So much to do and so little time? Discover how to improve workload management practices in our recent guide.
The profitability of your business relies on your team's productivity. And productivity is the result of effective workload management.
While it sounds easy in theory, there are quite a few building blocks you'll have to set in place to make sure just the right amount of work is assigned.
Here's the guide explaining how to get it right.
Workload management, also known as workload planning, is the process of forecasting, planning, distributing, scheduling, and monitoring people's workload on projects. It can be done at an individual, team, or organization-level. Effective workload management ensures:
Here's an example of how you could get this data in a workload solution like Runn:
The noble goal of managing workload is to optimize people's time to finish projects in the most efficient way, at the same time preventing burnout at work. When the load is distributed optimally across available people, productivity increases, individual stress levels decrease, and overall efficiency and morale within the team improve significantly. Here are more reasons why workload management shouldn't be left to chance.
Workload management is essential for any organization that strives to be operationally efficient and profitable.
Ultimately, the purpose of workload management is to deliver the best results for your business - by reducing unnecessary costs, maximizing ROI, supporting high productivity, and making the most of your most valuable resource - your people.
Here are some of the benefits of workload management.
As well as the business benefits of workload management, there is also an ethical imperative. Workload management is part of the duty of care you have towards your employees, protecting their physical, mental and emotional health.
By managing workload effectively, businesses can make sure their employees aren’t one of the 745,000 dying from long hours each year.
Capacity represents the capability of your organization to meet client demands efficiently and deliver high-quality services. It is determined by factors like the number of skilled professionals, their expertise, productivity levels, and available resources.
On the other hand, resource demand refers to the measure of employees you'll need to manage forecasted workload requirements, as dictated by the volume and complexity of client requirements for services. It can fluctuate based on market dynamics, client needs, and economic factors.
While demand can manifest itself in a new project that requires a specific capability to deliver it, capacity is your supply of resources that makes it possible.
Measuring capacity vs demand helps in allocating staff effectively to meet customer needs without overburdening employees or leaving them underutilized. By aligning staffing levels with demand fluctuations, businesses can optimize workforce productivity and avoid unnecessary labor costs.
We've shown you how we visualize capacity above. When it comes to demand, there are a few ways we do this at Runn:
1) Tentative projects are projects that you have not confirmed. You may be in discussion with your client about the project or you may be waiting for the final sign-off to begin it. That's a good indicator of demand.
By creating project plans for your tentative projects, you'll be able to see how potential work will impact your confirmed workload and bottom-line. You will be able to uncover the demand for specific people based on resource constraints early on.
Further reading: A Guide to Tentative Project Scheduling
2) Placeholders. By adding placeholders for roles and skills on a project, you can plan the project without knowing who you'll assign to it. It's the most foolproof way to visualize what resources are required for a project and analyze demand based on the project requirements.
For example, when you know you’ll need a certain type of resource but not the exact people you want to allocate, you can add placeholder resources - Developer, Graphic Designer, Project Manager, or other. This lets you plan the project and estimate resource requirements and costs, even if you don’t have specific people in mind yet. It also helps flag resource constraints and recruitment needs in advance.
Further reading: Why You Need Placeholders for Demand Planning
3) Resource utilization. Another way to spot demand is by looking at resource utilization and overtime. The staff with the highest utilization rates is the most wanted by clients. Therefore, their capabilities are in demand. It's a rock-solid demand indicator.
➡️ Related: Workload Forecasting - A Quick Guide
When every task is an urgent task, teams can feel overwhelmed. From an individual team member's perspective, having an ordered task list gives them a starting point for their work. Once one task is finished, they know what to focus on next - this also reduces downtime in between different pieces of work.
If their to-do list isn't prioritized, they may spend unproductive time figuring out where to start, or what to do next once they've completed a task. Not only that, but a long list of tasks just feels overwhelming.
➡️ Related: How to Prioritize Projects When You're Understaffed
Workload management is impossible without estimating how much time the project will take. Your team members should be involved in the estimation process as they have more knowledge as to how much time they might need to complete a certain package of work.
