The number and complexity of assigned tasks define how fast a person can work, as the overall quality of their performance. Hence, it’s pivotal for every manager to plan, distribute and monitor workloads among their staff members well – and here we describe how to do just that!
Check out our practical tips for successful workload management and find out why it’s so critical to manage workloads well. However, let’s start with the basics and figure out what workload management is all about.
What Is Workload Management?
A workload is the total of tasks one has to accomplish within a set timeframe. It can be measured both quantitatively and qualitatively, based on either the amount of work or its complexity.
Each person on your team has their own workload demand – there’s a limit to what they can realistically do within a day or a week. And that’s the main thing to remember what managing your staff’s workloads.
The goal of workload management is to distribute tasks among employees as fairly and productively as possible. Hence, it’s all about a thought-through allocation of work across the team, which involves strategic planning, estimation and performance monitoring.
Besides identifying how many tasks should be done and setting realistic deadlines for them, you also need to understand whether you have enough resources to complete work successfully and how skilled your employees are to do the job right. Figuring these things out is key to creating a perfect balance between your team’s ongoing workload demands and the company’s overall performance goals.
What Makes Workload Management So Important
Unmanageable workloads are among the primary causes of employee burnout. According to Ben Wigert and Sangeeta Agrawal, they affect a person’s mental state, making them feel incompetent and unable, which reduces performance efficacy even in the most talented of employees:
“In sports psychology, coaches use the term ‘mental quicksand’ to describe how moments of poor performance can cause athletes to feel overwhelmed. This leads to further poor performance and damage to their confidence that continues to drag them down. High-performing employees can quickly shift from optimistic to hopeless as they drown in an unmanageable workload.”
In other words, allocating too many complex tasks for employees is a sure way to turn them into unhappy and unproductive individuals. Not to mention that continual work-related stress may have a long-term negative effect on your team members’ health. And the more overwhelmed and dissatisfied employees become, the more likely they are to replace you with an employer who treats them and manages workloads better.
A takeaway: effective workload management is a cure against excessive HR costs, low productivity and poor employee engagement. By planning and allocating tasks to workers in a way that eliminates the risk of burnout, you can boost performance efficiency and attain superior business results.
10 Tips for Effective Workload Management
So, what can you do to keep team workloads always balanced and employees more satisfied with their jobs? Here are some clues:
1. Create a list of everything that must be done
Every successful project begins with a thoughtful plan that covers a list of all the work to be done. Be sure to include routine workplace activities into the picture too. Email management, daily standup meetings, occasional team discussions – these and similar tasks consume employees’ time and energy as well. Hence, they are a part of everyday workload just like all the other responsibilities you consider more significant.
2. Estimate tasks
The goal of time estimation is to figure out how long it may take your employees to complete the planned tasks. It is key to setting realistic deadlines and preventing work overloads in the team. Hence, it’s pivotal to come at as accurate time estimates as possible. Consider task complexity and choose an estimation method that meets your current needs best.
3. Analyze your resource capacity
The next step is to understand whether you have enough employees to work on tasks from your plan. The goal here is to identify the gap between your demand for resources and your actual capacity. And to do that, you need to divide the total of your team members’ working hours by the total time estimate.
In addition, think of the skills, experience, competencies and talents required to complete the job perfectly. If you see that your staff does not qualify to finish the planned work well, you might want to seek some extra help.
4. Prioritize tasks
Now that it’s clear whether you’re facing a resource shortage or not, you can elaborate on the previously designed workload plan, edit it and set the right priorities. Tasks that bring you closer to the desired business and project goals must remain at the forefront of the list. As for everything less important, it may be postponed for later or gotten rid of entirely if your team won’t have time to complete it.
5. Build a timeline
A timeline is more than just a visualized work schedule. It captures task dependencies, deadlines and project milestones and helps you keep the entire work scope at glance. This turns a well-developed timeline into a robust tool for workload planning and progress tracking. And you can create one yourself in merely a few steps – learn more about them from our comprehensive guide.
