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The Essential Guide to Workload Management

By Becky Simon | November 11, 2019 (updated August 10, 2022)

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When teams don’t work well together, problems occur. A vital soft skill of team performance is workload management. This article presents the most useful expert tips and downloadable templates to optimize your team’s workload management. 

Included on this page, you'll find a variety of workload management techniques , details on how to help employees manage their workload , helpful workload management tips , and workload management templates in Excel.

What Is Workload Management?

Workload management refers to assigning work to a team in a way that gets the most out of its skills and abilities and allows it to achieve the best performance and produce the highest quality deliverables. 

Through strong workload management, employees gain confidence in their abilities, take greater joy in their work, and become increasingly effective and productive.

Debbie Rosemont is a Productivity Consultant and Certified Professional Organizer at Simply Placed , a business consulting firm. She defines workload management as “having systems in place to ensure that teams or individuals get priority work done efficiently and effectively. Systems help people do their best work and get the best outcome.”

Andrew Stellman, a developer, architect, Agile coach, and six-time O'Reilly author , connects workload to workflow. “From an Agile perspective, workload management is less about trying to figure out how much work to pile on each individual team member and more about understanding the flow of work through the project,” he explains. “An effective Agile team is self-organizing, which means that the team members assign themselves work from a backlog at the last responsible moment. This is different from the more traditional model, where a project manager decides how to allocate work to the team members.”

According to Stellman, the beauty of self-assigning work and improving workflow is that it alleviates the intermittent overworking and idleness that derives from waiting for decisions, ticket approvals, and dependencies. 

However you approach the practice, good workload management is a win for everybody — nurturing less stressed, happier, and healthier employees, happier customers, and a better bottom line.

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Workload Management Techniques

Customers and companies have high demands for service in today’s always-on society. A critical foundation of quality service is workload management. The techniques of managing workloads can serve project and team leaders as well as employees. The following are the major workload management techniques: 

• Understand the milestones and timelines for projects and tasks. Understand task duration and due dates.
• Break down bigger efforts into tasks. Consider using a work breakdown structure that will detail work packages with the smallest components of work necessary for each effort.
• Figure out the team’s bandwidth, taking into consideration any current projects and the expectations for new projects.
• Determine any urgent or priority work. 
• One of the most important aspects of assigning work is understanding the people who will do the work. Make sure you know individual team members’ talents, skills, and temperament when assigning tasks. Assigning an equal workload to every team member may not always be the right solution. As Rosemont explains, “Someone who excels at something is going to perform those related tasks more efficiently and effectively than a person who doesn’t excel at those same tasks. The other person will struggle and find those tasks to be a burden. So, as managers, if we understand the strengths of our people, we can allocate work according to those strengths.” 
• Put the assignment in context by explaining to each individual why they received it. When you assign work, ask the team or individual if it’s doable. Ensure that you aren’t burning out your top performers. Discuss assignments and capacity with the people who will actually do the work. They know best how much they can successfully handle, and they may have a better idea for addressing workload. 
• Follow Up Regularly with Your Employees: Monitor project progress, but also observe your team for signs of stress or overwork. Team meetings can help everyone understand one another’s experience of the project. However, one-on-one meetings allow individuals to speak more freely. 
• For Andrew Stellman, with his Agile background, Kanban is the answer to workload balancing: “Kanban can be a very powerful tool to help identify and fix the root cause of workflow management problems. The idea behind Kanban is that the team first visualizes the workflow, then sets up feedback loops to experiment with making changes to limit the work in progress. Then, the team can measure the effect that those changes have on the flow.” 
• You can also base your scheduling on the 80/20 model: 80 percent of an employee’s time should focus on projects, while 20 percent should comprise administrative tasks, breaks, and lunch. Ensure that the 20 percent is distributed evenly throughout the work week, so people aren’t rushed only to later spend an idle workday.
• If you’re seeking other approaches for when your team or individuals seem overallocated, work backward to detect the cause. Were task breakdowns or resource analysis projections incorrect? Do individuals lack the skills or the materials to complete the job? If the entire team is having trouble, check for bottlenecks in the overall workflow.
• Leverage a Work Management Tool: Work management tools can be analog (such as flip charts or white boards) or digital. Online tools in particular offer the advantage of consolidating information in one location and making it accessible to all team members. Tools help surface conflicting deadlines and priorities and provide visibility, overviews of resource allocation, and reminders of due dates, milestones, and more.  In a tool such as Jira, you may track actual tasks separately from the schedules and resources in a resource calendar. Resource calendars can flag issues such as employees with excessive overtime, no scheduled days off, or no scheduled vacation. In some circumstances (i.e., matrix organizations), team members may have multiple responsibilities, making it impossible for them to devote one hundred percent of their time to one project. Whether on paper or digitally, you need to track these details somewhere other than in your head.

Workload Management Tips

For all the different types of management frameworks taught in any number of programs, few courses teach workload management specifically. Moreover, primary schools, secondary schools, and universities don’t teach this skill either. 

“Schools don’t teach individuals how to manage their time,” Rosemont laments. “They hand out planners, but they don’t do an effective enough job of teaching students how to manage a project. Students don’t learn that planning is more than just putting in a due date; it is actually learning to work backward and put in some of the project tasks. That’s a basic component of time management — chunking down or planning.” 

Despite the lack of training, the soft skills of time management and prioritization are receiving more attention. Says Rosemont: “More companies are starting to understand that if they don’t do time management and prioritization well, then they won’t do the technical things well.” Time and workload management also influence employee health, which can affect a company’s bottom line as health insurance costs rise and productivity sinks. 

Both managers and team members can benefit from having good workload management skills. Managing your workload properly can increase your ability to help others and solve problems. Use the following tips to manage your own work as well as your team’s work:

• Make it your priority to spend time reflecting on upcoming projects and tasks and the human resources — including skill sets — you require to complete them. 
• Discourage long hours for the sake of long hours — quality and output are more important than overtime. 
• List short and long-term goals to add clarity to team and individual workload management efforts. Review your long-term goals each month to determine if you are on track and what in your schedule needs tweaking.
• Write a to-do list at the end of each workday to prepare for the next workday. As a manager, you can make team and individual to-do’s, and each team member can create their own daily to-do list.
• Understand the difference between important tasks and urgent tasks, and determine which you have on your work docket. Be sure that small but urgent tasks don’t eat away at time that you should also devote to tackling important tasks. 
• Make dates with yourself to work on important tasks. Big tasks, such as writing a speech for a company anniversary or documenting a workflow, can seem overwhelming, which makes them easy to procrastinate. Schedule time each week to work on big projects, and be like the ants who move the sugar pile one crystal at a time. 
• The great can be the enemy of the good. Understand where perfection is critical and where good work is adequate, and communicate these standards to your team.
• Keep social media and email distractions to a minimum. 
• Set achievable deadlines. Missed deadlines and unrealistic deadlines can demoralize a team.

How to Help Employees Manage Their Workload

Team members need to be proactive in managing their own workloads. But, the right company culture sets them up for success. Here are some ways to help your employees manage their workload: 

• Acknowledge the Limits of Time: “You can’t fit a gallon into a quart-size jar,” says Rosemont. “We are limited in our time — and more than that, in order to manage workload appropriately, we need to pay attention to our energy and our attention. I think that a lot of people say ‘yes’ too quickly. They may be people pleasers. They may feel pressure. But, I think if we take on more than we can reasonably do in the time that we have, we’re not going to manage the work effectively or efficiently. We’re going to let someone down, whether it be family, a client, or a team member. Again, we can’t fit a gallon into a quart-size jar. We don’t get 28 hours in a day. You only have the same amount of time as everybody else. People continue to take on more and say yes to more without thinking about the impact on their current workload.”
• Cultivate Your Own Adaptability and Flexibility, and Teach These Qualities to Your Team: Sometimes, you and your team have to shift priorities. Help your team to learn from changes and not resist them. As a manager, listen to team-member ideas about work and be willing to adjust your direction to accommodate better suggestions. 
• Discourage Multitasking: Once upon a time, multitasking was a desired attribute; today, it is seen as a path to inefficiency. Priority items in particular need complete dedication and focus. “We actually teach a class called ‘Multitasking Makes You Stupid,’” laughs Rosemont. “There are studies upon studies that prove that our brains cannot concentrate or focus on two thinking activities at one time. Multitasking actually wastes time. It takes longer to get work done and we make more errors and cause ourselves more stress. Multitasking messes with hormones and cortisol goes up. We need to focus on one thing, finish it, then move to the next.” 
• Encourage Self-Care: “If we’re not taking good care of ourselves and we’re depleted, we’re not going to manage our work well,” Rosemont states. “Think good hydration. We are less effective at thinking, analyzing, and decision making if we’re dehydrated. Think good nutrition. Our brains need fuel to think, be creative, and fire at optimal levels. Think movement. We’re sitting at work, hunched over, click-clicking away. We need to get up, stretch, get exercise, and get our heart rates up, so we’re more effective.” She emphasizes that people need to take breaks throughout the workday and get proper vacations “where they actually unplug” and, thereby, manage their energy. 
• Share Knowledge: Create a culture where team members want to share knowledge. That way, more staff can easily pitch in to finish jobs.

How Do You Manage a Heavy Workload Effectively?

