Take the guesswork out of workload planning. Demystify your team's workload by creating a workload calendar.
Is everyone on your team equally busy? Are they all working towards the same goals? Is everyone pulling their weight evenly?
If the answer to any of these is "no", this presents some major challenges to overcome. But without the right information, getting a "yes" or "no" answer in the first place is extremely tough.
Thankfully, with the right planning tools, you can perfect your approach to team workload management and ensure everyone on your team is on the same page — and contributing equally to its success.
With that said, we’re going to discuss the importance of creating a workload calendar and how you can create one today. Let’s get started.
A workload calendar is a visual planning tool used by team leaders and resource managers to understand how workload is distributed across projects and teams.
While a workload calendar doesn’t get into the nitty gritty of individual workload management, it’s an incredibly useful tool that helps managers balance resources and identify conflicts. Just some of the information a workload calendar provides includes:
The goal is to help managers see the big picture, allowing them to manage the workload across their teams.
Workload calendars can be used in so many different ways, including:
Workload planning benefits not only your business but also your people. Here are the top benefits of creating a workload calendar for your team.
Plans change. Scopes creep. People call in sick. If your schedule has no room for wiggle room — or you have no set work schedule at all — chaos will ensue. A workload calendar not only allows you to visualize how these changes will impact your team’s workload schedule but also enables you to adjust your plans accordingly. The calendar also provides an easy way to share information with the rest of your team and stakeholders.
Rather than relying on guesswork, a workload calendar provides all the top-level information you need to make informed decisions around team workload and project priorities. Between supporting scenario planning and forecasting future resource needs, having all your commitments in one place can be incredibly valuable. What’s more, you can plan around upcoming vacations, PTO, and team events, making sure they never come as a nasty surprise.
Resource management aims to get the most out of your people without overworking your team. Visual workload management tools allow you to visualize how tasks are allocated across your team, promoting a balanced distribution of tasks; this means no more underutilization, which can lead to bored employees and wasted investment, or overutilization, which can trigger burnout.
Workload planning helps reduce the risk of employees becoming burnt out by too-heavy workloads by ensuring everyone has a manageable workload, supporting a healthy work-life balance. For example, if an employee is scheduled to work on two overlapping projects, you can identify this early and either push back one project or reallocate the task to an available colleague.
Your workload calendar will also help keep your projects on track by ensuring you stay on top of critical milestones, upcoming projects, and each task's end date. Laying out workloads visually makes it much easier to identify potential delays and bottlenecks, allowing you to address them before they become problems; this can mean reallocating resources to mitigate delays or providing updates to stakeholders to manage their expectations.
Now that you understand why you need a workload calendar, it’s time for us to explain how to create one. Here are six steps to creating your workload calendar.
Before you begin plotting your teams’ tasks on your calendar, you must know what information you should include. This means mapping out the details of the tasks your team will be working on in the near and distant future.
The first step is to create a list of all your tasks, no matter how big or small. The aim is to create a catalog of tasks in an easy-to-read format. Next, you need to categorize each task by priority. This will allow you to identify important tasks when quickly creating your calendar and in the event of conflicts later.
Finally, you will need to assign a time estimate to each piece of work; this can be done with workload analysis.
A key component of workload planning is prioritizing. During this stage, you should assign deadlines to each task, allowing you to prioritize in the future. These dates may change, but a rough idea of due dates will help your team understand what they should be working on.
It’s also crucial to factor recurring and daily tasks into your plan, such as meetings or regularly scheduled activities, as these will impact resource availability.
Getting to grips with project scheduling techniques can feel overwhelming. But with the right tools, it becomes as easy as pie.
And by ‘tools,’ we don’t mean spreadsheets, which are cumbersome and incredibly inefficient for creating work schedules. Spreadsheets' manual nature means that when you change one detail, you must update the rest of the calendar, leaving lots of room for error.
Digital tools like Runn, on the other hand, allow you to create interactive workload calendars built on live resource data. Just some of the super-helpful features that will help inform your time management journey include:
Now comes the bit you’ve been waiting for! Scheduling the team's tasks on your calendar. We won’t begin adding tasks willy-nilly; good workload management requires careful consideration of task priority, task duration, and employee availability.
Your calendar should be broken into rows representing each team member, allowing you to allocate specific tasks based on availability and skill set.
Of course, priority tasks should be scheduled first. Using the time estimate you assigned earlier in the scheduling process alongside the task deadline, you can determine how many people you will need to work on a task.
For example, if your team has two days to complete a task requiring 14 total hours of work, you will need to assign two people to work on it concurrently. These insights will allow you to mitigate clashes later down the road and manage stakeholder expectations if you need to push back deadlines because of resource availability.
What you’ll end up with is a calendar full of tasks, carefully split out across your team, allowing you to quickly assess:
Setting monthly objectives will help you create clear parameters for success, support steady progress through your projects, and keep everyone on target. Examples can include:
Setting short-term goals helps maintain focus while providing clear benchmarks for evaluating progress at the end of the month.
However, it’s important to remember that your people aren’t robots; they will have off days or even need to take time off for illness.
You want to keep your team on the straight and narrow but without causing unnecessary stress. That means allowing room for flexibility and always celebrating when you achieve your goals!
Creating your workload calendar is the first step towards improved team planning. But you need to maintain it if you want to increase productivity in the long term! Here are our three top tips for maintaining your calendar.
Your calendar is worth very little if your team doesn’t understand how it was created or how to use it. Involving them in the creation and implementation of your calendar will ensure it is used effectively.
What’s more, encouraging your team to flag any concerns or resource conflicts they notice can help create a sense of ownership over their workloads.
Planning is never a one-time activity. You’ll need to review your plan each time a project scope changes, an employee requests a day off, or your team flags an issue.
Regularly reviewing your calendar will help you avoid conflicts, and checking in with your team will reduce the risk of burnout.
A good rule of thumb is to aim for around 80% utilization across your team. This means striving to use 80% of all actual hours for productive work, which allows wiggle room for downtime, delays, and other unavoidable issues.
