Managing Backlogs in Complaints and Dispute Resolution Teams
- Shiv Martin
- Apr 10
- 14 min read
Updated: Apr 13
Backlogs have become a persistent feature of contemporary dispute resolution and complaints systems. In many settings, these pressures were already building before COVID-19, then accelerated through pandemic disruption, and are now further shaped by technology transformation agendas and limited resourcing environments.
Many organisations, in their attempts to manage backlog, inadvertently do more harm than good to service quality and team wellbeing. This is because a backlog is too often framed as a problem of throughput, when it is more accurately understood as a broader issue system design, workforce sustainability, service quality and institutional trust.
My perspective on this important discussion is informed not only by direct work with individual teams, but also by working across a wide range of jurisdictions and practice settings as a consultant and trainer. Sitting outside any one agency has given me a broader view of the recurring patterns, pressures and missed opportunities.
My work is guided by the principle that dispute resolution teams function best when they are supported by a culture of psychological safety, consultation and practical innovation. In periods of sustained pressure, teams are more likely to respond well when staff feel safe to identify priorities, raise concerns, suggest improvements and work together on achievable solutions.
What is a backlog, really?
A backlog is the accumulation of unresolved work that occurs when demand exceeds an organisation’s capacity to respond within a reasonable timeframe. In dispute resolution systems, this usually means matters waiting for assessment, allocation, investigation or finalisation because the volume, complexity or intensity of work is greater than the system can manage with its available resources.
Ultimately, backlogs signify an issue with timeliness. And timeliness matters because it is closely tied to stakeholder satisfaction, confidence in the process and the practical impact of the service being delivered. The longer matters sit, the more likely it is that frustration will grow, positions will harden, staff will lose momentum, and opportunities for early or lower-intensity resolution will be missed.
The difficulty, however, is that many organisations do not have a clearly defined, reasonable and achievable timeframe. Arbitrary targets, such as 60 days, may offer administrative simplicity, but they do not always reflect the realities of complaints work, where matters differ in complexity, urgency, stakeholder behaviour and procedural requirements. At the same time, allowing matters to take “as long as they take” is equally problematic. Without some structure around timeliness, systems can lose fairness, certainty and accountability.
A backlog is not just a question of how much work is waiting. It is also a question of whether the organisation has defined clearly what timely, fair and effective service is meant to look like.
What should organisations decide before they respond to backlog?
Before organisations respond to backlogs, they need to set well thought out timeliness goals. This step is often overlooked or arbitarily decided.
From an individual perspective, when any of us is under intense workload pressure, one of the most useful things we can do is pause and ask what is most important in that moment.
Time management is helped by prioritising. This means allocating our resources (time) to matters in the order of importance, and proportionate to their value, as opposed to simply working on everything, all at once, with the same time allocations.
The same principle applies at an organisational level. If leaders do not define the priorities of the system, backlog quickly becomes a meaningless numbers exercise rather than a service strategy.
This raises an important point about goal setting. A timeliness target may appear sound because it is specific and measurable, but that does not mean it is useful. If it is not achievable in light of demand, resourcing and case complexity, or if it is not relevant to the real purpose of the process, then it may do more harm than good.
The Commonwealth Ombudsman is clear that timeliness must be considered alongside complainant satisfaction and escalation, and that performance pressure should not produce poor outcomes for complainants (Commonwealth Ombudsman, 2023). The NSW Ombudsman similarly emphasises that effective complaint systems must be designed around the organisation’s context, supported teams and continuous improvement (NSW Ombudsman, 2024).
The point is simple: backlog cannot be managed well unless the organisation is first clear about what it is trying to achieve and what it is trying to protect.
Why should frontline wellbeing come first?
For me, any serious conversation about backlog should start with frontline staff wellbeing and engagement. Too often the response is top down: more reporting, more targets, more scrutiny and more pressure. But the people carrying the work each day are usually the clearest source of insight about what is happening inside the system. They know where matters are getting stuck, where duplication occurs, which issues escalate unnecessarily, and where early opportunities for resolution are being missed.
While executive leadership should (and must) clearly define the purpose, priorities and strategic vision of the dispute resolution functions, it is the frontline staff that are best placed to identify and implement the particular tactics that can meaningfully address backlogs. NSW Ombudsman guidance expressly recommends consulting with staff and other stakeholders for insight into complainants’ needs and how the system can be improved. (NSW Ombudsman, 2024).