6. Allocate tasks smartly and fairly
There’s hardly anything more stressful for an employee than being assigned a task they have no knowledge to work on successfully. Besides, a random allocation of responsibilities following the “first come, first served” principle is bad for businesses too – if a team member’s experience and talents don’t match task characteristics and requirements, the risk of cost overruns, schedule delays and low-quality outputs becomes real.
Avoid that by allocating tasks in accordance with employee strengths and weaknesses. Always choose the best fit for a piece of work. This way, your team members will show excellent performance results and won’t waste time correcting mistakes.
7. Make room for changes
Life rarely follows our plans. You can’t expect events to unfold exactly how you predicted and wanted them to evolve. Hence, to stay on top of the game, you need to do your best to identify changes in the environment and undertake precautions to reduce their negative effects on your team and business.
Even the slightest shift in task complexity and workload intensity may burden employees a great deal. And if any worker suddenly goes absent, someone else might have to stay overtime and compromise their own well-being in order to help you out with timely project delivery.
What you can do about this problem is track changes in your initial work plans and monitor resource availability nonstop. These measures will help you to quickly readjust the plan of action in response to sudden workload changes.
To get support in mastering this job, consider adopting a feature-packed absence management tool that lets employees schedule time off in advance and makes it easy for managers to track and predict staff availability at any moment. actiPLANS is one of such absence management solutions. Besides being super affordable, it includes many handy features for streamlined leave management and easy capacity analysis. Click here to find out more about how it can help with workload management.
8. Keep tabs on work progress
Performance progress is another essential thing to keep an eye on when managing workloads. If a worker is struggling to complete the assigned tasks efficiently, often misses deadlines and doesn’t meet your productivity expectations, it may be a sign for you to rethink the created workload plan and shift some responsibilities off that team member’s plate.
The best way to stay in the know of employees’ work progress is by using a time tracking and task management app. Such a solution logs every task your employees do throughout the day and gives an insight into how much time was spent on it. Use this info to see how efficient your team is and get informed for more accurate time estimation.
9. Organize daily standup meetings
Daily meetings are another excellent way to track performance progress, and they are fairly easy to arrange (both online and offline). Just agree on the time when meetings should take place and gather a small group of colleagues to discuss what everyone is doing and which challenges you’re facing.
Standup meetings don’t have to be long at all – five to ten minutes is more than enough to grasp the whole situation in your team. Yet even a quick daily meeting may produce an immense value for managers and empl0yees alike. It provides an opportunity for prompt collective problem-solving and lets you synchronize the efforts between different members of the team.
10. Use productivity-boosting techniques
In addition to carefully balancing workloads among employees, encourage them to apply versatile productivity-boosting methods, which allow for better task organization and optimal use of energy throughout the day.
Collect some materials on proven tools and techniques and don’t hesitate to share this info with colleagues. Here are a few ideas to get you started:
- Time blocking – A scheduling technique that teaches you to fight off distractions and stay more focused through efficient workday planning.
- Distraction-blocking apps – These software solutions enhance concentration on important tasks by keeping you out of the smartphone and all the websites that you find hard to resist.
- To-do lists – An easy yet powerful method to put your ideas in order and set priorities for the future ahead.
Best Workload Management Tool for Your Team
Need a robust solution to manage workloads and monitor performance progress? Have a look at actiTIME!
Besides a straightforward timesheet functionality, our time tracker contains such useful features as the Kanban board, real-time widgets, one-click timers and so much more. It lets you plan out the scope of work and keep tabs on the use of time among employees. It allows for an in-depth analysis of team productivity via multiple reports and charts and gives an insight into how well you comply with your initial task estimates. This way, actiTIME informs your workload management decisions, making them more fruitful and on-point.
Sign up for a free 30-day trial now to see how actiTIME can help you balance workloads and build a stress-free and productive environment for your team.