Busy times present their own challenges, but you and your team can cope. Consider these approaches to managing heavy workloads:

• Know How to Spot Stress and Overload in Your Team: “It’s a leadership trait to know what it looks like when you’re getting the best from people,” says Rosemont. He advises that if something seems off, you should ask. Encourage teams and individuals to be honest when they are overloaded, but also look for clues yourself (for instance, individuals will probably ask for more work if they have extra time and reject new assignments if they don’t). Remember that some people won’t speak up if they’re overwhelmed or stressed, so check in with employees often. Watch for signs of stress and overload and encourage employees to gauge their own capacity and energy. Incentivize them to tell you when they are experiencing problems or are overwhelmed. Frequent or long illnesses can indicate burnout.
• Ensure That Employees Work on the Right Things: Undertasked staff members usually find work to do, but it may not be work that serves the project, company goals, or priorities. Your team may not know how to prioritize. People may start with the easy tasks, what they do well, or what they enjoy doing. They may also pick the shiny tasks that have cachet. Perfectionists may never start at all. 
• Check In with People: Rosemost suggests that regular or weekly one-on-one meetings provide the best venue for this type of discussion. People may not want to admit to being unnerved by work in a group setting. 
• Pay Attention to Headcount: Rosemont says, “I see companies that will eliminate a position and not hire a new person. They’ll just reallocate those tasks. Now, you’re taking someone who already has a full-time job and you’re adding yet another item to their plate. That may work in the short term, but if nothing comes off their plate, that won’t be sustainable in the long term.”
• Communicate Concisely: When on deadline, communicate clearly and concisely. If someone isn’t pulling their weight, tell them. 
• Learn to Say Yes, and: “Most managers don't realize that they themselves are major contributors to the flow problems,” explains Stellman. “They also don't realize that, in almost all cases, there is a huge amount of waste causing those flow problems.” The manager may stop work so the team can work on something else or may accept assorted projects and tasks for the team without giving any clear direction or priority. “We've all had that boss who refused to tell us whether project A or project B was more important. The one who says, ‘Can't you just work on both of them?’" Stellman points out. According to Rosemont, one way around these issues is to learn to say, “Yes, and…” She explains, “You can say ‘Yes, I can help with that, and what of my current workload can wait?’ rather than just saying ‘yes’ reactively without considering the consequences. The same goes for a manager agreeing to an assignment on behalf of the team. You can say, ‘Yes, and I think we can get that done with our current workload.’”
• Find Novel Approaches: When the team is stressed and overworked, it may be time to turn to them for guidance. “You might get an idea that’s outside the box — one that you wouldn’t have thought of on your own. For example, someone might recommend outsourcing or reallocating work at very little cost,” notes Rosemont. A manager might be thinking one thing, but an employee might come up with their own solution. Ask the team to be part of the solution.”
• Encourage Self-Management: Worktime isn’t just about being online and doing things, but spending time on the right things. Train employees to manage their own to-do lists and discern priorities. Self-management can include involving others in tasks, delegating, or getting clarification from a manager.
• Table Some Tasks: Rather than overburden fast and skilled workers, review what tasks or projects you can table for later. 
• Fast Track: Is your project delayed? Add underutilized employees and then consider fast-tracking tasks. In fast tracking, some dependencies are worked concurrently rather than in sequence.

What Are Workload Management Tools?

Workload management tools, whether paper or digital, help managers and their teams understand and track assignments, deadlines, and resources. Workload management tools can support the team in the following ways:

• Resource management tools can help managers see the big picture of resource allocations so that it’s easier to shuffle resources as situations change. 
• Automation software can route tasks and tickets based on employee capabilities or capacity, and automation can increase back-office output and help with prioritization and tracking. 
• A work and resource management platform can aid in anticipating problems by revealing historical patterns of peak activity for teams and for roles, such as extra staffing needs for e-commerce sites and delivery companies during the Christmas season. 
• Data from a tracking system can show employee work patterns. When discussing necessary performance improvements with an employee, you can focus on the data to keep the discussion objective and professional.

Tools can be as basic as a paper diary or planner or as sophisticated as enterprise collaboration and work management platforms. But, tools are nothing without skills. “Tools can be helpful, but we can’t see them as a magic bullet,” explains Rosemont. “If someone is overwhelmed, we can’t just get them an app or a project management software license and expect that to fix everything.” She emphasizes that systems and habits, along with good communication, impact productivity: “Tools can help communication happen conveniently. Any project management communication tool can be helpful if it allows an employee to say ‘I’m overwhelmed’ or ‘My workload is out of control.’ But, the tool itself will not fix things. We still need good foundational time management habits, good behavior, and good people skills.”

Enterprise Workload Management

IT workload automation balances IT resources to prioritize and match service demand and business requirements. Enterprise workload management performs workload automation for arrays of servers and multiple platforms and provides overviews of performance across the enterprise.

IT workload management (also called server workload management ) consists of processes for determining the proper workload distributions in order to provide optimal performance for applications and users. IT workload management gives an organization the capability to micromanage and control requests and maximize throughput. It aims to prioritize business goals, enable throughput through optimal use of IT resources in pursuit of business goals, and optimize response and turnaround time.

What Is Intelligent Workload Management?

Intelligent workload management (IWM) is an advanced application of IT workload management that models automation and workload organization for multiplatform, cloud, and hybrid systems.

Excel Workload Management Templates

Team workload management templates are available as workload management spreadsheets, lists, and matrices, and you can print them or fill them out online. The following customizable templates are free to download.

Agile Resource Planning Template

This Agile resource planning template is organized according to each project role. It displays each role holder’s name, whether their responsibilities are complete, and the start and end dates for their assignment. The information appears on a Gantt timeline.

Download Agile Resource Planning Template

Excel | Smartsheet

Human Resources Planning Template

Individual tasks may require more than one team member on different days of the week. The human resources planning template lists tasks, start and end dates, and the hours you require or can access from each resource. A pivot table totals the hours by resource for each month. 

Download Human Resources Planning Template - Excel

Project Resource Planning Template

With this project resource planning template, you can account for human, budgetary, and material resources. Use the timeline to track planning details on a monthly basis.  

Download Project Resource Planning Template

Task Priority Matrix Template

Leveraging the Eisenhower Principle of workload management, this template provides large spaces for each quadrant in the matrix. Print any of the formats to create rough outlines of your prioritization, or use the Word and Excel versions to draft your thoughts online. 

Download Task Priority Matrix Template

Excel | PDF | Word

Improve Workload Management with Smartsheet

Resource Management by Smartsheet is a powerful resource management software that helps to effectively manage the who, the what, and the when behind projects.

With Resource Management by Smartsheet, you can more easily build the best team for a project, keep project schedules and budgets on track, and confidently forecast business needs.

When teams have clarity into the work getting done and by whom, there’s no telling how much more they can accomplish in the same amount of time. Watch a free demo to learn more about Resource Management by Smartsheet.

Make better operational decisions with a powerful resource management tool.

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What is workload management with strategies & templates.

Senior Content Marketing Manager

June 28, 2023

Do you ever feel like your team’s to-do list for a client is a pile of flaming bowling pins you’re trying to juggle?

Only, you have no juggling talent whatsoever and you’ve already singed one of your eyebrows? If this scenario is relatable, you need a new workload management strategy.  

Workload management is the super glue that holds your business processes together.

Without it, your pile of paperwork would feel as tall as Mount Everest. Your project schedules would be as disorganized as your teenager’s bedroom. And your employees’ task list would be as endless as their social media feed!

But what is workload management, exactly? And how on earth do you get started implementing it in your company? 

In this article, we’ll discuss what it is, how it works, and the best workload management tool to help you implement it. Grab that fire extinguisher and drop the bowling pins—let’s get started!

What is Workload Management?

Why is workload management important, 1. utilize a workload management tool, 2. evaluate your team’s tasks and capacity, 3. use resource allocation for team workload management skills, 4. help your employees plan with workload management templates, 5. prioritize communication and collaboration, 6. track workload performance with dashboards, 7. automate work and centralize visibility, workload management faqs.

Workload management is the process of distributing and managing your team’s work efficiently in order to maximize productivity. It might be a simple idea, but don’t be fooled. If neglected, it can actually increase your existing workload. 

In fact, a 2021 National Library of Medicine study showed employees are less satisfied when they think they have an overwhelming workload. This leads to lower productivity and higher rates of burnout and turnover. 

The takeaway?

Effective workload management is a big deal!

When you handle team workload management correctly, a few wonderful things happen:

• You’ll see increased teamwork and collaboration within your organization
• Your team members will deliver high-quality work while hitting deadlines
• An employee will be productive while also satisfied with their job and responsibilities

Sounds like a dream, doesn’t it? Now, let’s look at how you can bring effective workload management into the real world.

7 Steps to Effectively Manage Workloads

Workload planning is a bit like planting ‘magic beans’ within your organization. 

At first, you might be met with a little resistance. But over time, your team members (and, by extension, your clients) will be able to reap giant benefits from the workload management ‘beanstalk’. 

Here’s a step-by-step guide to streamline the workload allocation process.

Different teams within your agency might be using entirely different sets of work tools. This makes assigning a specific task or project to team members harder than it needs to be. 

Additionally, all your company data will be scattered across tons of apps, or worse: lost in a sea of email chains. This leads to your team wasting valuable time tracking down necessary data or client requests, meaning every project will take longer than it should get done. 

The solution? Before you begin, onboard all your teams onto a single work OS (operating system). It will act as a data center for all your business processes, and as a one-stop tool to manage your employee workload.

First, let’s talk about the elephant in the room: we may be biased, but we think it’s way easier to do workload management with the right app, like ClickUp . And if you’re already using someone else, you’d be surprised at how easy it is to import all your current project tasks over to our platform.

COME ON OVER ClickUp Bonus : ClickUp makes it super easy to navigate through multiple project tasks and subtasks across several clients. Check out the quick-start guide to manage your team’s workload in no time! Plus, if you’re already using existing project management tools like Basecamp , Trello, or Asana , ClickUp lets you import data from any tool in just a minute!

Capacity planning is the foundation of effective workload management. It’s the process of figuring out the time and resources it’ll take to complete a project and to do it right, you have to align task demands with your team’s capacity.

Check out these capacity planning tools & capacity planning templates !

Let’s take a look at how to set up an agile workload management system for your team.

Create a task and time estimate for every project 

Start by listing all of the business processes that your team deals with on any given project. Then break them down by creating manageable ClickUp tasks . If a task seems complicated, break it into smaller project milestones .

Make sure you list all tasks, no matter how trivial. This can include admin tasks like inbox management, documenting processes, and even going on a daily coffee run! 

It may seem silly, but leaving out common tasks that take up daily work time is a common time management mistake. It’s far better to build in time for those coffee runs than always being 15 minutes behind schedule. 

But that’s not the only thing you need to estimate: you also need to figure out how much time each task should ideally take. This can be done in a few ways:

• Estimate based on the information in a task’s project plan  
• Use a time-tracking or project management tool
• Base  the runtime of each task on previous experiences

If you aren’t sure how much time a task should take or how long it’s taken historically, use ClickUp’s Chrome extension to track the time spent on each task.

Gauge each employee’s personal capacity

Team production is critical.