Backlog pressure is also a psychosocial risk issue
This is not just a cultural preference. It is also consistent with work health and safety thinking in both Australia and New Zealand. Safe Work Australia identifies psychosocial hazards as arising from the design or management of work, the working environment, or workplace interactions and behaviours, and notes that managing psychosocial risks can reduce staff turnover and absenteeism while improving organisational performance and productivity.
WorkSafe New Zealand likewise says psychosocial risks can harm workers’ physical and mental health and that businesses must consult workers when making decisions about how to manage those risks. (Safe Work Australia, 2022; WorkSafe New Zealand, 2025).
What happens when teams become depleted
What I often see when backlog pressure is poorly managed is staff becoming burnt out, disengaged and increasingly detached from the purpose of their work. Over time, that affects judgement, consistency and service quality. It also drives corporate knowledge out of the room. Experienced staff leave, or mentally withdraw, and the organisation loses the insight it most needs in order to recover.
That pattern is consistent with Australian peer-reviewed research showing strong relationships between burnout, turnover intention and job dissatisfaction, and showing that job resources such as recognition, feedback, control and participation are associated with better outcomes. (Scanlan & Still, 2019).
What changes when demand rises but resourcing does not?
There is a fairly simple equation sitting underneath many backlog problems. When demand increases and resourcing stays the same, and timeliness needs to be addressed, something else has to change.
If it does not, delay is inevitable. Most dispute resolution teams would agree that more resourcing is part of the solution, but that is often not available or outside the control of the organisation itself (especially for government funded dispute resolution teams).
In that situation, here are some questions that organisations could be asking themselves:
Is the dispute resolution process you are using still fit for purpose?
Do you need to update or adjust your intake filters?
Are too many matters being funneled into resource-intensive pathways by default, even where a lower-intensity response might be more appropriate?
Are your staff trained in the dispute resolution approaches that are needed today?
Are your stakeholders receiving helpful information about timeline expectations?
Join us at the next Conciliation Symposium where you will hear from the approaches taken by different dispute resolution agencies to address backlogs and other contemporary challenges. Registrations now open: Early Bird Tickets End April 30
Backlog is also a system design issue
The Commonwealth Ombudsman says complaint handling systems must be adequately staffed and resourced, and that there must be an electronic system for entering, tracking and monitoring complaints and analysing complaint data. It also notes that agencies must have enough staff to comply with their own timeliness standards. Where that is not possible, organisations need to be more intelligent about how capacity is used.
The NSW Ombudsman’s guidance supports that same logic from another direction. It says effective complaint systems need to provide for the full spectrum of complaints and recognises that, in most cases, early resolution at the first point of contact will be the most effective way of handling a complaint.
That means backlog is not just a resourcing conversation. It is also a system design conversation about what gets escalated, what gets resolved early, and whether the organisation’s default model is proportionate to the problem it is trying to solve.
Why does triage need expertise at the front end?
When it comes to systems review, my view is that triaging must be a key focus. Triage and intake are not merely administrative tasks. They are strategic decision points. This is where organisations decide what matters, what is urgent, what can be resolved quickly, and what genuinely requires a more formal and resource-intensive pathway. If that front-end filtering is weak, backlog is not just revealed by the system; it is actively created by it.
A practical example of proportionate early intervention
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner in New Zealand provides a useful practical example. Its decision guide says some complaints can be resolved without formal investigation and gives the example of a phone call to explain obligations and give advice as a sufficient intervention in the right matter. It also makes clear that staff need to be deliberate about whether they are attempting early resolution or moving into formal investigation. That is exactly the kind of nuanced early judgement many dispute resolution systems need more of. (Office of the Privacy Commissioner, 2024).
Too often, intake and triage are delegated or outsourced to junior staff who may be committed and capable, but who do not yet have the confidence or experience to identify risk, spot patterns or seize early opportunities for resolution. That is not a criticism of junior staff. It is a design issue.
If the wrong matters are pushed too quickly into investigation, backlog deepens. If opportunities for clarification, facilitated discussion, conciliation or early problem-solving are missed at the outset, the work becomes heavier later.
The NSW Ombudsman’s guidelines, with their emphasis on early resolution, supported teams and complaint assessment, point strongly in favour of treating front-end triage as a skilled function rather than an administrative afterthought. (NSW Ombudsman, 2024).
Can early resolution really be cheap, fast and high quality?
There is a common assumption in service delivery that organisations cannot have outcomes that are cheap, fast and high quality all at once. In my view, informal resolution and mediation-informed approaches can, in the right circumstances, deliver all three, provided staff are trained well enough to use them early and appropriately.
A timely phone call by a skilled officer, or a short conference call at the beginning of a matter, can clarify issues, correct misunderstandings, manage expectations and sometimes resolve the dispute before positions harden.