You can create a workload schedule to understand how much time individual tasks within a project should take. This helps you assign a realistic workload to your resources, as well as forecast project schedules realistically.
Give workload planning (and workload analysis) the time and respect it deserves. It can make the difference between delivering great project outcomes on time and on budget, or missing the mark entirely. And when 50% of employees ranked heavy workloads as one of the key stressors in the workplace, it can make your team happier and more productive too.
➡️ Related: How to Create a Workload Schedule in 3 Simple Steps
Perhaps the most important takeaway from this entire article - be realistic.
Unrealistic deadlines are the silent killer of your team culture. They’ll erode goodwill and steal away staff satisfaction - until your team is feeling overworked, underappreciated, and disenchanted with your management style.
There’s lots to consider when setting deadlines.
It will help to involve staff in task estimation, as well as review data from how long similar tasks have taken in the past.
Remember, at least 20% of staff time is taken up with essential - but less immediately productive - tasks like meetings, emails, training, mentoring, even toilet breaks. So aim to only schedule 80% of their time.
And always allow some buffer room around deadlines for contingencies, delays and unexpected disruption.
Team members are among a workplace's most valuable resources. To get the best from them, it pays to be deliberate about how you plan to utilize them. This means proactively managing workload to keep each team member fully utilized without feeling overworked.
A resource management strategy gives you visibility over individuals' bandwidth, understanding how much work they have on and creating a plan for their upcoming work that is challenging but achievable.
Resource management is firstly about understanding the supply of resources you have - in this case, the number of team members on staff and the reasonable amount of work hours they have to give to projects. Once you know that, you can allocate resources to tasks based on work priorities, ensuring resources are looked after so that they remain productive without being overwhelmed.
➡️ Related: The Difference Between Transactional & Strategic Resource Management
A workload calendar, aka a resource calendar, gives you a bird's eye view of your whole team's capacity across a set time period. It gives you the advantage of knowing what is assigned to different employees, so that you can take that into account when allocating new pieces of work.
Resource calendars are particularly helpful in project planning. It helps you to see granular information about individual team members' availability, including their upcoming vacation time, public holidays, and start/end dates for different projects and milestones. This knowledge helps to inform your workload planning by ensuring you're allocating an appropriate workload to each team member.
A resource calendar also helps to see all of the tasks a team member is working on. It can even break this information down to specific time periods so that team leaders understand what someone is doing at a particular time of day, or when they're next available for extra work. Not only does this prevent overload, but it helps with resource allocation so that the entire team is productive as much as possible.
Your calendar becomes the overarching source of truth for resource management. The result is a central document that is accessible and visible across business departments. This helps to ensure remote teams and staff at different locations have the same intelligent workload management, reducing silos and encouraging transparency among all team members.
A centralized, unconstrained resource calendar records who’s available within your team or organization - including their skill set, skill level, cost to the business, capacity, utilization rate, and more.
Intelligent workload management is about assigning tasks equally and evenly. It's always best to aim for an equal workload for everyone, but this equality is hard to achieve without visibility.
For example, if you have a specialist staff member working on a long term project within their speciality, and you have another project that requires their skill set, it can be easy to allocate that piece of work to them out of habit. However, a project manager may not realize that another newly hired team member is also capable of performing that task, and has more availability.
Rather than sticking to old habits and assigning tasks based on what you've always done, it's best to check the pool of available staff members and allocate tasks according to who has the most capacity. This prevents some staff being overwhelmed while others are under-utilized.
➡️ Related: How to Get Workload Distribution Right in Your Team
Multi-tasking may seem efficient, but no one can do two jobs at once efficiently.
In reality, someone who is working on multiple tasks at one time is likely to be much less productive than if they were focusing all of their energy into just one thing.
Context switching is known to be highly disruptive, as people need to take time to reorientate themselves with the task at hand, work out what they need to do, maybe logging into different software, having to remember their password…
It’s better to block out time to focus on one thing at a time. See some tips on managing individual workload below.
