Backlogs, priorities and the culture that helps dispute resolution teams flourish
- Shiv Martin
- 3 hours ago
- 15 min read
Backlogs have become a persistent and increasingly significant feature of contemporary dispute resolution and complaints systems. While many teams were already experiencing mounting pressure in the years preceding COVID-19, the disruption associated with the pandemic appears to have accelerated these trends, which are now further compounded by technology transformation agendas and increasing levels of challenging stakeholder conduct.
This matters because backlog is often conceptualised as a problem of throughput, rather than being understood as a broader challenge of organisational design, workforce sustainability, service quality and institutional trust. My perspective on this issue is shaped not only by direct work with individual teams, but also by the vantage point of working across a broad range of jurisdictions and practice environments as a consultant and trainer. Sitting outside any one agency has given me a wider view of the recurring patterns, pressures and missed opportunities that emerge across systems, and of the conditions that appear to support more sustainable and effective responses.
What is a backlog, really?
My guiding principle in this work is simple. If we want dispute resolution teams to function well, especially under pressure, we need to build a culture of psychological safety and innovation. That is how teams flourish even in the face of backlog. They work together to identify priorities, quick wins and practical solutions, and they do so with a shared sense of what matters most to the organisation. That way of working also sits comfortably with Australian and New Zealand work health and safety guidance, which emphasises consultation with workers, adequate resources, and the active management of psychosocial risks rather than expecting staff to simply absorb mounting pressure. (Safe Work Australia, 2022; WorkSafe New Zealand, 2025).
Backlogs are often spoken about as if they are simply a numbers problem, but they are not. At the most basic level, a backlog occurs when more work enters a system than the organisation can allocate to its available staffing resources within an expected timeframe. Demand outpaces capacity, matters begin to wait, and timeliness is affected almost immediately. In complaint and dispute systems, those delays are not trivial. The Commonwealth Ombudsman recommends that agencies measure timeliness, complainant satisfaction and escalation as core indicators, and says timeliness benchmarks matter because they mitigate the risk of unnecessary delay. The NSW Ombudsman similarly treats timeliness as one of the six principles of effective complaint management. (Commonwealth Ombudsman, 2023; NSW Ombudsman, 2024).
That is why I think it is important to define backlog carefully. A queue of work is not always a backlog. Most organisations will carry active work in progress. The real issue is when accumulated work begins to compromise service standards, fairness, quality, staff wellbeing, stakeholder confidence or statutory purpose. Once that happens, backlog is no longer just an administrative inconvenience. It becomes a signal that something in the system is under strain. Australian ombudsman guidance consistently frames complaint handling as part of good administration, service quality and continuous improvement, rather than a narrow throughput exercise. (Commonwealth Ombudsman, 2023; NSW Ombudsman, 2024).
What should organisations decide before they respond to backlog?
Before organisations respond to backlog, they need to decide what matters. This step is often skipped. When workloads rise, the instinct is usually to increase throughput, demand quicker finalisation, and look for ways to clear files faster. But 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. The same principle applies at an organisational level. If leaders do not define the priorities of the system, backlog quickly becomes a numbers exercise rather than a service strategy.
This is where many organisations go wrong. They begin with efficiency before they begin with purpose. They talk about timeliness, but not always about fairness, quality, safety, public confidence or early resolution. They speak about “clearing” work without first defining what a good outcome looks like. The Commonwealth Ombudsman is very helpful on this point. It recommends measuring not only timeliness, but also complainant satisfaction and escalation, and it warns against pressuring complaint handlers to meet benchmarks where doing so would produce a negative outcome for the complainant. In other words, quality and timeliness need to be held together, not set up as opponents. (Commonwealth Ombudsman, 2023).
The NSW Ombudsman makes a similar point in a more system-focused way. Its guidelines say an effective complaint management system should be tailored to the organisation’s size, functions, complaint profile and operating context, and should be built around a positive complaint culture, clear escalation pathways, a skilled and supported team, and continuous improvement. That tells us something important. There is no sensible backlog response without clarity about purpose, proportionality and what the organisation is actually trying to protect. (NSW Ombudsman, 2024).
Why should frontline wellbeing come first?
For me, any serious conversation about backlog should start with frontline staff wellbeing and engagement. That is not where most organisations start. 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. 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).
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 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, something else has to change. If it does not, delay is inevitable. In that situation, the only serious response is to review the system itself. What dispute resolution model are you using? What is the filter for moving files into investigation? Are too many matters being funnelled into resource-intensive pathways by default, even where a lower-intensity response might be more appropriate?