Australian ombudsman publications strongly support this proposition. The Victorian Ombudsman’s 2023–24 annual report says its Early Resolution Team handles about 90 per cent of contacts to the office, closing most within 30 days, and explains that the team often works with organisations by phone with a view to resolving complaints quickly and informally. (Victorian Ombudsman, 2024).
The Commonwealth Ombudsman and the NSW Ombudsman also support early, proportionate responses. Taken together, these publications reinforce a point that practitioners often know intuitively: early resolution is not a lesser form of justice. Quite often it is the smartest, quickest and most proportionate use of agency capability. (Commonwealth Ombudsman, 2023; NSW Ombudsman, 2024).
What does fair management of challenging conduct require?
Another essential part of the backlog is the impact of challenging, unreasonable or querulous conduct on agency capacity. Most agencies will notice that a small number of stakeholders consume a disproportionate amount of time, attention and staff energy.
Examples of conduct that can place disproportionate pressure on a team include:
repeated correspondence
refusal to accept clear explanations
escalating demands
serial complaints
hostile interactions
repeated attempts to reopen issues that have already been addressed.
The NSW Ombudsman defines unreasonable conduct as behaviour which, because of its nature or frequency, raises substantial health, safety, resource or equity issues for the people involved in the complaint process. Its manual says the core objectives of managing this conduct are to ensure equity and fairness, effectively manage resource allocation and efficiency, and protect staff health and safety.
The New Zealand Ombudsman’s manual similarly says agencies need a systematic and consistent approach to unreasonable complainant conduct. These are very useful frames because they show that fair management of challenging cases is not a peripheral issue. It is part of sound system design. (NSW Ombudsman, 2020/2022; Ombudsman New Zealand, 2019).
In my view, organisations can seriously damage both their operational capacity and the wellbeing of their teams if they do not establish fair but robust responses to unreasonable conduct. Fairness does not require unlimited access, endless reconsideration, or unrestricted use of staff time where the conduct itself has become unreasonable.
How can technology create small but meaningful efficiencies?
Technology is not the whole answer, but it certainly plays an important role. CRMs, workflow systems and AI-supported tools can reduce repetitive administration and free staff to focus on the work that genuinely requires judgement, empathy and experience.
Technology can help by reducing time spent on:
transcribing calls
drafting follow-up correspondence
automating reminders
improving templates
reducing duplicated administration
Australian and New Zealand public sector guidance now openly supports the responsible use of AI for service improvement and productivity. The APS AI Plan 2025 says the Australian Public Service will use AI to deliver better services faster, while maintaining trust through governance, capability and safe use.
New Zealand’s Public Service Artificial Intelligence Framework says the goal is to adopt AI responsibly to modernise public services and deliver better outcomes, and it explicitly links responsible AI use with innovation, efficiency, resilience, human oversight and accountability. (Digital Transformation Agency, 2025; New Zealand Government Chief Digital Officer, 2025).
The two cultural shifts that matter
There are many small efficiencies available at agency level, but finding them usually requires two cultural shifts. First, organisations need to let go of the idea that “we have always done it this way”.
There is, of course, a risk calculation to consider as well. New tools, new templates and new systems may create the possibility of error. But those risks need to be weighed against the damage caused by delay, staff burnout, declining trust and systems that are no longer fit for purpose.
The question is not whether change carries risk. It is whether the organisation is properly accounting for the risk of staying the same.
What is the project problem?
Another issue that sits underneath many backlog conversations is what I think of as the project problem. This is the tendency to burden already overloaded case officers with transformation work on top of their ordinary caseloads, or to recruit externally for project delivery without enough genuine connection to frontline realities.
One approach drains the very people already carrying the system. The other can produce reform that looks neat on paper but does not fit the work as it is actually done.
Frontline insight matters, but it needs capacity
My view is that meaningful transformation in dispute resolution systems needs to be led from within. The people closest to the work understand where the pressure points are, where time is being lost, what stakeholders struggle with, and which changes are likely to make a genuine difference. But if those same case managers are expected to lead reform while also managing a full day-to-day workload, the organisation creates a new problem in the name of solving the old one.
If agencies want frontline expertise to shape reform, then they need additional resourcing to manage day-to-day work so staff can properly contribute to the project.
Transformation needs proper project discipline
That also means transformation projects need discipline. They need clear deliverables, realistic timelines, visible leadership support and genuine project management rather than vague aspiration.
