TORONTO – In the corporate world, employees are finding that their “circle back after the holidays” workload is building up to critical levels.
Jason Raynor works as a project manager for an undisclosed tech conglomerate. At first he was excited that work tasks kept being put off until 2024. Some of these projects had already been pushed back multiple times. Some couldn’t be started until the end of the fiscal year, then they had to put on pause since the whole team couldn’t find a time to meet over summer, and then in Q3 data engineering had to cancel any work requests. Now, the plan is to circle back in 2024.
“Currently I’m loving not having as much on my plate, but I’m getting really stressed,” stated Mr. Raynor. “January Jason is screwed! I’ll be working overtime and weekends for weeks. At least it’s a leap year, so I’ll get an extra day of work to play catch up.”
The C-Suite executives have defended this business practice. “From American Thanksgiving until New Year’s Day, I’m traveling from my yacht to my Bahamas beach house to my Miami mansion, and back to my yacht. It’s honestly exhausting,” explained the CEO who refused to be named. “I don’t want to approve the proposal in your deck, or decide how to improve our EBIT. I want to do the bare minimum to keep the joint running, and to sip Mai Tais while I defend the commercialization of the holidays.”
The Association of Human Resources says that all this circling back can be detrimental to the mental health of employees since they are the ones responsible for remembering the status of each project and for bringing unresolved issues back to the table.
“When everything is running in a circle, it’s hard to juggle where a project is in its respective loop,” said President Deepika Chopra. “Employees are more likely to struggle to relax due to the mental load associated with keeping their entire workload in a perpetual state of readiness for when the circle comes back.”
Mr. Raynor believes that at least one of his projects will come full circle so he has something to talk about during his performance review.
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