Denver pastry chef Eric Dale took on a new role — maintenance man — and saw his hours soar after his boss, Jen Jasinski, realized he was handy.

If you like the hazelnut tortamisu at Rioja, the top-rated Denver restaurant, thank pastry chef Eric Dale, who garnishes his sticky invention with gianduja chocolate and espresso crème anglaise. If you’re fond of the “flight of artisan water buffalo cheeses,” that’s him. And if you happen to pop your head into the bakery room and admire the tile job on the floor, you can thank Dale for that, too.

Ever since his boss, chef Jen Jasinski, discovered that Dale is handy, she’s had him doing double duty as the maintenance man. He’s spent hours repainting the oven, fixing the plumbing and installing a garbage disposal. And that’s just the start. He used to manage the dessert operation at one restaurant. When the recession hit, his boss asked him to take on a second location; now he’s up to three. All told, Dale says, his hours have expanded by a third, to more than 60 a week. The industry has changed, Dale says, and kitchen staffers can’t afford to be “fat and sassy.”

In this new era of the superjob, everyone does windows, and anyone who gripes about working too hard will hear an even hairier tale from the exec on the next bar stool. Emboldened by an unemployment crisis that’s only now easing up, businesses ranging from mom-and-pop shops to the Big Three automakers have asked a dwindling number of employees to take on extra tasks that have little to do with their primary roles and expertise. While hiring in some sectors has picked up, the Labor Department’s hours-worked-per-employee figures have been rising steadily for almost two years. Companies’ new solutions to staffing and budget shortfalls often look surprisingly makeshift, with engineers going on sales calls, accountants pitching in on customer service and CFOs running a division on the side. And some believe the shift is permanent, as the quickening pace of change demands more flexibility from everyone at the office. Management consultant Rich Moran, whose clients have included Apple and AT&T, says that going forward, employees will do whatever it takes to help their company compete: “Job descriptions are written in sand, and the wind is blowing.”

Some workplace experts say the superjob is the logical next step in management’s quest to make the workplace more cost-efficient. The latest shift started when businesses redistributed the workload over a smaller pool of employees following the layoffs of 2009; last year’s nascent recovery intensified the process. In a recent survey by Spherion Staffing, 53 percent of workers said they’ve taken on new roles, most of them without extra pay (just 7 percent got a raise or a bonus). Now that sales are picking up, there’s even more work to do, but companies are reluctant to hire, says Howard Tarnoff, SVP at employee-management-software provider WorkForce Software. Some are anxious about what the economic future holds, while others are taking their cues from global giants that have managed to increase revenue and profit even as they’ve dismissed thousands of workers.

Experts who work with Fortune 500 companies say that as hard as it can be to keep up, employees can benefit from the trend. Research shows that many successful leaders grew the most through “stretch experiences,” says Seymour Adler, an SVP at Aon Hewitt’s talent-and-rewards practice. “They killed themselves for a period of time, but there was an enormous amount of learning.” At Rioja, owner Jasinski says the economizing helped her avoid layoffs when sales dropped. Now that business is booming, she says, she has no plans to hire outsiders: The multitasking creates a sense of teamwork and keeps employees engaged. Still, even the most hard-nosed bosses know that workers can be stretched only so far. New research suggests long hours and project overload can reduce productivity, and recent statistics seem to back that up: In the middle of 2010, after five quarters of impressive growth, U.S. labor productivity took a dip, while a separate survey from the Conference Board found that just 43 percent of Americans are satisfied with their job—the lowest level since the survey started in 1987. The irony, of course, is that many companies think most of their own employees are perfectly happy; in a climate where new jobs are still hard to find, polls reveal staffers are afraid to tell management any different.

In one sense, the superjob phenomenon is part of an economic cycle that’s as predictable as the seasons. At the end of almost every recent recession, employers have increased the hours of their remaining workers before hiring reinforcements. But this time around, experts say, there are other forces at play. Some employers have grown wary of the organizational strain of hiring and firing every time the economy swings—not to mention the growing cost of benefits (about ,600 a year per employee, says Mark Stelzner, an HR consultant at Inflexion Advisors). Globalization and technological advances also play a role: Engineering and advertising agencies say clients are demanding shorter delivery times, requiring employees to work more hours, and U.S. executives must be available around-the-clock to take care of issues in Hong Kong and Paris. Then there’s the growing consumer demand for convenience that has druggists putting in long shifts at 24-hour pharmacies and retail managers working Christmas day.

Whether on major projects or small chores, assigning new roles to existing employees can be a smart move, says Debbie Zmorenski, a productivity consultant at LSA Partners in Orlando. But during the recession, she adds, many companies acted in more of a state of panic. Instead of thoughtfully reassigning tasks based on a careful assessment of employees’ skills and affinities, they rushed the process, redistributed the workload willy-nilly and provided little training. When you send a shy but talented IT specialist out to do sales, says Zmorenski, “you’re setting him up to fail.”

Debbie DeChambeau knows the feeling. She loved her inside-marketing gig at a large East Coast real estate firm, introducing her employer’s agents to the company’s home-insurance products. But as the recession gained speed, she says, her division’s new president decided the company couldn’t afford the luxury. DeChambeau was promoted to manager, overseeing several of her coworkers while continuing her marketing duties. And by the way, could she please double as an insurance agent on the side?

Photographs: David Yellen for SmartMoney.
Infographics: Emily Cooper for SmartMoney.