NSW Ombudsman guidance on positive complaint culture and supported teams, and Safe Work Australia’s emphasis on appropriate resources and timely responses to identified risks, both point in the same direction: organisations need to resource change properly rather than simply loading it onto already stretched staff.
In my experience, hundreds if not thousands of good hours, not to mention staff goodwill, has been lost across dispute resolution teams on transformation projects that simply perpetuated the backlog by stealing valuable case management time. Project management is not case management, and this is an area that is deserving of attention when it comes to the challenge of backlogs. (NSW Ombudsman, 2024; Safe Work Australia, 2022).
What kind of culture helps teams flourish?
To come back to my guiding principle - backlogs are best addressed in cultures of psychological safety and innovation. When teams feel safe enough to speak honestly about workload, process and risk, and when leaders are willing to look for solutions across all levels of the organisation, innovative problem solving becomes possible.
This is how dispute resolution teams flourish even in difficult periods:
They identify priorities, quick wins and sensible redesign opportunities together.
They keep a shared understanding of what matters beyond just counting days.
They listen to frontline staff, apply expertise early, manage unreasonable conduct consisently.
They treat technology and process redesign as tools in service of judgment rather than replacements for it.
Backlog is never just a numbers problem. It is a systems problem and a leadership problem, especially when the solutions must be people focussed. Rather than the reporting dashboard, focussing on staff wellbeing and service user experience, will ultimately hold the answers to an agencies backlog challenges.
Summary
A backlog is not just a pile of files. It is a sign that demand, priorities, process design and available capacity are no longer properly aligned.
Organisations should decide what matters before they respond, otherwise backlog becomes a throughput exercise rather than a service strategy.
Frontline staff wellbeing and engagement should come first, because overloaded and unheard teams are less able to deliver consistent, high-quality work.
When demand rises and staffing does not, the system itself must be reviewed, especially the dispute resolution model.
Triage is a strategic function and should be led by experienced staff who can identify risk, urgency and early opportunities for resolution.
Informal resolution and mediation-informed practice can be cheap, fast and high quality when the right intervention happens early enough and staff are appropriately trained.
Fair but firm management of unreasonable conduct protects agency capacity, supports staff wellbeing and keeps resource allocation fair, proportionate and defensible in the face of complaints.
Technology and CRMs can create meaningful efficiencies, but only if organisations are willing to change habits and listen to frontline ideas – this happens by creating psychologically safe team cultures.
Transformation projects should be led from within, properly resourced and tightly managed; project management is not the same thing as case management.
The most sustainable response to backlog is a culture of psychological safety and innovation, where staff at all levels help identify priorities, quick wins and practical solutions.
Looking to move beyond backlog and build a system that works?
If your team is navigating increasing demand, system pressure, or staff fatigue, the solution is rarely just working faster. It’s about strengthening how your system is designed, how decisions are made early, and how your people are supported to do this work sustainably. I deliver tailored, in-house workshops for Ombudsman offices, regulators, tribunals and complaints teams, focused on early resolution, triage, managing challenging conduct and building psychologically safe, high-performing teams.
👉 Explore training options here: In-house training and workshops
👉 Or get in touch for a free bespoke proposal: Enquire here
Reference list
Commonwealth Ombudsman. (2023). Better practice complaint handling guide.
Digital Transformation Agency. (2025). AI plan for the Australian Public Service 2025.
New Zealand Government Chief Digital Officer. (2025). Public Service Artificial Intelligence Framework.
NSW Ombudsman. (2024). Effective complaint management guidelines.
NSW Ombudsman. (2020/2022). Managing unreasonable conduct by a complainant and model policy materials.
Office of the Privacy Commissioner. (2024). Decision guide: Investigations and dispute resolution.
Ombudsman New Zealand. (2019). Managing unreasonable complainant conduct.
Safe Work Australia. (2022). Managing psychosocial hazards at work: Code of practice.
Scanlan, J. N., & Still, M. (2019). Relationships between burnout, turnover intention, job satisfaction, job demands and job resources for mental health personnel in an Australian mental health service. BMC Health Services Research, 19, Article 62. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-018-3841-z
Victorian Ombudsman. (2024). Annual report 2023–24.
WorkSafe New Zealand. (2025). Managing psychosocial risks at work.
Hi, I’m Shiv Martin. I’m a nationally accredited mediator, lawyer, conciliator, and conflict management specialist with over a decade of experience working across government, business, and community settings. I support teams to navigate complex and emotionally charged situations through mediation and conciliation, conflict skills training, facilitation, and practical advice on policies and processes. My approach is grounded in law, psychology, and real-world dispute resolution, with a strong focus on clarity, fairness, and workable outcomes.
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