The Hidden Cost of High Job Demands: What Every Leader Needs to Know
In today’s fast-paced business landscape, the push for productivity often masks a hidden cost: the toll of high job demands. When left unmanaged, these demands don’t just impact individual employees – they threaten the health, safety, and sustainability of your entire organisation.
At Get Mentally Fit, we help workplaces identify, understand, and manage psychosocial risks like high job demands. In this article, we unpack why these demands matter, how they impact your team, and what leaders can do to address them.
Before we do, a great place to start is to listen to SafeWork NSW’s video on Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work.
Why Are High Job Demands Costly?
As an organisational psychology company, we’ve seen first-hand the impact of psychosocial hazards such as unrelenting workloads, emotional strain, and poor systems of support. High job demands are one of the most pervasive risks, and they carry a steep cost: burnout, absenteeism, turnover, and workers’ compensation claims.
These are more than human issues – they’re business risks. A 2023 report by the Productivity Commission estimates that mental ill-health costs the Australian economy $70 billion per year in lost productivity, with job-related stress being a key contributor.
If you want to safeguard your people and your bottom line, start by taking a strategic approach to managing high job demands. Ready to jump in and have a closer look? Don’t worry, it’s not as scary as it sounds!
What Are High Job Demands?
High job demands refer to the ongoing physical, mental, or emotional effort required of employees to meet their job expectations. They become hazardous when demands are:
Severe: Extremely high expectations
Prolonged: Long-term, with no foreseeable relief
Frequent: Occurring regularly without breaks
Examples of high job demands:
Physical: Long hours, repetitive tasks, insufficient breaks
Mental: Complex tasks without proper training, unclear instructions, high cognitive load
Emotional: Exposure to client distress, customer aggression, or needing to suppress true emotions at work
These pressures wear people down, creating a compounding effect on morale, mental health, and work performance.
Real-Life Reflection: A Case Study
At a mid-sized marketing agency, staff turnover had spiked and productivity was dropping. An internal review revealed staff were juggling unrealistic deadlines with little autonomy or support. With our help, the company conducted a Psychosocial Risk Assessment, restructured roles, and introduced manager training in mental health support and job crafting. Six months later, employee engagement rose by 30%, and absenteeism fell by nearly half.
Protecting Your Business: A Strategic Approach
Managing psychosocial risks like high job demands isn’t just about ticking compliance boxes – it’s about safeguarding the wellbeing of your people and the long-term success of your business. A best-practice approach involves four (4) key stages: identifying the risks, assessing their impact, implementing effective control measures, and reviewing those controls regularly. When done well, this process reduces harm, boosts performance, and strengthens your culture from the inside out. Ultimately, you can mitigate the risks of high job demands by proactively managing psychosocial hazards in your workplace.
Here’s the 4 stages broken down for you:
1. Identify the Risks: Know What You’re Dealing With
Start by recognising the specific high job demands present in your workplace. These may be physical (e.g., long hours, heavy lifting), mental (e.g., constant multitasking, tight deadlines), or emotional (e.g., managing distressed clients, exposure to conflict).
Practical steps:
Consult your team: Ask employees about their workload and stress levels during one-on-ones or team check-ins. Use open-ended questions like, “What’s making your work harder than it should be?”
Observe patterns: Watch for signs of fatigue, rushed tasks, irritability, or declining performance.
Review available data: Examine sick leave records, turnover rates, complaints, incident reports, or workers’ compensation claims.
Encourage reporting: Create a culture where employees feel safe to speak up about pressure points without fear of judgment.
🔗 WorkSafe Queensland: Identifying Psychosocial Hazards
2. Assess the Risks: Understand the Impact
Not all demands are hazardous – but when they are too frequent, intense, or prolonged, the risk of harm increases. Assess how serious the identified job demands are and how they may affect your employees’ mental and physical health.
Practical steps:
Use assessment tools: For organisations with more than 20 workers, the People at Work psychosocial risk assessment tool is free and evidence-based.
Evaluate exposure: Consider how long, how often, and how severely employees are impacted by specific demands.
Identify compounding factors: A high workload combined with unclear roles or lack of support poses a far greater risk than a single issue alone.
🔗 Safe Work Australia: Managing Psychosocial Hazards
3. Control the Risks: Take Targeted Action
Once you’ve identified and assessed the risks, the next step is implementing effective control measures. These should be tailored to the specific needs of your organisation and your people.
Practical steps:
Redesign work where possible: Can roles be redistributed or deadlines extended? Is there a way to build in more breaks or rotate tasks to avoid fatigue?
Upskill and support employees: Ensure workers are trained and supported to meet the demands of their roles.
Provide psychosocial safety support: Encourage peer support, offer access to your EAP, and foster open conversations about mental health.
Clarify expectations: Make sure roles and responsibilities are well-defined and achievable within a normal workday.
🔗 Mental Health at Work (NSW): Practical resources
4. Review and Improve: Keep It Dynamic
Risk management isn’t “set and forget.” Regularly reviewing your control measures ensures they remain effective as your workplace evolves.
Practical steps:
Check-in regularly: Ask for employee feedback and watch for new or recurring stress points.
Track key data: Monitor sick leave, productivity, and engagement levels as indirect indicators of psychosocial health.
Be agile: If a control measure isn’t working, be ready to adjust or try a new approach.
Engage external expertise: A third-party review can offer valuable insight and support when addressing complex or persistent issues.
Protecting Psychosocial Health is Good Business
High job demands aren’t just part of the job – they’re a critical warning sign of potential harm if left unmanaged. They can quietly erode employee wellbeing, productivity, and your bottom line.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
By taking a proactive and strategic approach to managing psychosocial risks, you create a workplace that doesn’t just survive under pressure – but thrives. One where people feel supported, safe, and empowered to perform at their best.
It starts with awareness. It continues with action. And it succeeds with leadership.
✅ Start Protecting Your People Today
At Get Mentally Fit, we help organisations like yours assess, design, and embed practical strategies that minimise psychosocial risk and support high-performing teams.
Whether you’re navigating complex leadership challenges or want to implement a clear, compliant framework to reduce psychosocial harm threatening your employees – our experts are here to help.
📞 Get in Touch to speak with one of our workplace wellbeing consultants
📘 Explore our Leadership Development & Psychosocial Risk Control Solutions🎯
Creating a safe, sustainable workplace isn’t just the right thing to do – it’s the smart thing to do.