This is not just theory. The Commonwealth Ombudsman says complaint handling systems must be adequately staffed and resourced, and that unless complaints are few in number 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. (Commonwealth Ombudsman, 2023).
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 staffing 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. (NSW Ombudsman, 2024).
Why does triage need expertise at the front end?
This is why I place so much importance on triage. 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.
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).
Build stronger systems, not just faster ones.
If your team is managing backlog, pressure and increasing demand, the solution is rarely just working harder. It’s about improving how your system is designed, how decisions are made early, and how practitioners are supported.
My Introduction to Conciliation eBook offers a practical foundation for building early resolution capability, strengthening triage decisions and improving outcomes across complaints and dispute resolution systems.
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. I do not entirely accept that. 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. Earlier Victorian Ombudsman reporting described early resolution as preventing small issues from growing into larger ones. (Victorian Ombudsman, 2024).
The Commonwealth Ombudsman and the NSW Ombudsman also support early, proportionate responses. The Commonwealth guide links good complaint system design with more timely resolution, while the NSW guidance states that in most cases early resolution at first contact will be the most effective response. 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).
How can agencies use the waiting period better?
I also think organisations should make better use of waiting periods. Consider mid-stream allocation lists. These are matters that receive early resolution attention quickly and then sit waiting for investigation processes until investigators have capacity. That model makes use of the early weeks of a complaint process instead of allowing that time to become dead space. Even if a full investigation cannot commence straight away, something useful can still happen. The matter can be clarified, narrowed, risk-assessed, and in some cases resolved altogether.
Again, the New Zealand Privacy Commissioner’s framework is instructive because it gives staff something more nuanced than a binary choice between “investigate” and “do nothing”. Its guidance expressly recognises early resolution pathways, no-investigation outcomes in some cases, and formal investigation where that is warranted. That kind of staged and proportional model is far more likely to make productive use of the first weeks of a matter than a system that leaves everything sitting untouched until a full investigator becomes available. (Office of the Privacy Commissioner, 2024).
What does fair but firm management of challenging conduct require?
Another part of the backlog conversation that organisations sometimes avoid is the impact of challenging, unreasonable or querulous conduct on agency capacity. Most agencies will have a small number of stakeholders whose matters consume a disproportionate amount of time, attention and emotional energy. That may occur through repeated correspondence, refusal to accept clear explanations, escalating demands, serial complaints, hostile interactions, or 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 approaches to unreasonable conduct. Fairness does not require unlimited access, endless reconsideration, or unrestricted use of staff time where the conduct itself has become unreasonable. The NSW Ombudsman’s manual is very clear that agencies may need to set limits and conditions, establish boundaries, identify unreasonable behaviour, explain consequences, and enforce boundaries where necessary, while still treating complainants respectfully and consistently. (NSW Ombudsman, 2020/2022).
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. That includes transcribing calls, generating draft follow-up correspondence, automating reminders, improving templates, and reducing duplicated administrative effort.
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).
That supports a practical point I think agencies need to hear more often: 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”. Second, they need to stop assuming that the answers will come only from the top.
NSW Ombudsman guidance encourages consultation with staff and supports a positive complaint culture where leaders invest in systems and teams. Safe Work Australia and WorkSafe New Zealand both emphasise consultation with workers in managing psychosocial risk. Staff closest to the work usually know where time is being lost. (NSW Ombudsman, 2024; Safe Work Australia, 2022; WorkSafe New Zealand, 2025).
There is, of course, a risk calculation. 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.
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.
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?
My guiding principle remains the same at the end as it is at the beginning. 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, better thinking becomes possible.
That 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 to the organisation. They listen to frontline staff, apply expertise early, manage difficult conduct fairly but firmly, and treat technology and process redesign as tools in service of judgment rather than replacements for it. That approach is consistent with Australian and New Zealand guidance that emphasises consultation, appropriate resources, supported teams, and systems designed to prevent small issues growing into larger ones. (NSW Ombudsman, 2024; Safe Work Australia, 2022; WorkSafe New Zealand, 2025; Victorian Ombudsman, 2024).
Backlog is never just a numbers problem. It is a systems problem, a leadership problem, and very often a people problem as well. Once organisations recognise that, the conversation becomes much more useful.
Looking to move beyond backlog and build a system that actually 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 training for Ombudsman offices, regulators, tribunals and complaints teams, focused on early resolution, triage, managing challenging conduct and building psychologically safe, high-performing teams.
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Summary list
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.
Mid-stream allocation models can use the waiting period productively rather than letting the first weeks of a matter become dead time.
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.
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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