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Many businesses have more work to do than the time and staff available to do it. Having supervised teams of various sizes, I’ve experienced first-hand how a team leader needs to carefully manage incoming work against the abilities of the team. Otherwise, you end up with stressed-out staff and unhappy customers.
It’s a skill to master your team’s task flow. You want to set the group up to successfully achieve your business objectives while maintaining a balance between too much and too little work. That’s where workload management strategies can help.
Workload management is about assigning work to a team in a manner that effectively utilizes the group’s skills while maximizing productivity and the quality of deliverables. Trusted workload management principles can not only lead to greater output, they can also raise team morale.
It might be among your project manager responsibilities to manage a particular team’s workload. Let’s take a look at some helpful strategies you can use and how to implement them.
These techniques for managing workload increase your ability to fulfill the project scope and help the team hit performance metrics. This guide walks through seven strategies for effective workload management.
Before delegating work, understand your business priorities. These priorities involve day-to-day activities as well as long-term strategic goals.
Trade-offs are inevitable since business resources are limited. When you’re making decisions about the work that needs to be done, you have to keep in mind your business’s priorities. That will help you determine which tasks move the company toward its most important objectives.
In a retail store, cashiers are important for processing transactions, but so is ensuring shelves are stocked with merchandise. In a business-to-business environment, it may be in your best interest to prioritize customer service for clients with higher budgets over those spending less.
That’s why many companies tier their client base and provide different degrees of service based on customer spend.
Understanding your business priorities allows you to make appropriate decisions about your workload management approach. These priorities can even affect the tools you use and processes you implement.
Apply the following tips to incorporate business priorities into your workload management.
Deciding which tasks to address at any given time involves weighing a number of factors, including the following.
Weigh these factors against the business priorities to derive your task list. This is a summary of the work your team must complete.
Make task evaluation easier with these tools.
Assigning work requires two basic components: your task list, and people with the skills to complete it. However, workload management involves more than blindly matching up the two.
People must not only possess the skills to do the work, they must have the bandwidth to complete it within designated deadlines. If not, the staff member can feel overwhelmed and fail to keep up with the project schedule.
Consider your employees’ work styles as well intangibles such as temperament to assign each person to the appropriate task. For example, if a task requires collaboration with other groups, it’s best not to assign that task to a team member who prefers to work independently.
Sometimes the most complex part of workload management is matching tasks to the appropriate team members. The following tips can help.
Processes make workload management consistent, predictable, and quick. Any delay in a work assignment can put projects behind schedule, but a process framework prevents this.
Choose a process framework that facilitates workload planning and assignment based on what makes sense for your business. Many project management methodologies can apply to your task delegation process, such as kanban, where staff self-assign work. Another approach is to create assignments every morning before employees start their shifts.
Choosing the right process for your type of work has a big impact on workload management. Consider the following suggestions.
One of the challenges of workload management is that work ebbs and flows. One day, you’re ahead of schedule. The next, you’re hit with more work than the team can handle. Your workload management approach should enable you to adapt to these periods of uneven activity.
Support your team by adopting techniques to address this challenge. Some useful techniques include the following.
Additional tips to prepare for changes to workload include the following.
Using project management tools can do a lot to facilitate workload management. A whiteboard where tasks are posted, specialized software, a spreadsheet, or other tools will streamline assignments and oversight of the team’s work.
Project management software simplifies many elements of workload management while automatically monitoring your progress towards project goals.
It can automate work assignments and provide reports that give insight into project status, team workload capacity, and other details to inform workload management decisions. The larger your team, the more important it is to employ software to manage the work.
When using workload management tools, consider these suggestions.
Implement feedback loops to enhance communication and collaboration amongst your team.
This process can involve informally following up with employees on their progress, or a structured routine, such as daily or weekly team meetings where team members provide updates on their progress and insight into challenges they might be facing.
For example, in the scrum process, teams sync up regularly for a sprint retrospective, a meeting where the team shares what’s working and what’s not.
Feedback loops also deliver insight into whether the current workload management process is working to balance tasks across the team. If some team members are routinely feeling overworked while others are finishing early, that tells you the current process likely requires re-evaluation.
Strengthen workload management with these tips to utilize feedback loops.
There are many software solutions available that can help you facilitate workload management. Here are some of the best options.
One of the most comprehensive project software tools on the market is monday.com. It’s adaptable to many types of workload processes, including kanban, and it can present information in a dashboard view that meets your needs -- from its proprietary board system to a traditional Gantt chart.
monday.com offers all of the core features for workload management, such as tools to help you gauge capacity for each team member so work can be distributed fairly across the group.
Color-coding on the dashboard allows you to review task status at a glance. The software also provides a range of reports from standard charts to a timeline showing workload over time.
Airtable uses a visually appealing design approach to managing project work. You can also opt to leverage its set of built-in templates to match the nature of your project, such as templates for user research, a product launch, or a marketing campaign.
Airtable’s well-designed interface is intuitive, using image-based cards to represent tasks. The cards make it easy to track progress and reassign tasks to balance workloads.
The intuitive design extends to its customizable and programmable spreadsheets, which use color-coding to help you quickly view the status of each task as well as manage team resources.
A flexible project tool, Wrike delivers many methods to manage your workload and build an implementation plan. You can use kanban boards, Gantt charts, or even simple to-do lists.
It provides the ability to manage task assignments, track team progress, and set task priorities, and its interactive Gantt chart makes it easy to make changes that cascade across all related tasks.
Wrike integrates with a number of third-party tools, such as Slack, that extend the platform’s functionality. Its interactive reports make it easy to analyze how your team is doing, and Wrike even offers a free option for small teams.
Successfully implementing these workload management strategies includes improving your team management skills and keeping an open mind to assess how to continually refine and enhance your processes.
This continuous improvement is necessary as technologies and your own business evolve over time.
It’s a daily challenge to maintain the balance between achieving business objectives and ensuring even, productive work across the team. With these strategies and a willingness to adapt, you’ll be well-equipped to master workload management.
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