Top 10+ Effective Workload Management Strategies

Struggling around properly managing or wish to optimize the workload management in your business? You are not alone. We all know that feeling of dread. We mean? Who wants to be overwhelmed at work? Trust us, you can’t win the race against your seemingly unending to-do lists unless you know how to properly manage your workload.

According to an expert PMI report, about 50% of projects experience scope creep. It is due to setting unrealistic and maintaining unrealistic expectations. Plus, the a lack of the capability to adjust to scope changes. That’s why it is essential to understand how to manage workload effectively.

So, in this blog, we will try to wrap our heads around workload management. We will cover A to Z including effective strategies, improving team productivity, managing work in remote teams, and a lot more. By the end of this blog, you will have a proper idea of how to effectively distribute work for streamlined workflows. So, let’s dive right in.

What is Workload Management?

Management of workload can be defined as a process of optimizing the workload and performance of an organization or individual. This includes managing your and the workload of others. To undertake this task, you must first determine what constitutes a good strategy.

Effective workload management is the process of allocating projects among your team members equally to gain maximum productivity. However, it is easier said than done. As a team leader or specific project manager, you need to distribute the work in a way that the employees are not overwhelmed by it. They should all have equal work and enough time to complete the assignment.

Read Also: Employee Empowerment: A Complete Guide

Types of Workload 

Workload is the number of tasks that are expected to be completed in a certain period. It can be classified into three main types: project-based, process-based & individual activities. Understanding this is the key to proper management of workload for teams.

• Project-based workloads involve multiple tasks that have been assigned by a project manager or similar person.
• Process-based workloads involve several individual tasks that are performed by different workers on different days.
• Individual activities involve regular work activities performed by one or more workers at a given time.

Metrics for Effectively Tracking Workload

Proper workload management involves effectively tracking metrics, which determine the resource distribution among your teams. Below we have given you a little information on what these values are about.

• Task completion rates determine the number of tasks your teams complete within a specific time.
• Workload distribution is the total work each team member has and is managing. 
• Time spent on tasks is similar to task completion rates. However, it is based on per per-task basis. 
• Project timelines are the deadlines within which the tasks of each project must be done.
• Work hours and overtime determine how many hours your teams are working and the time they spend over the regular work hours. 
• Task complexity is how complicated a task is. This determines the:
  • Approx time required to complete it.
  • Priority of the task. 
• Task dependencies mean how each task of a project is related to each other and whether they must be completed simultaneously for example: A banner image for a website can only be made after the header line is finalized.  
• Team satisfaction and engagement are how much your teams are satisfied with the workload and how engaged they are toward the project.
• Employee stress levels as the name suggests are how much toll your employee is taking while working. Too much stress can lead to burnout, which is a clear red flag. 
• Task backlog is the number of pending tasks and projects. If this is rapidly growing it’s time to change or adjust the workloads.

What are the Causes of Work Overload?

Workload is defined as the total number of tasks or jobs demanded by the organization, which a person must complete to perform his or her job successfully. When a person is overloaded with tasks, they are working beyond their capabilities. The most common causes of overload due to not properly managing workload are:

• Unnecessary emails and tasks which you do not need to do.
• Work overload happens when people are not following proper procedures and they create unnecessary work because they do not follow the rules.
• Workload situation where there is too much work in one department and so, it creates an imbalance among departments according to their resources, etc.

Impact of Work Overload

Work overload due to improper work management can have a negative impact on your employees. It usually happens when the workload is too much and your employees start neglecting their personal life to complete tasks. You should look for these signs to determine whether your employees are overdoing it.

• Exhaustion, burnout, and the inability to focus on work.
• Making mistakes without realizing it.
• Giving more workload than your employees can handle, extra work hours, or forcing employees to bring work home.
• Overwhelmness, stress, and agitation.
• Poor quality work.
• Losing track of progress and unintentionally missing deadlines. 

Read Also: Decimal Hours Calculator: The Complete Guide

Why is Workload Management Important?

