Appointing the right person for the right job is a well-established secret to boosting team productivity and workplace efficiency. Employees with the right skillsets are ten times more productive than those who lack the necessary expertise required to complete a job.
At the same time, effective workload management among all team members is also important. It might look like a simple concept for you to equally distribute tasks to your employees, but in reality, it is far more complicated than it sounds. In fact, even the most qualified workers start underperforming when they feel overburdened and exhausted. It is, therefore, essential for team managers to be careful while assigning tasks to their personnel to avoid job burnout and maintain productivity levels.
This article briefly explains workload management and discusses 5 best practices to effectively manage the team workload that can help businesses make their teams more productive.
What is Workload Management?
Workload management is defined as the process of assigning tasks across a team strategically by looking at members’ skills, availability, and deadline. Team managers prioritize tasks based on their importance and manage the workload to maintain workplace efficiency.
This way, workload management promotes teamwork, improves organizational performance, and keeps employees happy and satisfied.
Importance of Effective Workload Management
Research shows that an individual team member has three most productive hours per day on average. Poor resource management decrease employee productivity levels as workers start experiencing job burnout due to workload demand.
Hence, overburdened employees feel less satisfied that badly affects their performance and forces them to quit. Unbalanced workload distribution is one of the primary reasons behind high turnover rates and poor workplace efficiency.
Hence, effective workload management becomes essential to encourage teamwork and decrease job burnout. An even distribution of tasks enables team members to focus on their performance and produce their best work. Besides, the practice increases workplace satisfaction and makes teams happier, more productive, and more innovative.
Best Workload Management Practices
1. Identify Task Requirements
First of all, team managers should list all pending tasks and determine their importance. They should identify the task requirements, deadlines, and level of expertise needed to achieve the desired goals.
The best way to make these assessments is to look at the timesheets downloaded from workforce management software. The timesheets can provide you with reliable data to estimate the time required to complete each task. Based on your estimations, you can make data-driven decisions and delegate tasks according to your workers’ availability.
2. Break Down Everything into Manageable Tasks
Once you have identified the task requirements, deadline, and projected outcomes, the next step is to break down your project into smaller manageable tasks. For instance, if you have a long-term project with a three-month deadline, make a proper schedule with key milestones to be achieved by each week and month.
Similarly, categorize your tasks into different groups such as technical, administrative, non-administrative, critical, repetitive, etc. Similarly, create a timeline before assigning tasks to your team members. This will give you a holistic view of your project and help stay organized while meeting your client’s requirements.
3. Assess Your Team’s Competency
Every organization has team members with different competencies and expertise. A good team manager recognizes his or her workers’ strengths and uses their talent to deliver results. To build a team with diverse skills and personalities, you have to assess the individual capabilities of each employee and delegate tasks based on your valuation.
Hence, before dividing the workload evenly, analyze your workers’ current engagements and check their availability. Besides, choose proficient team members with specialized skills who can complete a job better than others. You can also ask each employee individually to get a better idea of your team’s capacity.
Once your assessment is complete, make a chart mentioning the titles and JDs of your team members, their skills and expertise, and tasks currently assigned. For even better results, use workforce management software that will provide you with all those information in one place.
4. Set Deadlines & Expectations
Every task has certain expectations and deadlines that have to be met to satisfy your clients. Poor workload distribution might result in unnecessary delays and create a negative impression of your team’s performance.
Hence, to prevent disruption and deliver your project on time, implement a system to assess the individual workload of each team member. After careful analysis, set achievable task deadlines and clear expectations based on individual capabilities. This practice allows you to take inventory of your workers’ overload and give realistic deadlines to your employees.
5. Assign Tasks to Team Members
After you have met all preliminary requisites, now it’s time to effectively manage your workload and assign tasks to your team members. While you can delegate assignments manually, this method is less efficient and fails to deliver the expected results.
Hence, make sure to use workforce management software to assign tasks with just a few clicks. These cloud-based solutions ensure low-maintenance workload management by centralizing information about your employees’ positions, skills, and current engagements all in one place.
Instead of manually checking these details and confirming your workers’ availability one by one, you can get all this information from your dashboard and delegate tasks within a few seconds. Workforce management software not only helps you automate employee scheduling they also enable you to set deadlines, enter client sites, and add relevant information.
Moreover, UK-based businesses can also screen their candidates through the BS7858 staff vetting feature to hire the most talented professionals without any criminal background.
Final Words
Even distribution of your workload is essential to meet the client’s requirements and deliver projects on time without compromising on quality. Team managers need to make sure that their employees are not overburdened as well as appoint the most suitable persons to complete the jobs well.
The best way to effectively manage the workload is to use cloud-based workforce management software. These solutions enable team managers and business leaders to even distribute tasks after confirming their employees’ availability and assessing their competencies online.
You can automate employee scheduling, record workers’ time and attendance, and download timesheets to make accurate estimations. The software can help you stay organized, meet tight project deadlines, and make your teams more productive and efficient.