➡️ Related: Why It's Time to Rethink Multitasking
Team workload management requires constant awareness, which can be easier said than done.
Even with good planning in advance, there are plenty of other reasons why team capacity may change.
It's important to check in with your team's workload as tasks progress and make adjustments where necessary.
If a team member has time-dependent tasks, a delay can create an overwhelming workload when that delay is overcome. However, if you track that person's real-time capacity, you may be able to re-prioritize another task that gives them more availability later on.
Time tracking is much easier with a visible, central resource calendar that is updated in real-time.
Workforce planning is another key task in workload management. By understanding the future of your organization, you can see the likely demand for skills and plan to hire or structure the business accordingly. This is primarily the role of HR managers.
There are many reasons why there may be a change in demand for a skill set at a later date:
All of these factors feed into the ideal workforce for a particular organization. Being able to recognize that in advance enables organizations to adapt quicker, cheaper and more effectively. For example, you may be able to
Workload forecasting is a key element of this activity. Looking at your current and pipeline of work to understand how much time - and how many resources - you’ll need to achieve your desired outputs.
Proper workload management should include conversations about how to balance work and life. This is one of the most effective ways of preventing team members from getting to the point of feeling overwhelmed.
You can encourage staff to
All of these things help staff to refill their cup and decompress from the challenges of their job, which helps individuals to be at their best at work.
They can also prevent stress and work-related anxiety, which can result in reduced productivity, increased sickness and absenteeism, and employee turnover.
Encourage managers to treat teams in such a way that doesn't overwhelm individuals. For example, if there is a challenging deadline on a piece of work that isn't vital, managers can take the pressure off their staff by relaxing the deadline a little rather than make people anxious and stressed by pushing for it to be done on time.
Speak about personal wins and reward staff for their good work. This helps to encourage a good workplace culture where team members feel valued and appreciated, which in turn incentivizes even more good work.
Repetitive tasks can become very boring, very quickly. There is a degree of administration in any workplace or position, but it's important to blend in admin work with other tasks for variety and productivity.
This may mean automating administrative tasks where possible, or scheduling this type of work in small, regular chunks so that staff don't have long periods doing types of work that are unfulfilling or not part of their core role.
Reducing your administration is also a great way to save time and costs within the business. Administrative work generally has a low return, while real, core work represents more revenue for the business and is more impactful in general.
Measuring team utilization is perhaps one of the most insightful techniques in workload management. In one metric, team leaders can identify individuals that are under pressure for long time periods, as well as those that may feel frustrated by their light workload and lack of opportunities.
A utilization report shows what percentage of your people's capacity is scheduled or being put to use. It's a highly visual tool that enables team or project managers to identify the demands being placed on each team member in real-time.
It can help with resource allocation by ensuring individuals that already have a demanding workload aren't tasked with work that can be done by someone else that has greater capacity.
Team utilization also helps with planning. For example, if a staff member has two weeks of working at above 100 percent capacity coming up, you can plan for them to have time off to recover once they've finished. That can be taken into account in another project plan.
Utilization can also be broken down into billable and non-billable work, creating the opportunity for business efficiencies - as well as improving job satisfaction (see above re: reducing administrative tasks).
It's difficult to track everyone's workload when people are assigned to multiple projects at the same time. Workload management tools take all of the information from things such as staff calendars, resource allocation, project management tracking tools, staff utilization and workforce planning to create insightful reports about how your workforce is being managed.
Runn workload management software brings together a comprehensive range of metrics to make workload management visible in one place, for all staff.
Runn workload management software delivers all of these helpful insights in real time, allowing project managers and team leaders to make informed decisions with the most accurate information.
A person is overloaded when they're working at the limit of their ability. Some common signs that you might need a workload management plan include:
1) There aren't enough hours in the day to finish all the tasks when they're due. Working extra hours is the first sign that your workload has gone south and become unreasonable.