Management of workload for employees is important because it enables organizations to efficiently manage resources and reduce operating costs. It helps organizations ensure that they are using their resources efficiently by balancing workloads across different platforms and systems. A good tool will help you track how much time employees are spending on different tasks, as well as which tasks are taking up too much time.

Finally, the goal of workload management is to provide the best results for your organization by reducing unnecessary costs, increasing ROI, promoting high productivity, and making the most of your most valuable resource for your people.

Top 10+ Effective Workload Management Strategies

So, how can you distribute work in a way that the workflow is optimized and no one is stressed? You can’t unless you know these strategies for managing workload. So, with no more delays, let us get started.

1. Centralize Data

Every business deals with multiple projects at one time. Now, if you keep all the information regarding all the projects on different platforms, it would lead to chaos. You won’t be able to find sometimes what work is assigned to whom. What was the deadline for them to finish their assignment? What is the project deadline? All these questions will come to your mind. You need to equip all your employees with a single application that holds all the information regarding the different projects they are working on. By choosing the right workload management system, you will be able to:

• Reduce the time of actually assigning the task by organizing a meeting. You can just upload it on the application.
• Employees can also make updates on their assignments as they progress. You can make weekly reports and check if the progress is prompt.
• It would reduce the risk of important project information getting lost in the mail.
• Your employees will have a clear view of their workload and priorities. This way, they will complete the work within the deadline period.

2. Determine Team Capacity 

Your team has diverse types of people in it. They work differently, and some of them even work from home. They can work efficiently and complete the tasks under deadline with realistic expectations. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your employees will help you properly manage team workload.

Proper workload management would help you distribute the work that they can do best. You can even use many capacity planning tools to understand your employee’s work structure better. Some points to keep in mind, while planning a project work are:

• Evaluate the project carefully. Make a project outline highlighting everyone’s specific tasks.
• Take a practical deadline and also mention the deadline for specific team members according to the outline.
• Give equal work to everyone but also consider their time management skills and work capacity.
• Make sure you give them enough time to complete the project within office hours.
• You have to ensure that the quality of work doesn’t get affected because of an impractical deadline.

3. Encourage a Healthy Work Environment

It may seem like a silly thing, but the work environment can seriously affect your employees’ work efficiency. You need to ensure that all the members are on good terms with each other. Some small things can mess up a project, if not taken care of fast. Assign people to work together if possible.

It again creates healthy competition and also encourages them to learn team-building skills. You can also do some unconventional stuff to create a positive and friendly environment among your team members. You can take them on a short trip or organize weekly movie sessions. It would be a great way to relieve your employees from their daily work rather than just continuously using workload balancing techniques.

4. Planning

Planning is the key to proper workload management. Unless you don’t have a proper outline, you won’t know where to begin and optimize workflow. Instead, you will end up blindly completing tasks without caring for the consequences. Overall, a good plan ensures streamlined workflows and stress-free progress.

5. Set Achievable Deadlines

One of the expert workload distribution tips we use a lot for our projects is this one. The idea here is to set realistic deadlines and timelines. For example, if you are setting the deadline to finish developing a Tekken-like fully-fledged game within a workday, then you may need to reconsider why you became a manager.

6. Prioritize Work

Proper workload management also involves perfect work prioritization. Based on the work’s complexity, length, and time it takes to complete it, you need to identify, which tasks need urgent completion and which ones don’t.

7. Minimize HR Workload

A way to optimize the management of workload is to reduce your administrative workload. Remember that there is only a set number of HR tasks. However, the key is to balance them with other exciting work activities for continuous success and satisfaction.

8. Use Resource Management Strategies

Workload management and human resource management are interrelated. For example, even after having optimized workloads, if your teams don’t have enough resources, then they are sitting ducks. In short, we are talking about assigning the right tasks to the right teams, and resources.

9. Promote Work-Life Balance

One of the workload prioritization methods we like is the promotion of work-life balance. You as an employer, need to understand that your employees do have a life outside of work, which you need to respect. I.e., no work calls outside office hours unless it’s super urgent.

