Some will hate me for this one…
Recently I’ve had a couple of whines with 2 friends. One senior developer and one laboratory head. Both have observed the connection between quality/errors and team workload for several years now. Their findings?
1. If your team is too busy, quality goes down and so does morale and mood
2. If your team is bored, quality goes down and so does morale and mood even more
So, if your team under full throttle but still fighting all the time and produces a lot of errors, you might want to try to increase workload significantly – and everything might be fine.
This fits well with my own experience from hundreds of workshops with dozens of very different customers. Of course there is tension in teams with high workload as well. But to me it seems that teams with under 80% workload suffer even more.
As another friend, a n industrial sales director, puts it: ‚if people have no workload they have time for whale songs‘. I am not propagating exploitation here, but a sound degree of utilisation, 90% is what I like best myself.
For further reading I recommend studying topics like service level management workflow management including their downsides and if you like you can dive into queueing theory to draw some conclusions for the whole system you are working in.
But on a team level I suggest you working on trust. Without trust you will never have the negations you need to manage (increase decrease, allocate) workload together.