2) You make mistakes. The first sign of being overloaded is you start making mistakes. There is a point at which you can't do everything, and once you're past that point, there is no control over what will happen next.
3) Unhappy clients. It's easy to lose track of things when you have lots on your to-do list. Not getting client work through on time, or not completing it to the usual standard is typical of being overworked.
That being said, if you find yourself or your team unable to meet deadlines, staying late hours, and working on weekends, workload management may be something you want to look at and improve significantly.
For a project manager, it's vital to develop workload management skills. Read on for our tips to manage team workload effectively.
There are lots of reasons employees might feel overwhelmed by a heavy workload. These could be personal factors that make them more prone to feeling overloaded. Or could be down to management or organizational factors.
Unrealistic expectations
You may have unrealistic expectations of what your resources can achieve in a particular timeframe. Your expectations may be unrealistic if you’ve
These can all lead to tasks taking longer than expected. If you keep adding more tasks, it can create a backlog, overwhelm, and burnout.
If heavy workload continues unaddressed, the problems can be compounded. Unfinished work from this week can flow into next week, meaning your employee is even further behind when Monday comes.
It’s extremely important for managers to get into the mud and understand exactly what different roles entail, day-to-day, to make sure they schedule work realistically.
Using time-tracking software can help understand how long different tasks take, so you can adjust your expectations.
A demanding work culture
Some sectors are notorious for their unforgiving culture of long hours. When an organizational culture normalizes long hours, employees can be influenced into thinking their workload is acceptable - through management and peer pressure.
Consultancy firms and games development are two industries known to be tackling their grueling overtime culture and poor work-life balance.
Uneven workload distribution
Is there anything worse than feeling completely overwhelmed by work, only to see a colleague complaining they don’t have enough to do and hunting for something to occupy themselves?
If this happens in your team, you have an issue with workload distribution.
Having in-demand expertise
For some people, heavy workload results from them having specialist expertise. If you’re the only person in the organization with a particular set of skills, you’ll be in high demand.
In these cases, it’s especially important to protect this MVP from overwhelm and exhaustion. Because if you lose them - to voluntary turnover or burnout - then you’ll be stuck.
Use utilization reports to understand which individuals, role types, and skills sets are in continual high demand and look to recruit more ASAP!
Under-resourcing
Workload can become unmanageable if you don’t have enough resources to deliver. There are lots of reasons your team could be unresourced.
If someone is off sick or on holiday - and the rest of the team has to pick up their urgent tasks - this is a temporary issue. You can resolve it by helping your team members reprioritize their to-do lists.
But sometimes it’s a longer-term issue - for example, there’s a hiring freeze, you’ve been unable to recruit to a specialist position, or been blind-sided by an unexpected skills gap.
Effective capacity planning can help prevent these issues - surfacing and forecasting demand for resources so that you can recruit in a timely way.
Poor management
No-one teaches us how to be good managers. Often people are promoted to management roles without receiving any specific training. This means they’re ill-equipped to manage other people effectively.
If specific teams are struggling with heavy workload, consider investing in those team managers to improve their skills, so they can prioritize work and support their staff better.
Personality traits
The problem may also arise from the individual themselves. Some people are more prone to disorganization, procrastination, poor prioritization, overwhelm, and burnout than others.
The WHO - which describes burnout as an occupational phenomenon - recognizes that personal factors can make people more prone to experiencing it.
When this is the case, their manager needs to step in and provide training and support to help individuals overcome these challenges and thrive in their role.
(Psst. If this sounds like you, don’t worry. We’ve got some tips on how to organize your workload coming up 💪)
The unexpected
And, of course, there’s the unexpected. Sometimes the universe throws a curveball and your team is suddenly swamped with unexpected work.
It could be that another team all gets the flu and you need to take over to meet a deadline. Or an ad hoc project from a major client that you can’t refuse.
We’ve got 5 tips for managing ad hoc projects, when you’ve finished this article :-)
To organize your personal workload effectively, try the following.
