8 Steps to Effectively Manage Your Team’s Workload
Well-aligned, high-functioning teams don’t get that way by accident. Instead, it happens when you understand each team member’s values and skill set, and assign them the right amount of work.
This article will help you understand what workload management is, its benefits, and how you can optimize your team’s project queue.
What is Workload Management?
Workload management is the process of effectively delegating tasks to your team members to achieve your company’s goals and keep your employees motivated. Successful workload management maximizes everyone’s performance, promotes fairness, and boosts confidence.
Dangers of Ineffective Workload Management
Effective workload management can help your team grow and become more efficient. On the other hand, assigning employees too many tasks can trigger burnout or drive them to look for another job.
According to Forbes, 80% of workers quit because of mental health-related concerns like burnout and anxiety. Nevertheless, workload mismanagement can be mitigated by implementing a few simple steps—gathering employee input, assigning tasks in advance, and utilizing assistive tools. As a result, businesses can enjoy consistent productivity, and employees’ retention rates will increase.
Effectively Managing Your Team’s Workload
As any good manager knows, there is much more to managing than just handing out work. At its core, managing people is about balancing workloads while helping them grow as professionals.
To that end, here are eight steps for effective workload management.
#1: Analyze Your Team’s Workload & Capacity
One of the most challenging parts of workload management is understanding your team’s capacity. To start, determine how much time each team member needs to accomplish their projects.
You can gather this information by asking each employee to estimate their bandwidth and the amount of time they need to finish the job. Or, if you have concrete statistics, you can rely on previous performance to guesstimate how long it will take them to complete the task.
To encourage your employees to proactively manage their workload and capacity, you can develop a task checklist that gives them a timeline of upcoming projects. For instance, some people prefer being assigned projects weeks in advance, allowing them to manage their time and bandwidth accordingly. It’s especially useful for new employees to provide them with a new hire orientation checklist to ease them into the structure and workload of a new company.
#2: Prioritize & Trim Tasks
As you reprioritize tasks based on your team’s workload and capacity, make sure you consider meetings, vacations, and recurring duties, as these can affect timelines and productivity. Also, avoid assigning big projects or tasks all at once, as this could make your team feel overwhelmed. Instead, trim the tasks.
For instance, larger tasks may be broken down and assigned to various individuals rather than relying on one person to complete them. Similarly, try to assign tasks, especially large or complex ones, as early as possible. As a result, this can reduce feelings of stress in your team, and it can ensure your employees are taking their time to produce high-quality work.
Lastly, make it a habit to mark high-priority projects. This ensures important tasks don’t slip through the cracks and that your team is aware of urgent projects that require special attention.
#3: Set Reasonable Deadlines & Goals
Have you ever received a huge task and had to finish it by the next day? That’s a lot of pressure. Rather than focusing on producing high-quality work, you’re likely scrambling to finish the job so you don’t miss the deadline.
This is the same feeling for your team members. If you assign a high-priority project at the last minute, it could affect the quality. So, you have to ensure the goal is attainable in the set time.
You can have leeway, but you should always be strict when it comes to deadlines, as long as it’s manageable.
Of course, urgent tasks are inevitable. There will be jobs that suddenly show up, so make sure you have a contingency plan to ensure the project's continuity. You might need to pull a few people to focus on the extra task or put the current project on hold.
#4: Check-In Regularly & Be Prepared to Adjust
When you set project timelines, don’t be complacent and expect everything to proceed as planned. Instead, check your team’s progress regularly to determine if they require more assistance or time.
Set regular one-on-one sessions with your team members for updates. If you find one team member is overloaded with responsibilities, you can work to alleviate some of the pressure with additional help from other employees. In turn, you won’t sacrifice quality or your timeline.
However, make sure to communicate the changes in tasks to avoid miscommunication among your team. For instance, if it is a collaborative project, ensure each member knows exactly which portion of the task they are responsible for and when it is due.
If the adjustment affects the timeline, you might need to recalibrate the team and see if others can assist in more critical tasks to make progress faster.
#5: Monitor & Measure Progress
Monitoring your team’s progress allows you to identify which areas or team members affect productivity. For example, it could be that the task you assigned is difficult for one person to do. Conversely, another team member may be skilled or have expertise in that project. Regular monitoring can help you catch these hiccups ahead of time and address them before a missed deadline.
Consistent monitoring will ensure that everyone is on track and on time. If you notice that the project is behind schedule, you can make necessary adjustments before it’s too late. Adjustments may include:
Reassigning tasks to different team members who are highly skilled in that area.
Bringing on additional team members to collaborate on a large project.
Putting non-urgent tasks on hold to work on high-priority projects.
#6: Set an Example
Before promoting time management skills to your members, show them how it’s done. Avoid focusing on too many projects at the same time, as it can affect your performance and lead to burnout.
Improving workload management is essential, but you should also know when to take a break. Instead of leading the team to a path of work addiction, set an example by avoiding overworking. You can start working during working hours, take a break when necessary, and avoid bringing your job home.
According to Inc.com, workers on average put in an additional 23 hours of work each month, and this is because of poor time management. If your team members see that you have poor time management skills, it’ll affect their thinking and potentially cause a chain reaction within the company.
#7: Encourage Work-Life Balance
Many employees want to focus on work to finish their tasks earlier. However, this dramatically affects efficiency and accuracy. Additionally, the more hours they spend working, the more tired they will become, which affects the quality of their work.
Although your department may have urgent tasks and short deadlines to meet, it shouldn’t be at the expense of your employees’ mental health. Diminished mental health leads to burnout and complacency in employees. Instead, ensure your team balances work and life, takes timely breaks, and enjoys regular vacations.
Also, you can schedule office luncheons and team-building activities to lighten the mood and encourage a healthy company culture. These can be during work hours or off hours, depending on your team’s preferences.
#8: Use Tools
Managing your team’s workload can be a tedious job. As a result, constantly monitoring your team may cut into your productivity and timelines. Fortunately, there are tools that can help.
Monday.com, for example, gives you a complete overview of your team’s workload. You can see their progress and what stage the current project is in, while you can also track whether it needs more time or if it’s done earlier than expected.
Alternatively, Scoro offers end-to-end work management solutions, letting you have complete control over the team’s workload in one place. You’ll be able to schedule and track new and current tasks and see if you were able to provide enough jobs to each member.
And last but not least, Attuned allows you to see each team member’s individual values and motivators at-a-glance, helping you to assign tasks to people that are in line with their own intrinsic motivations—i.e. the things that make work meaningful for them. This not only means that they will be more likely to excel in terms of quality and speed of work, but will also be better equipped to find solutions when problems or setbacks occur.
Conclusion
Workload management is never easy. It requires regular adjustments, workload tracking, and deadline checks to ensure that everyone is productive and not demotivated. But with intentionality and the right approach, you can transform how you manage our team’s workload, and allow everyone to be as efficient and productive as they can be.
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