Productivity Demands Climb, Leaving Leaders To Manage The Human Cost Of Workplace Intensity

The productivity drumbeat is back, and with it the tension it creates. Organizations are asking for more time, more effort, and more intensity, often without recalibrating what that costs the people doing the work. It’s an approach with a short shelf life, and instead, sustainable performance depends on leaders knowing how their teams are really doing.

That’s the diagnosis from Julie Cohen, a nationally recognized authority on leadership development and career management. As the Founder and CEO of leadership development program Work. Life. Leader. and Author of Your Work, Your Life…Your Way: 7 Keys to Work-Life Balance, Cohen has spent three decades guiding executives and their teams. Having built a national coaching program at Ernst & Young during the first dot-com boom, Cohen isn’t just an observer; she’s a veteran of these cycles with a keen sense of how they end.

“When a workforce is afraid or has a scarcity mindset, yes, they are going to do what it takes. But they also won’t hesitate to jump when a new opportunity comes by. The issue of loyalty in the world of work has been a thing of the past for twenty years. But if the organizational culture becomes more and more intense, overwhelming, or toxic, then if and when alternative opportunities come, people will go,” says Cohen.

• An unwelcome upgrade: The push for higher productivity is showing up well beyond tech, even in sectors long considered stable. Cohen points to a recent client in the defense industry as a clear example. “They just switched her from forty hours to forty-eight. She’s a senior leader, the business is doing extremely well, and they’re not hiring. Her reaction was simple: ‘this isn’t what I signed up for.'” recounts Cohen. For her, the shift had little to do with performance and everything to do with raising expectations without accounting for the human cost.

For Cohen, this is just a familiar story in a larger historical cycle. She explained that these periods of intense work demands “ebb and flow, like fashion.” In her experience, the fallout always fractures the workforce along predictable lines, creating a chaos culture that affects people differently.

• Spectrum of a grind: Cohen sees the pressure fracturing the workforce in predictable ways. For some, the intensity is a point of pride. “There is still a group that takes pride in working harder, staying later, and pushing through seventy or eighty hour weeks,” she says. Others, particularly younger professionals, draw a hard line. “They’re very clear. ‘No, I don’t want this. This is not how I want to show up for work,'” Cohen notes. And then there are those at the breaking point. “For some people, the workload isn’t challenging or motivating. It’s actually killing them.”

• Not so equal: Cohen flags a quieter but consequential fallout of renewed hustle culture: its impact on workplace equality. “I started thinking about what this does to gender dynamics,” she says. “This kind of intensity is still coded as male, like the tech-bro mentality that treats endurance as a test.” The outcome, she adds, is familiar. “We’ve lived this before. Women leave the workforce, senior leadership becomes very homogeneous, and there’s a real business impact. This trend just pushes certain industries back to that split.”

• Beyond the spreadsheet: For Cohen, the fix isn’t complicated, but it does require intent. “A good leader knows how each person is actually doing, not just what the numbers say.” That kind of attention, she explains, is what separates sustainable performance from short-term output, because burnout doesn’t show up in spreadsheets before it shows up in people.

Once a leader has an accurate pulse on their team, the next step is reciprocity. Her argument, forged while retaining talent during the dot-com era, is simple: If you’re going to ask for more, you have to give something valuable in return. She emphasizes this requires a genuine exchange, offering coveted currencies like flexibility instead of simple perks.

• The give and get: “If you’re raising expectations of hours and time, what can you give back? Can you give flexibility? Can you give bonuses? Can you give projects that people really want to work on? Are you giving shares and ownership? Each person wants different things,” notes Cohen.

She cautions leaders against the assumption that a tight job market makes retention a low priority. The logic that fear creates a limitless talent pipeline can quickly break down when applied to high-skilled employees. Specialized talent, she notes, often has room to negotiate by pushing back, arguing a workload isn’t sustainable, and demanding better pay or other concessions.

Her final advice challenges leaders to stay vigilant. “My biggest realization was that this is happening all over again. For those who are in decision-making roles, I encourage regular assessment,” she concludes. “Is it working? Is it still working for you as the individual? Is it working for us as the organization? If it is and you’re getting what you want, great. And yet, be open to adaptation.”