WORKLOAD MANAGEMENT: HOW TO MANAGE WORKLOAD EFFECTIVELY

7 min readJul 26, 2021

Are you having difficulty assigning the work to your team?

Being an employer, it is your responsibility that your team members are focused, productive, and efficient with their tasks. You have to make sure that your team’s workload is distributed impartially. Balancing your team’s workload is not an easy task. In this article, we will discuss how you can manage workload effectively.

Team workload management is a business practice to assign tasks among your employees and monitor them. It is the best way to achieve your goals by focusing on teamwork.

Assigning work to your employees has to be manual. There is no easy way out. So in this article, we will walk you through the process of effective workload management. Let’s get started!

WHAT IS WORKLOAD MANAGEMENT?

Workload management initially sounds pretty simple. All you need to do is assign work to the right employee.

Well! It is more complex than it may seem.

Workload management is the practice of assigning tasks between employees and monitoring employee’s work over the working period. But more importantly, the goal here is to make sure that the work is completed within the given time frame and without loss in the quality of the end product. It also makes sure that a healthy balance is maintained for the amount of work every team member does.

When done appropriately, workload management maximizes the productivity of your team and keeps chaos at bay. It helps your team feel satisfied rather than overwhelmed, and thus, as a manager or leader, your work becomes drastically easy.

Without proper management, you may not be able to assess the danger until it’s too late to prevent the disastrous outcomes: when a project’s progress is severely hindered, or employee trust is damaged already.

Because, incomplete projects can lead to notable economic losses and overworked employees are likely to burn out and, as a result, leave your team. Monitoring workload spots out problematic trends and areas beforehand, assisting you in solving issues before they escalate.

WHY IS WORKLOAD MANAGEMENT IMPORTANT?

With the ongoing pandemic and the significant shift in work culture norms, studies report that employees are under higher levels of stress. With the increased load of managing the new work-life balance, managers are also trying to find a way to manage the employees with remote work. Further, many employees also feel less engaged at work when they’re stressed.

Workload management equips you to assign work across your team more effectively, and reduce burnout. This tool provides real-time insight into your team’s task, to manage workload effectively and promote overall balance.

It is also important because there is a unique relationship between job demands, intellectual demands, and the job satisfaction of the individual employee which needs to be fulfilled. Businesses now look at efficient strategies to help streamline processes, reduce costs and maximize profitability. By managing more effectively you start to develop the below traits for yourself and the team:

DECREASE IN STRESS:

Less stress = less negativity = more dedication= a productive workplace.

With workload management, you’re also managing work-related stress and working towards making your team more productive, making work less demanding, and enhancing overall team efficiency.

INCREASE YOUR PRODUCTIVITY:

By effectively managing your workload, you’re on the path to success. Managing your workload is in itself a process, similar to project management. More productive people hit their targets more efficiently and with quality, creating trust and reliability. This again helps strengthen internal relationships within your company, also positively affecting productivity.

INCREASE YOUR EMPLOYEE HAPPINESS:

As employees spend over a third of their lives at work, it’s important that they are happy within the working environment. Happiness makes you positive, and when you exude positivity it rubs off on your team– isn’t that in itself a sound reason to manage workload more effectively?

IMPACT ON OVERALL BUSINESS GROWTH:

If your employees and your customers are unhappy with you then it will affect your business growth. And that will lead your business towards the downfall of your business in the market. With proper management, you keep your employees happy, and thus optimally productive.

TIPS FOR EFFECTIVE WORKLOAD MANAGEMENT:

To manage your team members’ workloads, you’ll need to make sure some of your other project management skills are in prime shape as there’s nothing more challenging than balancing projects, tasks, deadlines, and skills.

These tips when put in action in your company, will help you manage the workload of employees with top efficiency:

TAKE TIME FOR PLANNING:

Always make sure you look before you leap. Planning in advance for the tasks and projects is effective for any corporate professional setting. No matter what field of work you are planning for, it gives you the ability to concentrate on what’s most essential. Setting a task-wise time estimate, defining the schedule for completion, naming the tasks appropriately, using proper descriptions, etc, are some of the key points to remember.

FIGURE OUT YOUR TEAM’S WORKLOAD AND CAPACITY:

With work scattered among various projects, it may be hard to keep track. Having that information handy is key to understanding how much work each team member can be assigned.

It is essential to have clarity of resource allocations to projects. You can now map and designate the tasks in advance. Now this will help you figure out who will be working on what and when.

ESTIMATE DUTIES AND SET ATTAINABLE DEADLINES:

If you have an estimate of all the tasks needed to be done, you can plan the project effectively and set deadlines for everyone. After all, it’s important to know how long specific tasks will take to finish. With practical deadlines, no project will be hanging and you’ll have more visibility and control over your team’s workflow, making sure to distribute work individually.

CHECK-IN WITH YOUR TEAM MEMBERS AND ADJUST WORKLOADS AS NEEDED:

Even with the best plans, you’ll need to make adjustments before deadlines are missed. Keep a track of each team member and their current workloads, and be proactive by establishing a consistent 1–1 check-in with your team.

Also, when you reassign tasks or projects, be sure to interact with your team about the changes so they understand and can work collectively.

SET PRIORITIES:

Clear priorities will assist your entire team to recognize what they need to focus on. They will thus make it more comfortable to adjust in case of force majeure situations. It’s a matter of mastering the craft of prioritizing time, tasks, finances, and resources.

While you are mainly focused on the entire project as a whole, encourage your team to develop their own system to improve efficiency. They must be doing the right things, at the right time.

ONBOARD A WORK MANAGEMENT TOOL:

Imagine being equipped to understand all that’s going on with your project and the situation of each employee’s work. When you utilize an employee task management tool, you can see how employee’s work feeds into larger company initiatives.

EMPMONITOR:

To help you with this challenging task of workforce management, you can employ this amazing productivity management tool. It is a cloud-based software that will help you

Once you have assigned the tasks to the employees, you also need to review their progress through the work to make sure it gets completed on time. To help with this process in organizations, a tool like EmpMonitor can help you to a great extent. You can easily monitor all the activities of your employees.

It provides many features through which you can analyze whether your employees are productive or not, how efficient they are, and measure their overall performance. You can access all these details with just a single dashboard. Here are some key features:

TIMESHEET:

Timesheets automatically trigger when employees turn on their systems and record it as a clock-in time.

REGULAR SCREENSHOTS:

EmpMonitor captures screenshots of your employees’ system at regular intervals. You can access all the screenshots and evaluate your employee’s performance.

STEALTH MODE:

Stealth mode assists you to observe your employee’s productivity without them feeling interfered. There will not be any popup of the software icon or user history. It will also aid you to recognize and avoid any unusual activity.

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FINAL WORDS:

Remember, workload management is a crucial factor in the success of your business. And it may feel overwhelming managing all those employees, projects, business meetings. But you have to do it anyway

and with the tips, we’ve outlined above, combined with a work management tool like EmpMonitor, can help you sort through conflicting deadlines and priorities to manage your team’s heavy workload.