When you eventually make your way back into the office, chances are your boss will greet you with words along the lines of "we are all going to have to do more with less".
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Glad to have a job, you simply go along with the much-maligned mantra despite knowing full well you will end up marinating in complete misery.
A recession, as well as months of flagging consumer confidence and ambiguity around exactly what will happen when JobSeeker grinds to a halt in September, has pushed many bosses to tighten their belts.
Some staff have been let go, other have taken hits to the hip pocket and another cohort has had its hours reduced. That leaves just a few hands on deck to get the job done.
For many bosses, the euphemism "doing more with less" means producing the same results with fewer people and resources. It is a much softer way of saying you will have to work much harder, suffer much higher stress levels and survive without much support.
The problem is we know that doing more with less flies in the face of what we all know: we actually do less with less, and more with more.
We don't do more with less sleep - we end up doing much less. We do not meet more new people with less networking - we meet fewer. And we don't get fitter with less exercise.
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If employees are already working hard, skilled up and have effective leadership, there is no way they are going to be able to do more with less.
Bosses who push for more with less end up being rewarded with exhausted team members, damaged morale and a decline in productivity. Any short-term gains will fail to last the distance.
If you push your people to the brink, there will be nothing left to give.
What we really need post COVID-19 is for our bosses to show us how to do "less with less".
Doing less with less involves prioritising better and playing to strengths, rather than fragmenting workers across too many projects and priorities.
It requires bosses to step up and divest their employees of "fake work" - long purposeless meetings, never-ending distribution lists on emails, networking without purpose, offsite meetings that distract rather than add value, and changing processes when the current ones work perfectly well.
Bosses must realise that we are not able to do more with less. We do less with less, and more with more.
Next time your boss says "we need to do more with less", perhaps suggest what is really needed is for everyone to work smarter rather than harder.
- Professor Gary Martin is a workplace expert with the Australian Institute of Management.
