5 Signs of Poor Workload Management + Tips on Achieving Balanced Workloads
How to keep your team members productive and engaged? One of the solutions is to ensure their balanced workloads. When people aren’t overloaded with tasks, they cope with their work much more effectively, which in turn contributes to smooth workflow and increases the chances of successful project completion. At the same time, effective workload management can be a demanding task, especially when you deal with a large resource pool spread across multiple projects. In this article, we’d like to discuss the key signals indicating that your workload management process is ineffective, suggest ways to improve the situation, and outline the role of the right online workload management software.
5 Symptoms Indicating Ineffective Workload Management
Here are the signs that show that your employees may be under- or overloaded. Upon noticing at least one of them, you should analyze their workloads thoroughly.
Disengagement
This problem can be caused by overload: when employees cannot cope with their workloads regularly, they become stressed, indifferent, lose initiative and motivation. On the other hand, when they are idle, they may feel unimportant, not able to contribute to the common goal, and lose interest in their work.
Failing to meet deadlines
No one is immune to delaying some activities from time to time; it can be affected by a great number of factors. However, if a team member or several of them cannot complete their work on time regularly, this can be a symptom of poor workload management. You may have assigned too much work that doesn’t correspond to their capacity. Alternatively, an employee can be stuck in bad multitasking and switch between numerous tasks without delivering the required output.
Low productivity
This can be caused by both under- and overload. When team members are overloaded, they are stressed, can make mistakes that require rework, which reduces their productivity. When employees’ workload is much lower than their capacity, they become idle and ineffective, too. Most likely, they won’t show their idleness, while the overall productivity will be decreasing.
High level of absenteeism
Overworking can negatively affect people’s physical and mental health. So, if you’ve noticed that your people often take sick leaves or stay away from work regularly, it’s better to check if they aren’t overwhelmed with work.
Uneven workload
This means that periods of having too much work are replaced with periods of idleness. This situation is a typical sign of improper workload management; it won’t contribute to productive project work and requires corrective actions.
These are the most common indicators of poor workload management. Read the next section to know what steps will help you balance it and ensure your people’s productivity.
Tips on Effective Workload Management
Tip 1. Prioritize tasks.
Every team member should understand what they should put their effort into first and foremost. Without clear priorities, their work will turn into multitasking chaos with a high risk of overload and reduced productivity.
Tip 2. Provide realistic estimates.
When estimating the time required to complete a project, you should take into account employees’ available capacity. Remember that you cannot load them for 100% of their capacity, as it increases the risks of overload; you should leave a capacity buffer for uncertainties. Also, discuss estimates with critical team members to be sure that their workload will be manageable.
Tip 3. Navigate changing requirements.
Changing requirements are inevitable in the project management process. However, without their proper management and correct prioritization, team members can become overwhelmed. So, it’s critically important to make informed decisions regarding changes to the project scope—run scenarios, consult stakeholders, and accept them only through a formal change control process.
Tip 4. Take into account employees’ strong and weak points.
You can’t paint everything with a broad brush: keeping in mind team members’ strengths and weaknesses is the key to their high productivity and engagement. Also, it can be tempting to assign more work to high-performing employees, but this strategy will lead to a misbalance in workload distribution.
Tip 5. Leverage a robust workload management system.
Digital workload management tools will help you manage team members’ workloads effectively and keep them balanced. Here are the key capabilities that contribute to wise workload management:
- Providing the data on team members’ capacity and providing resource allocation suggestions based on skills, capacity, and availability;
- The ability to forecast future capacity and workload to prevent overload and bottlenecks in the future;
- Analyzing historical performance by reviewing teams’ output in relation to capacity;
- Conducting workload analysis and finding what projects and tasks overload your resources;
- Running scenarios to find optimum ways to resolve bottlenecks and optimize workloads.
These and other capabilities are available in Epicflow, multi-project resource management software with powerful workload management functionality.
Conclusion
Proper workload management is the key to team members’ productivity, and, what is even more important, to seamless project work. What are the signs of imbalanced workloads? Check if your team members are disengaged, unproductive, fail to miss deadlines, and have a high level of absenteeism. Also, if they are idle now and then overloaded, it’s also a sign of poor workload management.
To address these challenges and balance people’s workloads, you should help them prioritize their tasks, provide them with realistic estimates, manage changing requirements effectively, keep in mind their strong and weak points, and leverage a robust workload management solution.
