In a recent post on Alison Green’s excellent blog, Ask a Manager, she recommended managers present a simple question to each of their direct reports:

“What’s not getting done right now?”

Her thought was that many employees these days are overloaded, sometimes handling a heavy volume of work and taking on additional projects in order to keep understaffed teams afloat. She’s definitely right on this point, as the layoffs and hiring freezes of recent years have left many managers I know with bare bones teams where people are often doing the equivalent of a job and a half.

So even though there’s a lot of work making its way through the pipeline to completion, there are also quite a few things that might be falling through the cracks. Problems not getting resolved, mistakes no one has had time to correct, key pieces of data no one is tracking. I know there are projects and tasks some team members have simply had to let ride because they just can’t get to them. But Green suggests managers make sure that they know exactly what these items are and agree that they can be put on the back burner.

I talked to a couple of managers who recently tried this question out and were completely surprised by the answers they got. In one instance, an employee reported he hadn’t been able to follow up on some customer issues because he’d gotten sidetracked with a new assignment. This was news to his manager, who thought the problems had been corrected weeks ago. The other manager found out one of her people was bogged down trying to complete a time-consuming project to help another department and was way behind in completing some key reports for an upcoming company meeting.

In both cases, the managers were able to work together with the team members to clarify priorities and figure out how to switch things around so the most important things weren’t getting dropped. As one manager said, “Most of the time when I asked the question the response didn’t surprise me. I knew the employee wasn’t getting a certain task or tasks done and was okay with it. But the real eye-openers were the times when I found out someone wasn’t taking care of something I absolutely didn’t want ignored. And I probably still wouldn’t know about them if I hadn’t asked.”

If you’re a manager, you probably have a lot on your plate these days, as well. It’s okay if you can’t list every single task your people are working on all day. But it’s a good idea to know what they aren’t working on and make sure those items are on the “Nice To Do” list, not the “Need To Do” one.

What about your team members? Do you know what isn’t getting done these days? Please share your experiences in the comments section below.