Korn Ferry’s Workforce 2026 Global Insights Report surveyed people at every level from entry positions to chief executives, across eleven markets including Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Sixty-two per cent said their workload had become significantly heavier over the past two years. Forty-four per cent said they were stretched beyond their capabilities. Nearly half said they were too busy to do work that actually mattered.
Then the two numbers that explain the first three. Sixty-four per cent said their organisation focuses more on efficiency than on exploring new ways to add value. Fifty-two per cent said the existing processes and structures were actively holding their performance back.
That is not a workforce that needs encouraging. That is a workforce describing a design problem.
The report’s account of how it happened is unsentimental. Forty-two per cent of organisations had cut management roles over the past year, and 55 per cent of the managers who remained said they were exhausted. Roles were restructured around artificial intelligence, and 52 per cent of workers said the technology had increased their workload rather than reducing it, because when a role is cut the work inside it rarely disappears. It gets redistributed.
Motivation fell from 71 per cent in 2024 to 61 per cent in 2026. Korn Ferry’s framing is that people are staying for pay and stability rather than for the work itself.
Lesley Uren of Korn Ferry Consulting put the central point plainly: cost-cutting and restructuring create savings, but they do not create the kind of passion that powers productivity. Growth does not come from asking people to do more.
The small-business version of this is familiar enough to be uncomfortable.
A member of staff leaves and is not replaced, because trade is soft and the saving is real and immediate. The work does not leave with them. It gets absorbed by whoever is standing nearest, usually the most capable person on the team, who absorbs it silently because that is what capable people do. For several months the business looks more efficient. What has actually happened is that the margin improved and the capacity to notice anything new disappeared.
The symptom is not that things stop working. It is that nothing new starts. Nobody has the half-day it takes to fix the ordering process that wastes four hours a week. Nobody trials the new supplier. Nobody writes down how the system works. Every hour is committed to keeping today upright, which means the only improvements that happen are the ones forced by a breakdown.
Korn Ferry’s recommendation is to redesign roles, rethink how the work gets done, and let people see the impact of what they do. The third item in that list is the one most often skipped and the cheapest to supply.
Everyone in the survey is working harder than they were two years ago.
More than half of them say the building is in the way.
Source: HR Dive, “Heavy workloads take a toll on long-term productivity, Korn Ferry report finds”