10. Establish Multiple Communication Modes

Proper workload management can also be done through multiple communication channels if you have the infrastructure for it. For example, in case you need to adjust resources on the spot as the requirements change, you can easily do it, if you have the latest communication tools.

11. Ensure Easy Work Access

One of the solutions for managing workload, which we often use is ensuring easy work access to our employees. A proper way to do it is to upload your work on secure central cloud spaces, which also provide collaboration features.

12. Create Templates

For proper workload management and time-saving, what you can do is create templates. This ensures that you don’t have to outline repetitive tasks again and again, which can lead to stress and burnout.

13. Adapt to Project Changes

A project should be consistent but it’s never constant. Management of workload in projects involves adjusting to any change at any point. For example, the requirements may be reduced significantly if the client says in phase 2 that they don’t need certain features. You must know how to adjust workloads per these changes for success.

Managing Workloads in Remote Teams

These days, we have a diverse workforce. Remote and hybrid work models are a preference as they provide many benefits to you and your employees. However, these also bring some challenges to workload management because:

• Team members are in different locations, leading to difficulties in communication resulting in:
  • Misunderstandings
  • Miscommunications
• Time zone difference is another problem. What it does is make it difficult to coordinate meetings and deadlines. The result of this is confusion and frustration among team members.
• Your employees can get feelings of loneliness and isolation due to a lack of social interaction.

It’s easy to doubt the productivity and what they are doing of the employees working from home. However, using micromanagement and constant messaging as management of workload for remote employees is not recommended.

It is time-consuming and can lead to mistrust and conflict among team members. Establishing a workload management system is the best solution to all these problems.

Read Also: Top 15 Employee Scheduling Software for Businesses in 2024

Improving Team Productivity through Workload Management

Proper management of workload for teams can drastically improve their productivity. It can lead to more success and growth for your business, which is good. However, how can we accomplish it?

1. List the Deliverables

When it comes to workload management for teams, the first step is to list the tasks and projects. This way you will identify the resource and team requirements. Plus, you will know how you can equally distribute all the deliverables.

2. Identify Team Capacity

The next part of effective management of workload in projects is to identify the team capacity. Other than the no of team members, it also includes employees’ skills, strengths, weaknesses, and the time they take to complete work. Distributing work accordingly will lead to more chances of success.

3. Break Down the Project

Now you can break down the project into doable tasks, subtasks, and checklists. What it does is make the project management and tracking progress simple and hassle-free. In short, the old school divide and conquer method.

4. Prioritize the Tasks

Task prioritization as we mentioned before is based on their length, complexity, and the time it takes to complete them. Proper workload management also involves assigning enough resources to each of these tasks.

5. Assign Resources & Workloads

To effectively manage the team workload, the next part is the workload and resource assignment. If you get this part right, the rest is comparatively very simple and easy to do for your teams.

6. Follow Up

Workload management doesn’t stop after you distribute the tasks and resources. You also need to follow up with your teams to identify how it’s going. It is your opportunity to address and fix any underlying issues during work.

7. Adjust Workloads

There may be times when you will have to adjust workloads all of a sudden. For example, an employee had no choice but to take a sick leave mid-project. In such cases, workload balancing techniques come in handy.

8. Monitor the Progress 

Use the latest tools and technologies to monitor the progress of your project. What we do is use employee monitoring software, which automates this process. Overall, it saves us valuable time for other essential work.

Top Tools for Workload Management

Workload management tools are often helpful in having a proper 360-degree view of the workflow, resource, and workload distribution. Businesses use these to automate and streamline processes, gaining valuable time advantages.

1. To-Do Lists

These are the very basic tools for managing workloads. Also known as checklists, they let you know, which tasks are pending to do. Although they are customizable, checklists can be overwhelming to use if you have a large task set.

2. Priority Matrix

Considered a valuable workload management tool, a priority matrix will let you track the urgencies and importance of tasks with ease of access. These have various versions. However, businesses commonly use the Eisenhower or Action Priority Matrix.