And when you think about resource management , it’s not only about distributing an equal number of tasks to employees. Each individual has a different working style and skills. Some juggle multiple technical tasks, and some cannot. 

Bonus: Resource Management Tools

You now need to figure out each team member’s workload capacity. So what’s the best way to do this? Well, with team workload management features!

The Workload View allows you to set a daily/weekly workload capacity for each individual user based on your conversations with them. You can set capacities for hours, tasks, or even Scrum story points .

Simply asking your employees for their input. Have each team member privately tell you how they feel about their individual workloads. Write down what’s on their plate, and whether they can handle more or need fewer tasks.

This way, you’ll know if your employees have an overwhelming workload, and you can redistribute the work when needed.

Be wise and prioritize !

Not all tasks are created equal. And a trip to Starbucks isn’t as important as finishing up the edits on a client’s blog post. That’s why you need to learn how to prioritize . 

Prioritization helps you ensure that, regardless of how much capacity your team has, you’re always focusing on the most important things first. It helps you expend the most energy on hard deadlines, and not stress too much over things that can be pushed.

To do prioritization right, you need to clearly communicate with your team what tasks must be completed first, which have hard deadlines, and which can be pushed if necessary. When making these decisions, we recommend using a simple points matrix with 3 possible points for the following components:

• Score this “1” if it’s a lower-level or individual requestor
• Score this “2” if it’s a team manager
• Score this “3” if it’s executive leadership
• Score this “1” if it’s a one-off project independent of your other tasks
• Sore this “2” if it’s part of a dependency, but the overall project is not deadline-focused
• Score this “3” if it’s part of a dependency, and the overall project has a hard deadline
• Score this “1” if it’s a contained project that doesn’t tie into a larger strategy
• Score this “2” if it is loosely related to larger strategy initiatives
• Score this “3” if it is integral to a larger company initiative

Use this matrix to make an objective score for the priority of each project—and make sure team members know if an assignment is flexible on deadline. 

FIRST THINGS FIRST ClickUp Bonus : Simple team workload management tools make it easy to set a Priority for every important task, ranging from ”Low” to “Urgent.” Sorting by urgency helps your team visualize their top-priority tasks. You can even create simple automations in ClickUp to set a specific priority level when a task is assigned to a certain person or reaches a due date.

After you’ve finished evaluating your team’s tasks and capacity, it’s time to distribute the work, right? But wait…not so fast.

You can’t just pick any person for any old project. Well, maybe you can . But it would be about as effective as asking the Hulk to make origami swans. 

Bonus: Resource leveling

Assign the right people the right tasks 

The key to intelligent workload management is assigning the right scope of work to the right person. Ensure that you or your project manager knows each team member’s skill sets, temperament, availability, and strengths before the job scheduling begins.

For instance, if one of your employees is great at fine details but struggles with high-pressure deadlines, they probably aren’t the best choice for a fire drill project. But likewise, your big-picture creative thinker may not make the best copyeditor. 

Take each individual’s unique strengths into consideration, then assign the highest priority tasks first. Once that’s taken care of, you can assign the rest (don’t worry, you’ll get to go on your Starbucks run … eventually).

Want to get extra manager brownie points? While assigning work to a team member, let them know why you picked them for that task. This makes their work more meaningful and engaging. 

The more confident your employees are with their tasks, the higher their productivity will be. It’s that simple!

Create realistic deadlines 

Once you’ve assigned all your tasks, you have to create deadlines for them. When you’re first starting out with workload planning, focus on making these deadlines achievable!  

Even with the most intuitive apps like ClickUp, you should expect a bit of a break-in period while your team gets the hang of the new workflows. Make your deadlines for the first round as forgiving as possible.

Use the information you gathered on previous task time estimates, employee capacity, and known skill sets to make your best estimate of how long each assignment should take. Then add a bit more time to account for unforeseen circumstances. 

When employees crush these deadlines, it’ll build confidence: in themselves, and in your awesome new system. Having the right tool to edit workloads—and doing so quickly—is essential to productivity for any team leads.

TEAMWORK > TALENT ClickUp Bonus : Assigning tasks in ClickUp is simple! Just create a task and assign it to one or multiple employees or Teams . After distributing the tasks, set the start dates and due dates for each team member. Worried about managing conflicting deadlines? Visualize your team’s tasks through the Timeline View to balance everyone’s start and due dates, all from a single project timeline .

Ok, so you’ve identified your tasks and how long they’ll take, and you know which employees are responsible for what. Autopilot from here on out, right?

Not so fast!

If this model of workflow planning is new to your team, they (and you!) may need a little extra support to get organized. And even if the workflow isn’t new, the more mature your workload management model becomes, the more your process should become templated. 

Templates do two things for workload management: They help teams new to the process get up to speed faster, and they help mature teams automate more of the good stuff they know is working.

Here are five workload templates to get you started:

1. ClickUp Employee Workload Template

The ClickUp Employee Workload Template allows team members and managers to determine their daily and weekly workload capacity, and see how much work is assigned to each employee.

2. ClickUp Schedule Blocking Template

The ClickUp Schedule Blocking Template lets team members monitor and visualize their past, present, and upcoming workload activities utilizing the time-blocking technique .

3. ClickUp Simple Task Management Template

Want to simplify your teams’ task lists ? Try the ClickUp Simple Task Management Template to give your employees the opportunity to get a personalized daily list of tasks, including work, personal projects, PTO, etc.

4. ClickUp Employee and Manager 1-on-1 Template

Workload management starts with employees understanding what’s expected of them. That means you, as the team lead, need to clearly definite production goals, time management , and project prioritization. The best way to get your individual contributors on the same page is with a detailed 1-on-1 document that tracks all of these aspects.

5. ClickUp Meeting Tracker Template

An efficient workload starts with organizing your daily work tasks. That’s why it’s so important to use a template to track your meetings so you know where your time is going and what you can do to help your workload.

TEMPLATES, TEMPLATES, TEMPLATES! ClickUp Bonus : We’re big fans of templates to keep your team on track and organized. Want to see more? Check out our full project management template roundup or visit the ClickUp Template Center for hundreds of ways to get started faster!

While we might have forgotten how to solve our 8th-grade calculus papers, here’s one formula you must commit to memory:

Workload management = Stress management

The less stress we face, the more manageable our workload becomes. So what’s the biggest source of workplace stress?

A survey from Wrike found it’s creating eight-character passwords with one numeral, capital letter, and symbol. Well, that and a lack of communication and collaboration .  

Even good changes can cause stress when they’re brand new. After implementing your new task management system, make sure you check in with your team regularly to ensure they feel supported. 

Institute regular team check-ins

Especially while this process is still new, make a conscious effort to schedule one-on-one meetings with your team members. Communication is key for change management , and getting your employees to embrace new processes. For a successful change management process use the questions below to get your teams’ honest feedback:

• Is your current workload realistic, and if not, how could it be changed? 
• Are there roadblocks preventing you from completing current projects? 
• How confident are you about meeting upcoming deadlines?
• What are your biggest challenges with the new system?
• Do you have any suggestions or ideas on how to improve processes ?

Try out these change management tools !

Prepare for change with succession planning templates !

Note that adding more meetings to your and your employees’ schedules may slow productivity—the exact opposite of what you’re going for! So think of ways to make these check-ins as convenient and efficient as possible.

Consider doing them over Slack, for example, so team members can update you when it’s convenient for them with limited interruption to their workflow. Some employees are never going to feel completely comfortable venting to their boss —and that’s OK! 

Have a weekly team standup where everyone can come together to share strategies and air grievances. And consider utilizing an anonymous participation app like ScatterSpoke so everyone can share their feelings in a low-pressure way. 

Emphasize collaboration, not interruptions

There’s nothing more annoying than sending an important message to your employee, and not hearing from them for hours, right? I mean, what part of “Where’s my latte?” did they not get?! 

Jokes aside, unattended messages slow down your progress, making it difficult for you to manage your workload. When designing your workload management process, make sure the focus stays on breaking down silos, not building new ones. 

Create team tasks so everyone has visibility into what their other team members are up to. If they can look statuses up without having to interrupt someone else’s workflow? Even better. 

YOU CAN ASSIGN COMMENTS?! ClickUp Bonus : Use ClickUp to leave a comment on every task. Employees are notified instantly, so they can’t make up any excuses for not seeing your request. And if you need the person to do something urgently, convert your comment into a task and assign it to them. Employees will be notified and the comment pops up in their task list. Once they’re done, they can click the Resolve checkbox to show you they’ve completed the task. Voilà.

Workflow management is a constant cycle. You’ll need to go through reps of each of these steps for continued improvement. But how are you supposed to measure if it’s working?

Well, there’s always the hard way. You could keep careful spreadsheets of each complaint, snafu, and deadline met (or missed). During each new task cycle, you could look for patterns and common sticking points, try the ol’ guess and check the approach to changing things to see if it helps. 

Ready for the easy way? 

ClickUp’s Dashboard can serve as your mission control center where you monitor and track how well your team is managing their workload. You can populate each Dashboard with tons of Custom Widgets such as charts, calculations, text blocks, and more, with each one pulling in specific data from across your team! 

However, that isn’t all. You also get access to tons of task reporting widgets for detailed insights on how your team is dealing with task management. For example, you can use:

• Velocity Charts : Determine the completion rate for a set of tasks and better estimate your team’s actual workload capacity
• Cumulative Flow Charts : Check how well your project is progressing and identify bottlenecks that could have resulted from poor workload allocation
• Goals : Set and track business goals, objectives, and OKRs

ClickUp Bonus: Another great way to monitor your team’s workload allocation is by using the Box View. It visualizes what an employee is working on as well as their current work capacity. You can easily identify who’s overloaded and reassign tasks to those who can take on more.

BOX IT UP ClickUp Bonus : Another great way to monitor your team’s workload allocation is by using the Box View. It visualizes what an employee is working on as well as their current work capacity. You can easily identify who’s overloaded and reassign tasks to those who can take on more.

After you work out any kinks in the workflow in the first few cycles, look for more opportunities to further improve your efficiency. 

Don’t skip this step!

There will come a time during a project life cycle when your team will have to deal with a heavy workload. Workload management helps you be proactive with these time-saving strategies now, so you save yourself the stress later.

