay. What is it? Subtract before you add. Organizations must actively hunt down and remove hindrance stressors. Hindrance stressors. Yes. These are demands that don't contribute to growth, but act purely as obstacles. Red tape, convoluted reporting matrices, unnecessary recurring meetings. And the paper provides three very different, very practical examples of how companies actually executed this subtraction. Take Shopify.

[00:14:39] I love this example. It's wild. They initiated a massive remote calendar purge. They literally went into the system and unilaterally wiped out all recurring meetings that had more than two people in them. Just deleted them. Gone. It eliminated roughly 10,000 calendar events and freed up over 76,500 hours of human capacity. I imagine the cultural friction was intense at first. You know, people panic when their routines are broken.

[00:15:05] But it forced every single employee to justify why a meeting needed to exist before putting it back on the calendar. It flips the default from meet to don't meet. Exactly. The second example is from Hawaii Pacific Health. They launched a program bluntly titled Getting Rid of Stupid Stuff. Which is an amazing name. It really gets to the point. They actively solicited nurses and doctors to nominate electronic health record requirements that were poorly designed or redundant.

[00:15:32] Often these are legacy compliance rules that made sense 10 years ago, but are now just pure friction. Right. By investigating and removing just one required documentation row that nurses had to manually click during patient rounding, they saved 1,700 nursing hours a month across their four hospitals. 1,700 hours a month reclaimed by removing a single click. One click. And the third example is Amazon. When they went through their delayering process, they paired it with a bureaucracy mailbox.

[00:16:03] Oh, wow. So, employees could directly report unnecessary red tape to the leadership. And that resulted in 150 immediate actions taken to streamline internal processes. But these purges lead to a critical realization, which is the second major solution. Organizations must recharter roles. Recharter. Yes. When you restructure or when you cut a layer of management, you cannot just delete the roles and hook the work figures itself out.

[00:16:29] You have to explicitly renegotiate what tasks remain and who owns things. This is exactly like a physical closet. Oh, how so? Well, you can't just keep buying new clothes and stuffing them in. Eventually the closet breaks. The rod snaps right off the wall. You have to explicitly take an old shirt out when a new shirt comes in. But it sounds like most corporate structures have absolutely no built-in throw-out mechanism. That is a brilliant way to frame it. Every addition in a corporate environment has a sponsor, right?

[00:16:59] A vice president gets a bonus for launching a new reporting initiative. But no one owns subtraction. Right. No one gets promoted for identifying a meaningless status report and killing it. The paper warns that subtraction has to become a recurring, disciplined practice, not just a one-time purge. Because it'll just fill back up. Exactly. It cites the NHS Productive Ward Program in the UK, which was designed to free up nursing time for direct patient care.

[00:17:26] It was incredibly successful initially, but a 10-year evaluation showed the benefits completely decayed over time. Why? Because the management support for subtracting work disappeared, and the closet just slowly filled back up with new administrative clothes. The sprawl creeps back in if you don't defend the boundaries. So how are companies rechartering to actually defend those boundaries? Bayer is a great example.

[00:17:51] With their shift to dynamic shared ownership, they implemented 90-day cycles for self-organizing teams. Every 90 days, the team explicitly defines what they are working on and, by definition, what they are dropping. Oh, that's smart. Citigroup, during their delayering, didn't just cut managers. They actively disbanded 60 different internal committees. They explicitly decided that the coordinating work those committees were doing simply wasn't going to be done anymore.

[00:18:17] It takes genuine leadership to look at a piece of work and say, we are comfortable letting this drop. Which brings us to the next structural defense. How do organizations govern this new reality so the sprawl doesn't just return? This is solution three. Govern workload as a strict capacity budget. Right now, organizations treat financial capital as a highly constrained, heavily audited, finite resource. Sure. But they treat human time as infinite.

[00:18:44] If a project costs $50,000, it requires three levels of approval. If a project costs 500 hours of engineering time, a manager just drops it in a Slack channel. We have to budget time like money. And the paper highlights Dropbox's virtual first model for this, right? Yes. They establish strict four-hour core collaboration windows. If you need a synchronous meeting, it happens in those four hours. The rest of the day defaults to asynchronous work, giving employees guaranteed, uninterrupted focus time.

