The work landed where it always does: with the colleague who would finish it. In July 2024, Dubai-based Rachel, whose name is withheld on request, found herself working extra hours not on her own tasks but on the unfinished work her teammates had left behind. Nobody had explicitly asked her to do it. Her own targets were complete, yet as she describes it, a rather insidious fear had crept in. “I had finished my targets, but my teammate hadn’t, and she needed help. I stepped in, and in the end, I did her work too, because I felt as if I had to do it.” The extra hours added up, the coverage continued, and gratitude flowed from her new colleagues while she privately wished they had simply done their own work. “They were new, and I just wanted to be the helpful senior I never had. Did I turn out to be a doormat?” She agrees the term is cruel, and she still worries about slipping back into the loop. “I’m better than I used to be. Saying no used to be such a messy, unpleasant business.”
Another Dubai-based employee traces a similar pattern with an intern she was helping, until she was completing the intern’s work as well. “She kept saying that she had a lot going on back home, and I was trying to be sympathetic,” she says, ruefully.
Additional reference context is available at https://gulfnews.com/lifestyle/doing-a-colleagues-unfinished-work-uae-residents-on-why-its-so-hard-to-say-no-1.500727866.
Why do people tie themselves into knots over someone else’s unfinished deliverables? Anna White, an occupational therapist and director of corporate services and mental health first aid at LightHouse Arabia, has catalogued the traits of those who absorb other people’s workload. “Common traits I’ve observed in people who say they absorb other people’s unfinished work are people-pleasing behaviours, finding it difficult to say no, and being labelled as the reliable one.” Sometimes the motive is a form of micromanaging, the need to finish a task because you are not satisfied with how it has been handled. Sometimes it is simple operational habit, and White is blunt about how the habit gets reinforced. “Even if it’s a bad habit, if you finished someone else’s work once and it worked, you met the deadline and you and your team just about made it through, you’re far more likely to do it again,” she explains. “Even if you were home late, complaining and annoyed with that person at the time. It’s easy to think it’s quicker to just do it yourself, and it might be today, but if you don’t take the time to teach, guess who’s going to be doing it next week and next month? You.” The trade-off, in other words, is short-term delivery today at the cost of capacity tomorrow.
Emma Burdett, founder and chief executive of WILD Group, who now advises leadership teams after years in corporate life, points to the need to please, the want for validation and, ultimately, the seeking of approval. Dubai-based Maithili Thakur, now a 79-year-old homemaker, remembers her own version: she used to insist on finishing other people’s work, including her siblings’ household tasks, certain they could not do it properly. “In my case, it’s more of a bossy tendency. I am an elder sibling, so I felt responsible and believed the blame would fall on me. So, I would dust the tables again right after they wiped it and wash the dishes, just to be sure. As you can imagine, I wasn’t a very well-liked sister.”
The conditioning, it seems, starts in childhood and grows stronger with age. Dr. Vassiliki Simoglou, a psychologist and the clinical director of Almond Blossoms Wellbeing Center, traces it to what psychoanalysts call the superego, the moral compass assembled from the rules and prohibitions of childhood. In some people, that inner voice is unusually harsh. A child punished for being unhelpful, or for leaving a task undone, may grow into an adult who cannot walk past one, developing a pronounced sense of duty and feeling obliged to step in for others, even to their own detriment. Perfectionism tightens the grip: the perfectionist must deliver their absolute best in all circumstances and is never satisfied with the results of their hard work. Pair that with a deep sense of duty and a people-pleasing streak, and the result, Simoglou says, is a saviour complex, an uncontrollable urge to please, help and save others from hardship. Helping a struggling colleague becomes compulsion rather than choice.
Burdett has watched these pressures fall unevenly. In her work on gender equality, she found that taking on more work and striving for perfectionism was often driven by a preconceived belief that women would get noticed, then promoted or given a pay rise. The reward rarely matched the effort. “People do this at their own expense, including their health and stress levels,” she said.
Meanwhile, the pattern looks like excellence, which is precisely what makes it hard to disrupt. The organised, dependable, uncomplaining employee is the one organisations hire and promote. As White puts it, “Every manager wants one of them on the team.” Underneath, the picture can be fragile: overthinking, approval-seeking, an inability to slow down. “The problem is that because they look so good on the outside, people are far less likely to notice they’re struggling, and they can sometimes be the last ones to ask for help,” White says. Left unnoticed, they keep absorbing more until something gives, whether that is their health, their relationships or their job satisfaction.
Over time, being needed can harden into identity. Burdett has seen high performers come to believe the organisation cannot function without them, and she knows the feeling first-hand. “I was the top performer for the region and felt indispensable.” That certainty did not protect her. Amid company politics and a boss she describes as ego-driven and threatened by her success, she found that situations were orchestrated to push her out of the business. Her conclusion is blunt: “No one is indispensable, especially when the number of great candidates available right now is high.” Simoglou notes that when identity is built almost entirely around a professional title, losing it can mean losing one’s sense of self; some people need to feel indispensable simply to feel they belong. White observes that being needed starts to feel like proof of competence: a colleague’s “we’d be lost without you” lands as a compliment. “But being indispensable is a bit of a trap.” The indispensable never fully switch off on holiday, get stuck in roles nobody else can cover, and end up leading teams that never grow because they never had to. Her antidote is a single, deliberately uncomfortable question: “If I wasn’t the person fixing everything, who would I be at work?”
The risks compound at the top of the reporting chain. If saying yes becomes reflexive, saying no can feel genuinely dangerous. “If someone is in fear of their manager or worried they may lose their role, then this would make them more likely to take on the unfinished work of others,” Burdett says. Yet the fear rests on a misreading, she argues; refusal tends to earn respect rather than cost it. “Saying yes all of the time leads to resentment and stress longer term, which affects mental health.” White said whether a refusal is safe depends on the team. Where there is psychological safety, a no is read as a sign that someone knows their priorities. “Where it’s very hierarchical or competitive, or people are afraid of looking like they can’t cope, saying no can feel like a real risk.” The conditioning starts in classrooms that teach that good students say yes, reinforced by a stubborn optimism about time. “We also say yes to things down the line because we’re convinced future us will have loads more time,” White said. “She never does…”
There is another motive too: extra work can keep anxiety at bay. Burdett sees this partly as a consequence of hustle culture, which she calls “an outdated concept which leads to burnout”, and a broader belief that worth is measured in busyness. Taking on more can make people feel more accomplished and less anxious. Simoglou hears echoes of this in her practice; for many high performers, free time is a luxury they neither respect nor appreciate, and for those struggling with anxiety, keeping busy gives worry an outlet. Beneath both lies a need for control. “I often hear my patients say that while they may feel helpless in many areas of their lives, work is the one area they have under control,” she said. There is a note of caution, though: not every long workday is a symptom. “Some people genuinely love their work, and for some it’s a lifestyle,” White said. “For me it’s all about what’s driving the behaviour.” When the driver is anxiety, constant activity becomes a way of never sitting still long enough to notice what is going on beneath the surface. “In a world this overstimulating, whether it’s work, scrolling or eating, we can fill every gap and forget how to just sit with ourselves,” she said. The relief is real but temporary. “But if it becomes a pattern, it can keep us from really getting to know ourselves and having a life outside of work.”
As covered by Gulf News, Rachel still wonders whether she became a doormat. The experts suggest a more useful question, one that treats every favour as a trade. “What we forget is that every time we say yes to one thing, we’re saying no to something else,” White says. “It might be the gym, dinner with the family, or the work that’s actually in your job description.” The question isn’t really whether you should say no, in her framing. “It’s what you’re saying no to when you say yes.”