75 Percent of Workers Say Projects Stall When a Key Colleague Takes PTO. That’s a Leadership Problem

Teams need resiliency, not one indispensable employee.

EXPERT OPINION BY SCOTT HUTCHESON, AUTHOR, BIOHACKING LEADERSHIP

Labor Day weekend is supposed to create a little distance between people and their jobs. For many workers, however, even a long holiday weekend comes with a calculation: What will pile up while I am gone, and what will stop moving without me?

Zoom’s new Out of Office Index suggests that concern is widespread. In a Morning Consult survey of 1,000 U.S. knowledge workers, 75 percent said work tied to a key teammate stalls for at least a day when that person is away. Sixty-one percent dread the work waiting after taking paid time off, and 68 percent would rather monitor their inbox during vacation than return to hundreds of unread messages.

Zoom frames the findings primarily as a problem of inbox anxiety and lost context. The more consequential finding for leaders, though, is not how many employees worry about being away. It is how many organizations apparently cannot keep work moving when one person leaves.

An indispensable employee is a warning sign

Leaders often describe an employee as indispensable to signal that the person is exceptionally valuable. From an organizational-design perspective, it can mean something more troubling. When critical knowledge, decision authority, or customer relationships reside with one person, that employee becomes a single point of failure.

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Those dependencies usually develop gradually. A capable employee solves problems quickly, remembers how decisions were made, and becomes the person everyone calls when something goes wrong. Because the arrangement works while that person is available, leaders may mistake constant access for resilience. The employee who rescues every deadline may be solving an immediate problem while preserving a structural one.

None of this means organizations should make talented people interchangeable. Their judgment, experience, and relationships matter. A resilient organization makes sure that the knowledge and authority surrounding those contributions can travel when the person cannot.

Time off exposes the system

Dependency risks can be hard to see when a team is fully staffed because capable employees compensate for poorly designed processes. They answer the extra message, make the undocumented decision, or quietly coordinate work across functions. When they step away, that compensating behavior disappears and the underlying system becomes visible.

Source: www.inc.com