[00:19:14] And solution four is about making the hidden work visible. Because you can't budget what you can't see. Exactly. The first thing that's important is that AI experts dropped out because experimenting competed with their billable hours. The firm only built three tools.

[00:19:42] Contrast that with the Academic Medical Center in the exact same study. They treated AI experimentation as formal work. Formal work. Right. They built the time into job responsibilities. They adjusted workload expectations to make room for it. And they tied it to promotion criteria. Because the work was visible and budgeted, they successfully built 141 tools. From three to 141. That's proof right there. It is.

[00:20:07] And the final piece, Solution 5, focuses on resourcing managers and enabling job crafting. It reasserts that managers are not just expensive overhead. Their actual job is to allocate capacity and protect their team's boundaries. Teams need structured organizational permission to say no to requests that fall outside their rechartered roles. Absolutely. But I know that when we start talking about governing capacity and tracking hidden work, warning bells go off for a lot of people. Right.

[00:20:36] Let me play devil's advocate here for a second. If I'm an employee already drowning in emails and compliance checks, the absolute last thing I want is a new mandate forcing me to rigorously track every minute I spend on hidden work. Doesn't this governance idea risk creating the exact kind of bureaucratic red tape we just spent 20 minutes trying to eliminate? This raises an important question and it's a vital pushback. If implemented poorly, yes, it just becomes a new hindrance stressor.

[00:21:05] But true capacity governance isn't about micro tracking individual employees. Okay. What is it then? It relies on anonymized team level telemetry like that Microsoft data to spot heat maps of overload. More importantly, proper governance shifts the burden of proof upward. Upward to leadership. Yes. Instead of the employee tracking their minutes, it requires leaders to write capacity impact statements before they are allowed to launch a new initiative. Oh, wow.

[00:21:34] The executive sponsoring the project has to explicitly declare whose time this will consume and what existing team deliverables will be paused or canceled to make room for it. You don't govern the worker. You govern the people generating the work. That is a fundamental paradigm shift. You are forcing the executives to do the subtraction themselves before they are allowed to add to the pile. Exactly. Okay. We have covered a massive amount of ground today.

[00:22:01] We started with the suffocating reality of the two job job, the accretion of tasks that quietly drain our capacity. But what this deep dive ultimately reveals is that overload is a solvable design flaw. It's not a personal flaw. No, it's not.

[00:22:16] Whether you're a senior leader who can start mandating capacity impact statements, a manager who can start aggressively subtracting this stupid stuff today, or an individual contributor who now has the vocabulary to identify role conflict and push back, you have leverage. You can look at that new request and say, this isn't job enlargement. This is role sprawl. What are we dropping to make room for it? You now have the language to make the invisible visible.

[00:22:42] And as we close, I want to leave you with a final unmentioned provocation built directly on the foundation of Dr. Westover's research. Let's hear it. We talked about governing human capacity like a financial budget. But what if the future of work requires us to take this even further? What if organizations eventually have to treat time bankruptcy with the exact same legal and structural severity as actual financial bankruptcy? Time bankruptcy. Yeah.

[00:23:09] Imagine a system where, if a department's telemetry data shows they have gone time bankrupt, working past 8pm, drowning in context switching, a structural freeze is automatically triggered. A full freeze. All new initiatives are legally halted, no new meetings can be scheduled by external departments, and leadership is forced to restructure the work before the department is allowed to operate normally again. Think about how that threat would completely change the way your executive team launches their next pet project.

[00:23:38] Time bankruptcy. Time bankruptcy. That forces a complete shift in reality. Instead of treating human energy like a magical well that just keeps refilling no matter how much you draw from it, you treat it like a bank account that can actually run dry. And when the funds are gone, the operations stop. It forces consequences on the designers of the work, not just the doers. It really does. Thank you for joining us on this deep dive. Keep asking those big questions. Keep actively designing your own work life.

[00:24:05] And remember to check your background apps before your battery completely drains. We'll catch you next time.