Automate repetitive tasks

The easiest way to lighten the actual workload is by identifying mundane tasks that can be done automatically. In fact, your organization can save up to 2 hours a day through workload management automation! These tools can automate the bulk of task management processes.

Sure, you can always pick and choose automation tools off the shelf. But why clutter up your team’s applications when you can invest in an all-in-one workload management software that’s chock full of automations? 

Say you want to create an automation that lets an employee know right away when they have a new urgent task to complete. Thankfully, you’re a brilliant decision-maker and decided to use ClickUp for workload management! 

All you have to do is use the automation, “ Whenever a task is given an ‘Urgent’ priority, then the task changes to ‘Open’ automatically.” Bam. As soon as a task is tagged urgent, your employee will know about it. 

Choose from a list of 50+ in-built automations or just create your own! 

Use a Kanban Board for a different perspective

A Kanban Board is a compact, yet powerful tool to ensure that your business processes are running smoothly. How does it work?

It visualizes your project workflow and shows you the status of each task in a neat physical or virtual task board . Your team can then drag and drop tasks into relevant status columns as they progress, like this: 

That way your entire team can see the project’s progress in real-time. This workload management process gives everyone involved a better idea of how long a project takes, and who is responsible for each part of it. 

The project manager should also identify which tasks are stagnant on the Kanban board, which indicates bottlenecks in the process. They can then allocate a resource (or a team member) to help them resolve the task.

CUSTOMIZE YOUR VIEW HOW YOU WANT ClickUp Bonus: We offer a Kanban board for project management , Gantt charts to visualize dependencies, and other views so you can pick the perspective that works best for your team. Use Flexible Views to visualize tasks in a task list, Kanban board, or Timeline View. 

What are common workload management challenges?

Workload management challenges can vary depending on the industry, company size, and individual responsibilities. However, some common challenges include:

• Overwhelming workload : It can be challenging to manage a workload that is too heavy or demanding, leading to stress, burnout, and reduced productivity.
• Lack of prioritization : Without clear priorities, it can be difficult to determine which tasks are most important and how to allocate resources effectively.
• Poor time management : Time management techniques are essential for workload management, but many individuals struggle with procrastination, distractions, and other productivity traps.
• Inadequate resources : A lack of resources, such as staffing, technology, or budget, can hinder an individual’s ability to manage their workload effectively.
• Scope creep : Expectations can change or expand beyond what was initially agreed upon, leading to an increase in workload without a corresponding increase in resources.

Who should manage workload planning?

Depending on how your org is structured, your workload management may be solo or in a group. 

If your company is super siloed and departments seem to operate like their own mini-companies, it probably makes the most sense to be a lone wolf in your planning. However, teams that are highly collaborative and frequently work with others to complete projects probably need everyone to put their heads together. 

What are the benefits of effective workload management?

Workload management tools help you see everything that’s going on within the company. And it gives your team that same visibility! 

Seeing where projects are at can eliminate communication issues and project siloes. And most importantly? It helps keep your team on the same page and working efficiently. And that means more happy clients who receive their projects on time. 

Workload management systems also:

• Ensure that no project resource (software, time, employee skills) goes to waste
• Give you a crystal clear view of how your project is progressing
• Show which business process is slowing down your work
• Inform you of due dates and project budgets
• Close communication gaps between different departments

Implement Effective Workload Management With ClickUp

Workload management is like a first-aid kit for your organization. It’s a great way to safeguard your team’s well-being when they’re dealing with a heavy workload. Not only that, it gives them an instant productivity boost too!

However, manually managing workloads is a hard pill to swallow. You need a dedicated project management tool—that’s not just convenient for skilled project managers—to do all the heavy lifting like workload distribution, tracking team progress, creating reports, and more.

Fortunately, tools like ClickUp have tons of features, including the Timeline View, Workload View, and Box View that make this process go down smoothly. 

With ClickUp’s free plan you get unlimited users and unlimited projects. With the paid plan you get unlimited storage and unlimited integrations to help you with your team’s workload.

So sign up for ClickUp , and diagnose and fix your productivity issues today!

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Your window into your team’s workload

Make sure team members aren’t overwhelmed or underworked and projects are properly staffed—all in one pane. Introducing Workload, available with Asana Advanced.

Loved by more than a million teams in 190 countries

See who’s staffed across initiatives

Manage your team’s workload in real time. Get a complete picture of everyone’s capacity at a glance, and easily drill into tasks for additional detail.

Promote balance, not burnout

Assign a value to tasks, like hours or points, so you can estimate the effort they require and see who has too much or not enough work.

Rebalance work—without heavy lifting

Just drag and drop tasks to reassign and reschedule them. Prevent burnout and boredom, and make sure your team gets the right work done at the right time.

Choose task count, hours, or points to estimate the effort tasks require. Or create a new field with another value. Workload analysis made easy.

Set capacity

Decide the maximum amount of work your team and individuals can take on per week. If anyone is over capacity, the graph will turn red.

Get a holistic view of your team’s workload. Schedule tasks or revise current schedules to make the best use of your team’s time and help everyone meet deadlines.

Mission control for your projects and teams

Say goodbye to manually measuring progress. Instantly gauge how your key initiatives and team are doing with Portfolios and Workload, available with Asana Advanced.

Workload Features

Get insight across people and projects

Workload includes everything you need to see how much work team members have, spot potential snags, and adjust assignments and tasks as needed.

• Option to drill into tasks for more info
• Project milestones viewable
• Expanded timeline for planning
• Capacity trendline by person
• Hover states for individual effort stats
• Drag-and-drop task scheduling
• Multi-select bulk rescheduling
• Filtered views by role and person
• Effort in hours, points, or any value
• Customized capacity thresholds per person
• Assign new work with the unscheduled tasks pane

See how Workload can help your team

Who has too much work? Too little? Are projects on track? Get immediate answers, and keep your team ahead of demand with Workload, available with Asana Advanced.

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Workload Management: The Complete Guide with Tips & Templates

We all know the feeling of being overwhelmed at work. Trying to keep up with a never-ending to-do list can be daunting and lead to burnout. Therefore, learning about workload management can be useful in helping you to use your time and organize your tasks better. When done correctly, it can lead to increased productivity, less stress, and improved work-life balance.

What’s more, managing your team’s workload can be especially challenging when team members are remote or in different time zones. In this article, we’ll also share some of the best practices and tools for effectively managing your workload across hybrid teams.

What is Workload Management?

Workload management refers to prioritizing, distributing, and effectively managing your team’s workload. The purpose of such a system is to make sure that the work is delivered on time while ensuring that team members can maintain a healthy work-life balance.

Managing the team’s workload effectively focuses on your team’s sense of urgency, progress, performance, and well-being. It is a process that involves identifying and mapping out the workload, prioritizing and assigning work to individual team members, and managing by keeping the workload within the team, delegating, and pacing. A workload management process allows you to allocate work among your team, considering the amount of work and each team member’s capacity.

To implement such a process, you need to know what a healthy workload looks like. Since different people have different work styles and needs, it is important to understand what work overload looks like and why it is damaging.

Importance of Workload Management

As a business, you will constantly change how you do things, which can make it difficult to track who is doing what. The importance of workload management comes in here. With workload management, you’ll be able to track what’s been done and what still needs to be done.

Furthermore, it will address the following to improve the team’s delivery:

• Allocating work according to the optimal capacity of team members.
• Effectively utilizing the resources such as money, time, and capacity of the project.
• Effective management of time and workload expectations.
• Making sure that projects are on track and within budget to optimize project schedules.

Benefits of workload management include,

• Strategically distributing the work to increase your team’s productivity.
• Ensuring a fair distribution of work.
• Supporting capacity planning and resource utilization to boost employee performance.
• Reducing stress and preventing burnout.
• Improving the work-life balance of employees, which contributes to better employee retention.

How to Manage Team Workloads Effectively

1. put together a list of projects and tasks your team has to deliver.

Chances are your team is working on multiple projects that are the sole responsibility of your team or are cross-functional ones they are contributing to. If so, there may be various tasks and deliverables where the scope may range from small to large.

As a first step, it is best to create a checklist that includes every project, task, and deliverable to gauge the amount of work that needs to be completed. Then using a mind map or a roadmap, you can map and brainstorm project tasks, milestones, and deliverables.

• Ready to use
• Fully customizable template
• Get Started in seconds

2. Figure out the capacity of each of your team members

It could be that your team’s work is dispersed in different channels, making it harder to track. This also makes it difficult to understand the amount of work each person has to complete and if they have enough capacity to accomplish all assigned tasks on time.

Initiating the planning process to manage the workload with a team-based org structure can help you to understand the team’s capacity, gaps, and areas for growth. Use the structure to define your team members' roles, responsibilities, and routines. Compared to other organizational structures, a team structure can enhance productivity, transparency, and performance by focusing on coordination, cooperation, and problem-solving.

3. Break down the projects into manageable tasks or activities

After assessing the amount of work and the team’s capacity, you may now have a clear picture of the overall workload you need to complete. Now it’s time to break down the overall project and deliverables into manageable tasks and subtasks. It is also essential to note down and track dependencies so that the team members understand which tasks they need to start, complete, and when.

It would be best to involve the team members at this stage of planning. Asking for their input and feedback on the possible completion of the tasks by the given deadlines and adjusting accordingly will help avoid bottlenecks, delays, and misunderstandings.

To start breaking the project and deliverables into more manageable steps, you can use a work breakdown structure (WBS).

4. List down the deliverables according to priority, importance, and urgency

Prioritizing urgent and vital tasks are essential. This should be done parallel with breaking down tasks into manageable chunks as you can better schedule the workload, considering dependencies and other factors.

Use a priority matrix like the Eisenhower matrix to sort tasks as do, schedule, delegate, and delete. By doing so, you can prioritize required tasks, manage time, and ensure that the entire team is on the same page.

5. Identify and allocate resources and workloads

Now that you have an overall idea about everything your team needs to do, start figuring out the required resources and who will work on which task and when.

Resource and workload allocation are crucial in optimally assigning and identifying available resources while making sure that team members manage their workload without being overwhelmed. To start, first, assign the work with the highest priority. Do take into account their skills, experience, and, most importantly, availability. Factoring all these will help assign work to the right people. Let them know you are giving them a particular task so they can provide feedback, set expectations, and iron out any issues from the beginning.