3. Mind Maps

Mind maps are workload tracking tools, that are useful in brainstorming and compiling to-do lists, concepts, projects, tasks, and deliverables. What we like about mind maps is the high level of visual representation they provide for a better understanding of the workflow.

4. Roadmaps

We would consider roadmaps as still timelines. These workload management tools provide you with an overview of the major project elements including milestones, deliverables, and tasks. These are great for setting an initial plan for how you would start the work.

5. WBS

Expanded to Work Breakdown Structures, these solutions for managing workload are commonly used to break down tasks into manageable subtasks. These are also a feature of project management software or can be integrated with other apps you use.

6. Organizational Structures

There are many organizational structures out of which, the best for workload management are team-based structures. However, there’s a catch you may need to customize it as per your requirements.

7. Flowcharts

Unless you have been living under a rock your entire life, you must have heard of and even used these solutions for managing your workload. Overall, flowcharts are used in project planning.

8. Kanban Boards

If you have more agile teams, we recommend using these workload management tools. Kanban boards are one of the best applications to visualize work, which of course boosts efficiency. Moreover, software solutions for managing projects also provide this feature.

9. Gantt Charts

Gantt charts are one of the most commonly used tools for managing workload for teams of all sizes. Primarily, these are used to list tasks against a timeline. These also come in handy for allocating resources and helping your teams meet deadlines.

10. Employee Scheduling Software 

Employee scheduling software solutions provide automated tools and features to schedule employees.

Plus, these are some of the best workload management software also used to assign workloads, tasks, and resources to the proper teams, ensuring optimal employee availability.

Why is DeskTrack the Best Workload Management Software?

DeskTrack is the best workload software, providing a plethora of features for you to effectively manage resources and distribute workloads. It helps you control the workflow with these features.

• Single dashboard to create tasks, subtasks, and checklists.
• You can easily assign subtasks to your employees.
• With the intuitive dashboard, your team members always know what they have to do and track pending work.
• You can track the project progress in real-time and visualize work from a single dashboard.
• Real-time tracking and activity monitoring for increasing efficiency and much more.    

Conclusion 

We hope you have now wrapped your heads around the concepts of workload management and how to optimize it. Now, you will be able to properly assign workloads to your employees and teams to ensure that there is minimum stress and no burnout for maximum efficiency. Throughout the post, we covered various strategies, tools, and methods to properly assign and manage workloads. Plus, we also covered how to distribute workloads to your diverse remote and hybrid teams. But that’s not all. Now, you are also aware of the causes and negative impacts of work overload on your employees, which further clarifies the importance of properly managing work. Fortunately, we have many tools and technologies to help us visualize work, distribute tasks, and subtasks, and plan, and schedule employees for maximum efficiency. However, what if you need more than a workload manager tool? DeskTrack is the best all-in-one employee monitoring software.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q. What is Workload Management?

Ans. Management of Workload is optimizing the workload and performance of organizations and individuals. It usually involves you managing your and others’ workloads effectively for streamlined workflows.

Q. How Do You Calculate Workload?

Ans. Workload is the percentage of hours a user has planned to work out of the total work-time. Simply put, the formula will be:

• Workload in % = (work hours / total hours) * 100. For example (20 / 100) * 100 = 20%.
• < = 80% = Low workload
• > 80% and < = 100% = Optimal workload
• > 100% = High workload

Q. What are the 4 D’s of Management of Workload?

Ans. Properly managing workloads involves wrapping your head around the basic 4 Ds of task placement. Arranging your task activities in these categories will let you prioritize your work.

• Do
• Defer (delay)
• Delegate
• Delete (drop)

Q. Why is Management of Workload Important?

Ans. Managing workload is essential because it ensures proper task and workflow as:

• Your employees and teams are always busy with important work.
• Tasks are prioritized.
• Your employees neither become overloaded nor idle.
• People also want to work with businesses that appreciate their efforts and provide them with the right amount of work at the right time.