My Employees Work 60-Hour Weeks and Still Are Not Productive

By Malcolm Gurley, President

Gurley Leadership Solutions Inc.  |  Ajax, Ontario

If your team is putting in 60-hour weeks and you are still not seeing the results you need, the instinct is to push harder, add more resources, or assume the people are the problem. In my 35 years working inside Fortune 100 organizations across manufacturing, engineering, and operations, I have seen this situation hundreds of times. The hours are almost never the real issue. The structure around those hours is.

Long hours with low output is one of the clearest signals that something is wrong at the leadership level, not the employee level. It is a solvable problem, and the solution is more straightforward than most leaders expect.

Why Are My Employees Working Long Hours But Still Not Getting Results?

The answer is rarely that your people are not trying hard enough. In almost every case I have worked through with organizations across Durham Region and the Greater Toronto Area, the issue is that hardworking people are spending most of their time on the wrong things. They are reactive, not proactive. They attend meetings that produce nothing. They work on urgent tasks that have low impact while high-payoff work gets pushed back day after day.

This pattern is a direct result of how leadership is being practised at the management level. When leaders do not set clear priorities, do not delegate effectively, and do not protect their teams from low-value interruptions, even the most dedicated employees end up exhausted and underperforming. The problem is structural, and it has a structural solution.

What Are the Most Common Causes of Low Productivity Despite Long Hours?

After 35 years in senior executive roles at Honeywell, Johnson Controls, and Armstrong Fluid Technology, I can tell you the causes are consistent across industries. Here is what I find most often when I work with organizations in Ajax, Whitby, Oshawa, Clarington, and the broader GTA:

• No clear written goals at any level. When people do not know exactly what success looks like, they fill their time with activity instead of results.
• Weak delegation. Leaders who do not delegate push work back down to the wrong people or keep it to themselves, creating bottlenecks and overload everywhere.
• Reactive culture. When firefighting is the default mode, every hour gets consumed by whoever shouts the loudest, and high-payoff strategic work never gets done.
• Too many meetings with no outcomes. Meetings without clear agendas, the wrong people in the room, and no actions captured are one of the biggest productivity drains in any organization.
• Email and interruption overload. Constant notifications and open-door expectations destroy deep work and make it impossible to complete meaningful tasks.
• No planning discipline. High performers plan in minutes, not hours. When leaders do not model and teach structured daily planning, the whole team defaults to reacting.

Every one of these is a leadership behaviour, not an employee behaviour. Learn more about Malcolm Gurley's approach to fixing exactly these patterns inside organizations across Durham Region.

What Does the Research Say About Overwork and Productivity?

How Does Leadership Development Fix a Productivity Problem?

Telus Health's 2025 Mental Health Index found that 70% of Canadian employees say their productivity has declined due to worsening mental health, with high workloads remaining the leading cause of stress cited by 30% of employees. This is not a wellness problem. It is a workload design and leadership problem.

When your managers are equipped with practical goal-setting, delegation, time management, and prioritization skills, the effect is immediate and visible. High-payoff work gets protected. Meetings become shorter and more productive. People stop working reactively and start working intentionally. Output goes up even as total hours come down.

Through a proven program from Leadership Management International, customized to your organization, I work directly with your leaders over a structured series of spaced working sessions. The program is applied to your real goals, your real workflows, and your real people. Results are tracked and measured throughout. Visit the FAQ page for common questions about how the program works and what organizations typically see.

What Should You Do Right Now If Your Team Is Overworked and Underperforming?

Here are the first actions I recommend to any leader facing this situation:

1. Stop adding hours and start auditing how existing hours are being used. Track what your managers actually spend their time on for one full week. The patterns will be revealing.
2. Set three written high-priority goals for every leader and every team. Not a long list, just three. Clarity on what matters most immediately changes how people allocate their time.
3. Conduct a meeting audit. List every recurring meeting. Ask whether each one is necessary, whether the right people are attending, and whether it produces decisions and actions. Cut or restructure accordingly.
4. Establish email and notification boundaries. Set specific blocks for email response twice a day and communicate the expectation clearly. Interruptions are the single biggest destroyer of productive output.
5. Develop your managers as leaders, not just as operators. The skills that made them good individual contributors are not the same skills that make them effective leaders. Leadership training and skills development is the most direct investment you can make in your team's productivity.

How Do I Make My Company More Productive Without Burning Everyone Out?

The answer is not to work less. It is to work on the right things, led by people who know how to organize and prioritize effectively. Statistics Canada's 2024 to 2025 Canadian Survey on Working Conditions found that workers in manufacturing, trades, and operations sectors were among the most likely to regularly work days exceeding 10 hours, sectors where clear process, strong delegation, and goal-directed time management produce the most measurable productivity gains.

Malcolm Gurley works directly with organizations across manufacturing, healthcare, not-for-profit, engineering, and operations throughout the Greater Toronto Area and Durham Region, including Ajax, Whitby, Oshawa, Clarington, Pickering, Barrie, and Mississauga, to close exactly these leadership gaps and produce measurable productivity improvements.

Frequently Asked Questions

My employees are working 60-hour weeks and still not productive. What do I do?

Long hours with low output almost always points to a leadership gap, not an effort gap. The most common causes are unclear goals, poor delegation, reactive culture, and too many low-value meetings. A proven program from Leadership Management International, customized to your organization, addresses each of these directly through structured leadership training and skills development, with measurable outcomes and a return on investment of typically 10:1 or better.

How do I make my company more productive?

Start by developing the leadership effectiveness of your managers. When leaders set clear written goals, delegate with accountability, protect high-payoff time, and run effective meetings, productivity improves across every level of the organization. The goal is not to add more hours but to ensure the existing hours are directed at the highest-value work.

How do I get my team to be more productive?

Give your team clear goals, clear priorities, and leaders who model structured, intentional work habits. When managers plan their own time deliberately and teach their teams to do the same, reactive firefighting reduces and meaningful output increases. Leadership training and skills development is the most reliable way to make this change stick at every level of the organization.

What are the warning signs that my team is burning out?

Watch for long hours combined with flat or declining output, rising errors and missed deadlines, withdrawal or cynicism during meetings, and your strongest contributors quietly carrying disproportionate workloads. These are structural leadership problems. Addressing the goal-setting, delegation, and prioritization skills of your managers is the fastest way to reverse these patterns before your best people resign.

Do you work with companies in Durham Region on productivity and leadership?

Yes. Gurley Leadership Solutions is based in Ajax, Ontario and works directly with organizations across Durham Region and the Greater Toronto Area, including Whitby, Oshawa, Clarington, Pickering, Barrie, and Mississauga, across manufacturing, healthcare, not-for-profit, engineering, and operations sectors. Every program is delivered in person and customized to the specific goals of your organization.

About the Author: Malcolm Gurley

Malcolm Gurley is President of Gurley Leadership Solutions Inc., based in Ajax, Ontario. With more than 35 years of senior executive experience at Fortune 100 and manufacturing organizations including Honeywell, Johnson Controls, and Armstrong Fluid Technology, he helps organizations across the Greater Toronto Area and Durham Region fix chronic overwork and low productivity by developing leadership effectiveness at every level. He is LMI Canada licensed and a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. Every program is a proven Leadership Management International program, customized to the organization, with a return on investment of typically 10:1 or better. Learn more about Malcolm Gurley and why organizations choose Gurley Leadership Solutions.