A Gantt chart or resource schedule would help map and plan resource utilization, while setting up a Kanban board from the get-go can help track each task’s progress.

6. Follow up with team members

Once the resources and workloads are assigned, don’t forget to check in to see how each team member is fairing. It’s essential to keep yourself and others updated on how the work is progressing and to see whether they require additional support.

Perhaps one important task to undertake before team members start their work would be to introduce them to different work management concepts and encourage them to develop their own work management systems. You can also teach them effective time management strategies.

7. Adjust workloads if necessary

See how the work is progressing and adjust if necessary. If you reassign team members or workloads, explain the reasoning behind your actions. Formalize the changes through a change control process where requests for changes are captured, evaluated, approved, or rejected.

8. Monitor work progress and schedules

Monitor the progress and schedules to see if everything is going according to plan and if the systems you have implemented are working effectively.

Useful Workload Management Tools

To-do lists.

To-do lists are an ideal place to start your workload management process. List everything your team has to do to capture all in one place.

Priority Matrix

The priority matrix is considered as a valuable time and project management tool. It helps you to identify and focus on the most critical and urgent tasks to keep your workload on track. Though there are several priority matrices, the most popular are Eisenhower Priority Matrix and Action Priority Matrix.

Mind maps are useful in brainstorming and putting together to-do lists, concepts, projects, tasks, and deliverables in an attractive graphical representation.

Project roadmaps are ideal for getting an overview of all major elements related to a project, including milestones, deliverables, and tasks.

Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)

A commonly used tool to break down tasks into manageable chunks, WBS can help to boost productivity. Check out Work Breakdown Structure Templates for more templates.

Organization Structures

There are several types of organizational structures. The best suited for workload management would be a team-based org structure. However, you may need to put your own spin on it. We have put one together to get you started. To learn about organization structures, look into our post about 7 Types of Organizational Structures .

Flowcharts can help in the planning of any project. Use a cross-functional flowchart or a simple one to sketch your workload and processes.

Kanban Boards

Primarily used in agile teams, the Kanban board is a helpful tool to visualize work and maximize efficiency. Look for more information on How to Better Manage Your Projects with Kanban Boards .

Gantt Charts

A Gantt chart’s primary purpose is to list the tasks against the timeline. It is also helpful in allocating resources and helping teams to meet deadlines. To learn more about resource management, go through The Complete Guide to Effective Resource Management .

Workload Management in Hybrid Teams

In a hybrid team environment, team members are scattered, with some working in the office and others working remotely. There are many benefits to having a hybrid team. They are,

• Cost-effectiveness as you do not have to pay as many overheads.
• More flexibility than traditional teams. This can benefit team members who have other commitments outside of work, such as family or other hobbies.
• More creative as hybrid teams have access to a broader range of perspectives, ideas, and capacity.
• More productive as geographical boundaries do not restrict members.

However, despite the many benefits, hybrid teams have their fair share of challenges. These include,

• Team members being in different locations, which can lead to difficulties in communication resulting in misunderstandings and miscommunications.
• Time zone differences can make it difficult to coordinate meetings and deadlines, leading to frustration and confusion among team members.
• Social interaction is an integral part of work for many people. When team members are in different locations, there may be less opportunity for social interaction, leading to feelings of isolation and loneliness.

With some members not being physically visible at all working hours, it is easy to doubt their productivity and how they are spending their time. Micro-managing and messaging team members at every step are time-consuming and such mistrust can lead to less than stellar work relationships, creating issues within the team.

A solution to all these issues is establishing a workload management system . Obtain the buy-in of your teammates, establish the work that requires to be completed, assess productivity statistics, and allocate tasks accordingly.

Impact of Work Overload

Work overload happens when a person is burdened with too much work causing them to neglect their personal life to complete their work. There are many signs that your workload is getting too heavy.

A few signs include:

• Exhaustion, feeling burnt out, and having a hard time focusing on your work. If that’s the case, you are likely overdoing it.
• Making mistakes without even realizing it.
• It could be you are the only person capable of doing specific tasks, which means that the company is assigning you more work than you could personally handle. It could also be that the company encourages a ‘long-hour’ culture. Not enough hours in the day to complete the assigned tasks to meet deadlines leads to extra work hours or bringing work home.
• Feeling overwhelmed, stressed, and easily agitated.
• The quality of the work you perform is poor.
• Losing track of progress and work leads to missed deadlines, resulting in unhappy clients.

Work overload can negatively impact the health of employees, workplace morale, relationships, and employee retention and lead to costly errors and conflicts.

Tips for Managing Your Workload Successfully

The following tips will be beneficial when managing workloads in hybrid or remote environments.

Take time to plan

Don’t rush the planning process. Take time to go through each aspect. Estimate the tasks at hand and plan your capacity accordingly.

Set SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) and provide ample time for feedback, sick days, and vacations when setting deadlines. Make to-do lists, break down more extensive deliverables and tasks into subtasks, and distribute tasks evenly among team members. Also, make sure to consider the different working styles of your teammates, as that will play into how the work progresses.

Make sure that the deadlines you set are achievable

When setting deadlines, discuss with your team to understand their availability and how they work. Set deadlines that have some flexibility if schedules need to be shifted due to unavoidable circumstances. Communicate the established timelines ahead of time.

Prioritizing work is key

Give special attention to prioritizing work according to urgency and importance. Assign these prioritized work correctly, taking into account the right set of skills, experience, and the ability to deliver.

Minimize administrative work where possible

There is a given amount of administrative work at any workplace or position. However, the trick lies in blending administrative tasks with other more exciting work and distributing such tasks evenly among team members.

Consider establishing a resource management strategy

Your team members are amongst the most valuable resources. Therefore, having a resource management strategy that provides a definitive guide on implementing the right processes to optimize the ability of your team and the tools at hand is essential.

When developing a resource management strategy, make sure to avoid multitasking and include detailed information about the roles and responsibilities of each team member.

Regularly follow up with your team

Do regular follow-ups with your team to track time and the team’s capacity. Are they progressing in line with the timeline? Do they have enough capacity and time? Are they overworked, or do they require support from others? What issues have they run into? These are some of the questions that you could answer and solve with regular follow-ups to ensure effective work management.

Stress on the importance of work-life balance

Discuss and speak with your teammates about work-life balance. If necessary, organize workshops and training sessions to help them better manage their work. Allow room for flexibility, vacations, and sick days to ensure that your team will decompress and enjoy a relatively stress-free work environment.

Establish several modes of communication

Communication is key to a successful work-life. Everyone should be kept informed about important details of the workplace and projects. Maintain frequent and open communication among team members. To that end, have several modes of communication to ensure that each of your team members is reachable during working hours.

Have one-to-one meetings at regular intervals. This will help to ensure engagement while allowing you to follow up on the work and the well-being of your team.

Create and maintain a workspace where team members can easily access their work

Create and maintain a shared workspace that all your team members can easily access. The workspace should include information about the projects, workload, recent updates, changes, roles and responsibilities, and any other information relevant to your team’s work.

Emphasize maintaining an open and honest environment

Trust and integrity are essential qualities to nurture. Encourage an environment where teammates feel comfortable to be open and honest about their work, abilities, and issues.

Create templates for repetitive tasks

For repetitive tasks, take time to create templates to help achieve work goals quickly without reinventing the wheel. This can be mainly applied to administrative duties.

Creately to Manage Your Workload

Workload management can play a significant role in maintaining your personal and professional health. Creately provides a host of tools to get you started.

• Powerful documentation capabilities include doc blocks and attachments and image attachments to create reports and presentations.
• Built-in project management tools including Kanban boards, timelines, multi-role workflows, visual prioritization tools to enable any kind of workflow.
• Whiteboard and freehand drawing tool to get your planning process set up and started quickly
• Multiple templates and tools to plug and play, including flowcharts, WBS, Gantt charts, priority matrixes, etc.
• Multiple access and role levels to manage, share, edit and review, along with multiplayer capabilities to collaborate in real-time.
• Data, note, and task panels to house information, assign roles and responsibilities, and track the progress.
• Integration with other platforms with 2-way syncing to manage data efficiently.
• Comment on anything, with context. Full comment threads and discussions for async collaboration.
• Spotlight and presentation mode to conduct interactive and dynamic presentations right on the canvas.

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Amanda Athuraliya is the communication specialist/content writer at Creately, online diagramming and collaboration tool. She is an avid reader, a budding writer and a passionate researcher who loves to write about all kinds of topics.

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Workload Management: Ultimate Guide to Efficiency

Lucija Bakić

April 12, 2024

Workload management  balances tasks evenly across employees according to availability, skill sets, and overall business goals.

Without it, your business will be sinking time into unprofitable projects, burning out key employees, and losing its competitive edge. How do you avoid this? With the best practices for improving business-wide efficiency and productivity discussed in this guide.

Key takeaways

• Workload management includes a set of business processes for improved time management, balanced task lists, and healthy project life cycles.
• The benefits of optimizing your workload management process include reduced employee stress, increased productivity and efficiency, and improved project delivery.
• Best practices for project managers are: effective delegation and resource scheduling , task and project prioritization, managing expectations, and communication and transparency.

What Is Workload Management?

Workload management is the process of scheduling tasks across one or multiple project teams to promote achievable deadlines and balanced workload capacity. It includes:

• Planning work
• Prioritizing essential activities
• Organizing task lists

The main goal of workload management is to ensure that the entire team has just the right amount of work assigned. Too much and you risk burnout; too little, and you might be underutilizing your employees. This can lead to decreased job satisfaction, disengagement, and ultimately, employee attrition (which can be quite costly for your business — according to research by American Progress, up to 20% of an employee’s annual salary). Learn more about the importance of scheduling teams for billable and non-billable tasks .

The Importance of Workload Management

According to research by Gallup, engaged employees are more focused and efficient. They are better aligned with customer needs, and they pay closer attention to processes, standards, and systems. Collectively, the behaviors of highly engaged teams contribute to a 23% increase in profitability. Workload management helps increase engagement by:

• Combatting unrealistic deadlines across numerous projects
• Ensuring that individual workloads are appropriate
• Improving communication and progress visibility
• Reducing employee stress by clarifying actual workload
• Organizing opportunities for skill building and personal projects

Ultimately, proper workload management not only supports team productivity but also plays a crucial role in retaining top talent. This helps your agency stay resilient and sustainable, providing a competitive edge in your industry. 

