How to distribute work in a team with uneven loads
Echipa HR 365 · reviewed 2026-09-08 · 5 min read
In almost any team, two people carry disproportionately much. The cause is not the laziness of the others, but a simple mechanism: more goes to whoever delivers reliably, because it is less risky. Repeated over six months, it produces two exhausted people and five who are not growing.
How to measure load without counting hours
The number of tasks says nothing: ten small pieces are not the same as one large one. Hours worked tell you who stays late, not who is loaded. What works is a combination of three signals, all observable without any tool:
| Signal | How you see it | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Who gets asked first | Note, for a week, who you gave each new piece of work to | Your own allocation reflex |
| Who says “I cannot get to it” | Or, more often, who never says it | The ones who never say it are usually the loaded ones |
| Who is blocked by whom | At the weekly meeting, who is waiting on whom | The bottlenecks in the team |
| Who works in the evening | The time of the last message or the last delivery | A late signal, but a clear one |
How it gets there
- It is faster. Explaining a piece of work to someone who has not done it costs time now, and time is always short.
- It is safer. Someone who has done it ten times does not get it wrong; someone doing it for the first time might.
- The loaded person asks for it. Good people take things on, and refusing is harder for them than for others.
- It is invisible. Without a deliberate look, uneven distribution is invisible to the manager.
All four are rational in the short term and expensive in the long term. The third is the most insidious: the loaded person does not complain, so everything looks fine — until the day they resign, and then it looks like it came out of nowhere.
Rebalancing, without punishing anyone
The classic mistake is to take work off the loaded person and give it to someone else, abruptly. The loaded person reads it as a withdrawal of trust, and the recipient feels thrown in at the deep end. What works is a transfer with overlap, on a single recurring piece of work.
Transferring a piece of work, in four stages
- The first time — the new person watches how it is done; the loaded one explains why, not just how
- The second — the new person does it, the loaded one checks before delivery
- The third — the new person does it and delivers, the loaded one checks afterwards
- From the fourth — the new person owns it; the loaded one is the person to ask, not the person who checks
Three cycles are usually enough for a recurring piece of work. The cost is the loaded person’s time in the first two — which means that in the transfer month they have more work, not less. That is why transfers started in a crisis fail.
When you genuinely cannot rebalance
Sometimes the concentration is not a choice: one person holds a skill that cannot be transferred in three months. Then the solution is not rebalancing but explicitly acknowledging the situation — and a conversation with them about what can be taken out of the rest of their workload.
What does not work is leaving things as they are and hoping. Someone who single-handedly carries a critical skill plus all their ordinary work is the most likely candidate to leave the team — and their departure produces exactly the crisis you were avoiding.
What if the loaded person will not hand anything over?
It is usually not possessiveness but a fear that the result will be worse and they will still answer for it. The conversation is about who answers during the transfer period — if they do, the refusal is rational.
How do I know whether someone genuinely has nothing to do?
That is rarely the case. More often they have work you cannot see because it produces no requests to you. Ask them what they did last week, not what they have to do.
Where to start
Note, for a week, who you gave each new piece of work to. It is five minutes a day and shows you a pattern you cannot otherwise see.
Then pick one recurring piece of work from the most loaded person and start the four-stage transfer. One, not three — otherwise next month is harder for everybody.
The special case: whoever is new to the team
A new joiner usually gets too little — out of care. The effect is the opposite of the one intended: without real work they do not learn the context, do not gain confidence, and stay for months in the zone of small tasks nobody wants.
The rule that works: from the second week, a real piece of work with low stakes and supervision. Not a task invented as an exercise — one somebody actually needs, chosen so that an error can be repaired.
The work nobody wants
Every team has two or three boring, necessary jobs. How they are distributed says more about fairness than anything else: if they always land on the same people — usually the newest or the least insistent — that is noticed and remembered.
The version that works is a declared rotation with fixed periods. Not because it is more efficient — it is not, since specialisation is lost — but because it removes the one form of unfairness teams feel acutely.
Tasks visible across the team, with an owner and a deadline
You see in one place who has what in progress, so uneven distribution shows up before it becomes a resignation rather than after.
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