Workload Management vs Resource Management

Workload management  is a narrower term that encompasses the management of human resources within a business. It involves distributing and managing tasks in a way that prevents workload issues and delays in project milestones. Resource management  is a broader approach that involves the management of all resources within an organization . This includes human resources, finances, facilities and equipment, and other resources depending on your industry and company.  Another important distinction is between capacity planning vs. resource planning , where capacity planning is seen as a broader, strategic process. In comparison, resource planning is more tactical and concerned with day-to-day processes.

Main Challenges in Workload Management

Some of the main challenges of workload management include: Understanding current business availability, efficiently managing resources for long-term competitiveness, implementing effective change management, and tracking progress accurately with KPIs.

1. Understanding Team Capacity

Identifying a team’s capacity means understanding what each employee can do, when they’re available, and how to best utilize them to achieve business priorities. Calculating utilization rates is a popular way to gauge the productivity of a specific department or employee.

Visualize and forecast your utilization rate with Productive

The utilization rate is the ratio of billable vs non-billable hours spent on work to the total available working hours. It can be measured across various metrics, such as seniority, department, or specific projects, to bring more nuance to your insights. Keep in mind that both billable and non-billable hours are valuable for your workforce planning. Billable hours bring direct profit, but non-billable hours include crucial activities such as:

• Skill building
• Administrative tasks
• Project pitching

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2. Managing Resource Pools

 Efficient management of your resource pool includes:

• Operational or day-to-day management : Operational management involves scheduling your human resources, managing project schedules, and preventing uneven workload distribution on a daily basis (learn more about creating a resource management plan ).
• Strategic or long-term management : Strategic management includes forward and proactive thinking, considering the future needs of your business and how to achieve them by leveraging your human resources. This includes various strategic HR planning tasks such as succession planning, reskilling or upskilling, and talent retention.

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3. Adapting to Project Changes

According to a PMI report, nearly 50% of projects experience scope creep. Two of the main reasons for this usually include:

• Setting and maintaining unrealistic expectations
• A lack of ability to gauge the effect of scope changes

Unrealistic expectations might be caused by a lack of historical data on previous projects, a misunderstanding of project complexity, or a desire to overdeliver to satisfy clients.  The other is usually caused by a lack of a reliable solution for tracking real-time data. For example, some resource management software (such as Productive ) offers financial forecasting capabilities.

Get real-time data on essential metrics for capacity planning

This means that you can view the effect your workload allocation has on financial metrics, such as revenue and profit margins, across the entire project duration. This can be an invaluable tool for making informed business decisions.

4. Tracking Progress Accurately

Two key aspects of accurate project progress tracking include having a reliable system for real-time data and understanding which KPIs are crucial for specific initiatives . For example:

• For initiatives aimed at building employee satisfaction , key performance indicators (KPIs) might include employee engagement scores, turnover rates, and feedback from satisfaction surveys.
• For productivity improvements, KPIs could encompass metrics such as output per hour, efficiency ratios, and the percentage of projects delivered on time.
• For enhancing project performance , relevant KPIs might involve milestone achievement rates, budget adherence levels, scope change frequency, and overall project completion times.

Setting target goals for each of your KPIs is equally important for ensuring you’re on the right track.

The Role of Resource Managers

The duties of a resource manager are complementary to the managerial roles of a project manager. The resource manager role is more people-oriented — it focuses on managing human resources, finances, and facilities across multiple projects.  The project manager role is project-oriented — it focuses on managing projects from initiation to completion, ensuring the quality of deliverables, and communicating with stakeholders. While project managers usually focus on one or more specific projects, the resource manager works on an organizational level. They perform workforce planning to ensure the business can operate sustainably in the long term.

What Is Workload Overload? Main Causes

Workload overload occurs when the demands placed on an employee exceed their capacity to complete their tasks effectively. This can involve too many tasks, tasks that exceed employee capability or experience, or unrealistic deadlines. However, it can also happen when the workload is moderate or well-suited to capabilities. For example, even light workloads might become heavy if employees are disengaged or unmotivated. Disengagement can be caused by:

• Long-term work on repetitive tasks
• Loss of perspective for the overarching business goals
• Lack of personal progression within the company
• Inadequate compensation

According to statistics by McKinsey, employee disengagement and attrition can cause companies $1.1 billion in lost company value over five years. This is why it’s so important to recognize the main symptoms of workload overload early, including:

The Main Symptoms of Workload Overload

• Working late hours
• Overtime work
• Drop in quality
• Missed deadlines
• Chronic fatigue
• Decrease in communication
• Health issues and burnout

How to Prevent Burnout

Burnout is one of the most damaging consequences of heavy workloads. Unlike workplace stress, which is usually temporary, burnout results from long-term issues with overwhelming or unbalanced workloads. Unlike stress, burnout is also more challenging to resolve succcessfully. According to the BusinessWire, employee workload is responsible for up to half of annual workforce turnover in 50% of businesses. Some of the main strategies for preventing burnout include:

• A strength-based approach to the employee lifecycle to foster a culture of development
• Focusing on creating a healthy environment by monitoring management behavior (have you heard the phrase: people don’t quit jobs, they quit managers?)
• Upskilling bosses to provide meaningful feedback for nurturing employee growth
• Aligning professional growth with personal wellbeing

Consideration should also be given to managers, who are highly susceptible to burnout. The signs and preventative strategies outlined above are essential for their personal development and well-being.

Strategies for Managing Team Workload

Managing your workload effectively involves key components such as:

• Effective task scheduling and delegation
• Strategic prioritization, especially for complex projects
• Managing client expectations 
• Team communication and transparency

1. Delegating Tasks 

Effective workload management begins with task scheduling and delegation. This includes identifying what needs to be done and when and organizing this into a clear resourcing schedule .

Manage your current workload with Productive’s Resourcing module

Some of the strategies used include:

• Identifying strengths and weaknesses : Understand your team’s abilities and assign tasks to employees who’ll perform them best.
• Define your expectations:  Clearly communicate the task’s objectives, deadlines, and expected results to avoid confusion.
• Provide support and feedback : Offer assistance and constructive feedback to ensure that tasks are going according to plan — but make sure not to micromanage the process.

2. Prioritizing Crucial Work

Strategic prioritization is key, especially considering that project managers can handle from five to ten projects simultaneously (RGPM). It’s essential to determine urgent tasks or strategic workloads, but also to identify which projects are your top priority.  While it might be tempting to commit equally to each project, this is more likely to lead to burnout than quality delivery. Overservicing can be a big issue — according to PR Week, nearly one in five agencies are overservicing every single account. This can stretch your human resources thin and negatively impact your profitability.

We ended up terminating contracts with two of our oldest clients after only a few months of using Productive. We thought that we were at least at zero with them, or that we had some small earnings, but it turned out that we were losing money because the money they paid us did not cover salaries, fixed overhead per hour, and variable overhead per hour.

Ilija Brajković, CEO of Kontra Agency 

 Learn more about the specifics of handling resourcing for multiple projects .

3. Managing Client Expectations

Setting clear expectations from the outset is important for managing various situations that may occur during the project’s progress. To give an example, one of the weak points of website project management is the maintenance phase. Clients and service providers might have different notions of what this may include — bug fixes vs implementing new features. Having to commit to a project you thought was completed can significantly impact your ability to take on new projects that bring in business profits. Another critical aspect is promoting mutual transparency. If clients have a clear understanding of your project tasks and the progress that has been made, they will be more willing to compromise and discuss changes. Workload management tools that provide task transparency with client access can help you achieve proactive communication, saving you future time and trouble.

Productive’s Gantt charts provide full transparency into your project progress 

4. Effective Team Communication

Strategies for effective and transparent communication extend to your project teams as well as clients.  Providing a clear overview of:

• Employee workload across a project
• Who is responsible for what
• How each task affects the overall project milestones

Can help project teams and employees self-manage and maintain engagement and productivity. It also reduces stress, as everyone is clear on their obligations and how to complete them effectively. Some valuable features of team workload management tools that can help you achieve this are status updates on tasks, automatic notifications, managing updates through the comment history, organizing work through project boards, and more.

Gather all communication in one place with Productive’s project and task management

Tips and Tricks for Personal Workload Management

One part of a manager’s work is to ensure that the workload management process is smooth for individual teams. However, applying these strategies to personal workflows is the other equally important part. Some tips for more efficient personal workloads include: 

• Healthy work-life balance : Prioritize your health and personal time just as you would work tasks to prevent burnout and maintain overall well-being.
• Blocking out time : Dedicate specific periods for focused work, allowing for more efficient task completion and reducing distractions.
• Set realistic deadlines : Estimate the time needed for tasks accurately, considering potential obstacles to ensure deadlines are achievable.
• Two-minute rule : Immediately tackle tasks that can be completed in two minutes or less to reduce your to-do list and maintain momentum.
• Task batching : Group similar activities together to minimize context switching, enhancing focus and productivity.
• Pomodoro Technique : Work in short, intense bursts followed by brief breaks to maintain high concentration levels and avoid fatigue.
• Utilize time tracking : Monitor how you spend your time to identify areas for improvement and better allocate your hours.

Time Tracking – Best Practices

Find out how to address the main challenges of time tracking with Marcel Petitpas from Parakeeto and Productive.

Strategic Workload Planning

Strategic workload management is different from day-to-day workload management. It includes looking further into the future to ensure that your business can meet potential customer needs. The top three strategies that it includes are:

• Needs Forecasting : Analyzing market trends and customer feedback to predict future demand and prepare accordingly.
• Capacity Building : Investing in resources and training to expand your team’s abilities and increase your capacity to take on future projects.
• Alignment with Business Goals : Ensuring that workload management strategies are in sync with the overarching objectives of the business.

1. Needs Forecasting

Needs forecasting involves examining data on market trends, customer feedback, and historical patterns to predict future demand. For example, a retail company might examine holiday sales data over several years to anticipate inventory needs for the upcoming season. This proactive approach allows businesses to adjust their strategies. Popular strategies for matching capacity with demand include lead strategy (which increases capacity before it’s needed) and lag strategy (which increases capacity when the demand has already surpassed it).

2. Capacity Building

Capacity building focuses on developing your team’s skills and expanding your operational capabilities to handle increases or changes in demand. The two main types of capacity building include:

• Upskilling , where employees learn new skills complementary to their current job requirements.
• Reskilling , which includes training employees in entirely new skills or roles that differ from their current job functions.

A practical example is a digital marketing company investing in advanced training for emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence. By doing so, the company improves its current project delivery and prepares to take on future projects requiring this capacity .

3. Aligning Strategies With Business Goals

Finally, aligning workload management strategies with business goals ensures that every project and task contributes to the overarching objectives of the organization. For example, if a business aims to expand into a new market, its workload management might prioritize hiring resources with competitive skills or upskilling current talent. This alignment requires regular review of business goals and workload management strategies to adjust priorities with changing circumstances.

Workload Management Software & Tools

The benefits of using ERP software for business management can include improved internal collaboration (34%), improved delivery (28%), improved employee productivity (23%) and engagement (17%). Software with workload management features can help you gather data from various activities and improve your processes. Project management tools also support task prioritization, team collaboration, utilization tracking, and workflow automation. When looking for your top software choice, consider:

• Scalability
• User-friendliness
• Customer service

These three criteria are essential for promoting adoption across the entire team. Additionally, scalability is important for ensuring your software can grow alongside your agency.  One of the best tools that provides all three for agencies is:

Productive — The Top Agency Software for Workload Management

If you’re interested in comprehensive software for workload management, Productive is your top choice. It’s a software solution designed by industry veterans that caters specifically to agency workflows. Core features include resource management, budgeting and billing, and project planning.

The fact that Productive is agency-focused means that the whole ecosystem fits together so that there are fewer tools we have to pull together in order to do what we need to do.

Orion Jensen, CEO at Clear Launch

Capabilities that support workload management include:

• Time tracking with multiple ways to manage entries
• Financial forecasting and utilization insights
• A Resourcing module for easy scheduling and oversight
• Integrated time off management
• Project and task management for improved collaboration
• No-code workflow automations to boost efficiency

Additional features include : sales performance management, AI-ready Docs, project budgeting and billing, real-time reporting, custom permissions, and integrations with third-party software. Book a demo today to discover what Productive can do for your business.

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Resource management

Workload management: 10 ways to increase your team's efficiency

Building a truly great project schedule from the ground up is exceptionally difficult. Just ask anyone leading a project and usually, workload management makes the top of the list for hard things to do efficiently .

We get it. Workloads change at the drop of a hat. And keeping everyone on pace toward completion can feel like an impossible task.

For example, do any of these project situations sound familiar?

Designers are supposed to have mockups by Friday, but they're bottlenecked by another department.

Devs complain they have too much to do or sprint timeframes are unrealistic.

Certain marketing members are burning out trying to keep up, while others in the department seem to have plenty of free time.

Delivery team workloads have a yo-yo effect with peaks of overwork and valleys of boredom.

Each of these project management challenges may have many contributing factors, but at their core, inefficient workload management is to blame. Team leads can right the wrong by following a few tips to better manage the team.

And in this blog, we’ll show you 10 ways to effectively control your team’s workload through better workload management practices.

Let's get started.

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What is workload management?

Workload management is the process of assigning work to an entire team in a way that distributes the load optimally among the available resources.

It considers team members’ skill sets, availability, capacity, throughput, and anything else that affects how much and what kind of work a team member should get.

Managers, team leaders, and stakeholders skilled in workload management build successful project schedules where team members are sufficiently busy with work they’re good at and enjoy — while no one is overloaded or sitting idle.

Why does this matter? Because your organization thrives when resources are maximized. No one wants to be in the opposite situation, with some project team members sitting around with nothing to do while others are so overallocated they burn out or walk out.

10 effective ways to manage workloads

Of course, getting your organization’s or department’s workload balanced perfectly is really tough to do. But it’s easier with the right set of tools and strategies.

Use these 10 methods for effective workload management within your agency to start seeing stronger performance and happier teams.

1) Evaluate the full workload across your team or agency

Part of the difficulty with workload management is getting a true picture of all the work that’s happening on your team or at your agency.

Even if you’re following traditional project management best practices , it’s easy for invisible, untracked work to sneak in. Start by looking at your previous month's worth of work. This should give you an idea of what a typical workload includes so you can begin to understand what typically makes a sprint or recurring campaign.

Then detail who on your team is responsible for each task. Or, if it's easier, simply list out the most common jobs given to each team member to understand who works on what and how much that entails in the month's workload.

Even in the simplest workflows, planning and evaluating your team's capacity is so much easier with the right tool. And hey, that leads pretty well into our next topic.

2) Adopt powerful project management software to organize, streamline, and visualize workloads

It's easy to recommend adopting a new project management software, but not all tools are the same. In fact, several of the top choices don't have detailed workload resource management features.

But guess what? Teamwork.com does! Our resource management features help client services teams quickly find people who can take on new or extra work while ensuring no one is overworked.

Our tools help estimate team member availability and allocate project tasks the right way the first time around so everyone's workload is properly managed. This also allows teams to prioritize important tasks to make sure the most essential parts of a project are completed and follow the appropriate timeline.

You and the team can view workloads in calendar form, whether you prefer a Gantt chart, Kanban board, or simple calendar view. It's simple to assign specific work to the most relevant resources, mark start and end dates, note dependencies, and highlight due dates for project deliverables and milestones .

3) Implement time tracking to learn realistic workloads

Balancing a team workload not only requires leadership to know the capacity of each employee, but also the time it takes to complete each task. Once you understand the average time of a task, workload management becomes so much easier.

The trouble here is that this can seem incredibly difficult to measure in creative or knowledge-economy work. Even repeatable tasks like “review and revise copy” or “review and approve the statement of work” don’t always take the same amount of time.

Another big thing is most teams simply don’t work at consistent paces. They may struggle with time management after a bad night’s sleep but then turn into hyper-productive employees the next day.

Over the long run, though, task lengths tend to average out. You just have to track how long people spend on them consistently, which means starting a time-tracking program.

Your team will benefit from running a test over a temporary timespan (say, a few weeks or months) in which everyone records the time it takes to complete common tasks at a normal pace. This allows you to assess how much can actually get done in a day, a week, or a month.

But a more simplistic way is to use an employee time tracking software that is effortlessly built into the same task management software . You guessed it — Teamwork.com allows you to easily record the time it takes to complete a task, which is crucial for prioritizing workloads.

Additionally, time-tracking software is great for client work, so you can provide your clients with more detailed billable hours. This helps your organization avoid leaving money on the table when it comes to managing billable hours for a client.

A word of caution here: Be careful in your implementation. Team members might misunderstand the reason for time tracking, thinking it’s a way to push them to go faster, judge them, or micromanage the work they can accomplish related to other team members.

Make sure you explain that the end goal of the project is to better balance workloads so that no one feels overwhelmed or overworked.

4) Hire an operations manager or detail role responsibilities to keep team tasks organized

If you’re a leader at a new agency without a formal project management solution, you'll have a tough time moving projects from start to finish. Instead, consider hiring an operations manager that could help take the burden of your project management challenges and ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

If you can't quite afford to make operations a full-time job, at least ensure your leads understand the roles and responsibilities associated with operations so they can best manage projects for their own team.

You won’t regret detailing how the entire organization will manage the creation of tasks and staff workloads. Doing this takes time and focus, but it greatly benefits your agency.

Creating an environment where employees understand what is on their plate will remove the stress of chaos and disorganization and should also improve delivery dates and managing client expectations .

5) Create templates for repetitive project-based services

You can save significant repetitive manual work by relying on project management templates for repetitive tasks.

Once you’ve identified the comprehensive workload for your project and team, you’ll likely start to notice patterns of repetition. And the same thing will happen as you get more and more projects up and running.

While each project is unique, much of the project management work and deliverables will look quite similar. Both within a project and across projects, building templates will allow you to scale and quickly build stackable and understandable workflow management systems.

Get started with one of many Teamwork.com project management templates to get work done faster and put an end to repetitive work!

6) Provide ample time for feedback, sick days, and vacations

Make sure to build plenty of time into project schedules for the delays and invisible work that you know will happen. Effective team communication through email, Slack, or whatever else you use is essential to keep up pace and prevent projects from coming to a halt when someone goes on vacation.

Ideally, you’re building those subtasks into your project schedules, but there’s always at least a small amount of additional back-and-forth that doesn’t make it onto the schedule. Make sure to give enough time to cover this kind of needed work.

Project leads don't always account for vacation even though most employees get anywhere from two to four weeks per year. If that's not scheduled into your workload management process, you run the risk of a serious project bottleneck.

Businesses should scale back the total expected hours per year to more reasonable amounts so projects have a good buffer zone for unexpected or even planned resource changes.

7) Prioritize time for teammates to focus on one task and avoid multitasking

A lot of folks love the idea of multitasking because it can feel more productive and in control of your work.

There’s just one problem: It’s all an illusion .

Study after study makes it clear that multitasking almost never works . People work more slowly and make more mistakes when they multitask.

Besides working to change perceptions around multitasking, you can take other steps to help your team do their best work, staying focused on the right task at the right time.

Schedule-building and prioritizing tasks are the most important. Employees who feel the pressure of a dozen competing priorities tend to switch between them.

Those who understand what’s the most important, highest priority work tend to focus on that work. When you streamline work by keeping team members focused on the right task at the right moment, you’ll increase team performance.

8) Be an example of a healthy workload for your team

If your team feels they're constantly overworked, you're going to risk burnout.

Despite all your efforts to improve your workload management strategy, it could be time for some introspection. Are you and the other leaders at your agency modeling healthy relationships to work?

Or are you leading by example down a path full of work addiction, after-hours stress responses to the crisis of the day, and so on?

If you suspect the issue is one of culture more than actual overload, it’s time to set an example. Team leaders and managers can pave the way by showing what a healthy relationship with work looks like.

Of course, to be that good example, leaders must find a way to avoid overworking themselves .

9) Pay close attention to your headcount

If you’ve tried everything else and your resources are still overallocated, it’s time to look at more drastic changes. Do you need to increase the headcount or perhaps decrease the scope of the project ?

One of the benefits of using Teamwork.com is you get access to detailed budgeting reports so you know exactly how much money you have available from your clients so you can better manage headcount.

Additionally, tools like the Teamwork.com Advanced Resource Scheduler allow you to plan future client work based on current headcount so you know if you're taking on more work than you can handle.

10) Have regular check-ins with team members

Last, it’s crucial that project managers and team leads regularly check in with every team member.

This can happen as a part of regular team meetings, though it’s wise to conduct periodic one-on-one check-ins. Team members need to know their project managers and leaders actually care about employee workload.

Regular check-ins send these messages and provide an easy and obvious time for workers to express their concerns regarding workload.

Pro tip: Don’t assume your teams will volunteer this information, especially if your agency culture isn’t known for openness and transparency. Proactively and clearly ask team members about their workload, making sure they know you’re ready for real and honest feedback.

Common challenges of workload management (+ solutions)

Those 10 tactics can help you improve workload management, but it’s still tough to know which tactics make the biggest impact in specific situations.

Here are a few common challenges agencies face around workload management, plus quick solutions for each.

Unrealistic expectations

Sometimes the problem is what a business expects of its people. This is easier to see in production or logistical settings than in creative or knowledge-based ones: no one will sign off on a logistics plan that assumes your trucks drive at 200 miles per hour.

But it’s not always obvious how many accounts a customer success rep can manage or how quickly a graphic artist should be able to crank through an assignment. And the farther the people doing the planning are from the work itself, the more likely this problem becomes.

Solution: Use a combination of qualitative and quantitative data to set performance expectations. Talk to the people whose workloads you’re managing to get their take on what’s realistic. Then analyze your historical performance data to see what the trend over time has been.

Overdemanding work culture

“You may con a person into committing to an unreasonable deadline, but you cannot bully them into meeting it.” 

~ Consultant John Edwards in People Rules for Rocket Scientists

Unrealistic expectations often develop without ill intent: project managers and leaders don’t always understand what it takes to get the work done. An overdemanding work culture is when those unrealistic expectations spread into the agency's ethos. Suddenly it’s not that people don’t understand what’s possible; now those people are demanding the impossible. Unsurprisingly this leads to burnout, destroys morale, and can cause heavy attrition.

Solution: Changing culture is hard to do, but it’s easier with data. With the right project management software, you can chart exactly how much your top performers can deliver (along with what your average performers deliver). This data can show those in charge of shaping the culture what’s possible and what’s not.

Uneven workload distribution

This is what we described way back in the intro, where one department has a heavy workload and another has none. Or, on the individual level, two employees in identical roles might have vastly differing workloads.

The larger your organization and the more complex your projects, the more likely this becomes. Sometimes it’s inevitable in small ways. But left unchecked, it can create problems with morale, performance, and even retention.

Solution: Use workload management software to better handle workload distribution. Teamwork.com’s resource and workload management features make it easy to reassign tasks away from overloaded team members!

Under resourcing

Last, sometimes the problem isn’t expectations, demands, or imbalance. Sometimes the problem is headcount.

If all your resources are consistently above 80% or maybe 85% allocated, you have no margin. When something unexpected comes up (or goes wrong), you don’t have many options, and workloads get out of control.

Solution: Hire more people. Of course, that requires convincing higher-ups of the need. You may want to track this data to show decision-makers exactly why you need that increased headcount, plus the ramifications of not getting it.

Learn why teams turn to Teamwork.com to manage and organize their workloads

Workload planning can be challenging, but you can make the work easier and improve your outcomes by implementing the right strategies and using the right tools.

We’ve given you 10 strategies to help you manage workloads and keep the work flowing. But even more importantly, we’ve created an industry-leading project management platform that’s perfect for managing and organizing workloads on even the most complex projects and on teams of any size.

Ready to learn more? You can see Teamwork.com in action right now! Get started for free today .

Alex York is a Content Marketing Manager who is passionate about marketing acquisition and content strategy. He has many years of experience in the Project Management space and loves providing expert advice and tips on how to improve team productivity and efficiency.

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Workload Management: Complete Guide w/ Effective Strategies

January 3, 2024 - Updated on January 3, 2024

In the ever-evolving landscape of the modern business world, where the pace is relentless and expectations are soaring, the art of effective workload management is crucial.

Imagine a workplace where tasks flow seamlessly, where burnout is but a distant memory, and where the workforce operates like a well-oiled machine. This vision is not just utopian but a real possibility, and it begins with mastering the delicate art of workload management.

This article provides insight into workload management, its significance, and tips you can use to successfully enable your team to grow and achieve project goals. Let’s get started!

What is Workload Management?

Workload management is a systematic approach to efficiently planning , scheduling, allocating, and monitoring workload among employees .

Optimal workload distribution means employees will not be overwhelmed with work and will not have more duties than they’re required to. It is not an easy task, but with a systematic approach, you’ll be on the right path to successful workload management.

To achieve successful workload allocation, a project manager needs the following management skills:

• Prioritization
• Time management
• Task delegation
• Team communication
• Stress management

Workload management is applied regardless of team size or industry since it directly affects employee satisfaction and company results.

The Importance of Workload Management

Workload management is crucial in maintaining productivity, promoting fairness, and preventing burnout. By implementing effective workload management strategies, individuals and teams can distribute tasks fairly, avoid excessive workloads, and achieve better work-life balance.

Let’s delve deeper into the importance of workload management and its key benefits.

It Distributes The Tasks Fairly

Workload management ensures the fair distribution of tasks , creating an environment where each individual feels valued and respected. By considering task complexity, quantity, individual expertise, availability, and team dynamics, workload management facilitates equitable task allocation.

This approach promotes collaboration, fosters a sense of ownership, and establishes a healthy working dynamic among team members.

It Prevents Burnout

Prioritizing employee well-being is a fundamental aspect of workload management. Overloading employees with excessive work or consistently assigning mentally demanding tasks can lead to burnout.

Through workload management, leaders can ensure that workloads remain reasonable and sustainable, allowing employees to maintain motivation, engagement, and overall performance.

It Helps With Project Scheduling

Managers can create realistic project timelines by objectively assessing task complexity and considering employee capacities. That enables effective resource management , ensuring the right assignment of tasks to the right individuals at the appropriate time.

It Maintains Workflow Efficiency

An effective workload management strategy prevents bottlenecks by equally distributing tasks among team members . By assigning tasks based on individual capacities and skill sets, workload management optimizes workflow efficiency.

This balanced distribution of responsibilities allows interconnected processes to flow smoothly, eliminating delays and improving overall project execution.

It Allows for Effective Time Management

Individuals can allocate their time and energy efficiently by prioritizing tasks based on their importance and urgency using workload management. This approach prevents individuals from being overwhelmed by less critical tasks and allows them to focus on key responsibilities.

How to Create a Workload Management Process

Workload management can be demanding since it requires the skills we mentioned, empathy, and an understanding of the structure and needs of each team member and team as a whole.

To help you develop one with no hassle, we have prepared a step-by-step process guide for successful workload management creation:

#1. Identify All the Projects

The first step in creating a workload management process is to identify and map out all the projects within the organization , which includes both ongoing and upcoming projects.

When you have a clear overview of the projects, you can better understand the scope of work and resource requirements for each. Consider creating a project inventory or using project management software to document and track the projects.

#2. Break Down Projects Into Tasks

Once the projects are identified, it is important to break them down into smaller tasks . Task breakdown helps understand the specific actions required to complete each project and facilitates effective resource allocation.

Collaborate with the project team to identify the individual tasks and create a task list for each project. This can be done using project management tools or simple spreadsheets.

#3. Analyze Team Capacity

It is crucial to analyze the capacity and availability of the team members. Assess their skills, experience, and workload to determine how much work they can handle at a given time.

Understanding the team’s capacity allows you to allocate tasks appropriately and avoid overloading individuals or leaving resources underutilized . Consider creating a team member skills and availability map, which can help to identify skill gaps and ensure the right people are assigned to the right tasks.

#4. Assign the Tasks

Assign the tasks to the appropriate team members based on the team’s capacity and members’ skills . Consider their workload, expertise, experience, and development opportunities when distributing tasks.

Distributing tasks fairly and evenly among the team members promotes collaboration, minimizes potential errors, and ensures optimal resource utilization. For example, if a team member has extensive experience in user interface design, assign them tasks related to that area.

#5. Monitor Progress

Monitoring progress is a very important step since it helps identify potential issues, track project timelines , and make necessary adjustments to optimize workload management. Use project management tools to track task completion, provide updates, and foster effective communication within the team.

It is also important to encourage team members to provide regular reports and hold periodic team meetings to discuss any challenges or roadblocks. This allows for proactive problem-solving and ensures the project stays on track.

10 Tips for Managing Workload Effectively

To address the challenges of workload management effectively and ensure the well-being and productivity of everyone involved, knowing how to manage the workload of employees is essential. Here are some tips to help you manage the workload perfectly:

#1. Implement Time-Tracking Software

Implementing time-tracking software allows you to monitor the work engagement of your employees. It provides insights into their productivity levels and helps identify any challenges they may face in task execution.

By tracking the time spent on tasks, you can recognize if someone is overloaded and use that information to distribute work better. Time tracking software is also a valuable tool for employees, enabling them to monitor their work, better organize their tasks, and prioritize effectively.

#2. Avoid Multitasking

Minimize multitasking whenever possible. Although it can seem tempting to juggle multiple tasks simultaneously to save time, it often results in reduced productivity and increased errors .

Multitasking divides your focus and compromises your attention to detail. Therefore, prioritize your tasks, focus on one task at a time, and give it your full attention for better quality results.

#3. Be Mindful of Sick Days & Vacation

When planning your workload, it’s essential to consider sick days and vacation time. Include these absences in your project timeline and workload distribution.

Plan tasks in a way that allows for flexibility and ensures work can continue smoothly even when team members are absent. By taking into account time off, you minimize disruptions and maintain productivity within the team.

#4. Do Regular Check-Ins With the Team

Schedule meetings or brief check-ins to discuss ongoing projects, task progress, and potential challenges. These check-ins foster open communication, allowing team members to share updates, ask for help, and collaborate on finding solutions.

Regular check-ins also help managers identify potential bottlenecks or workload imbalances, enabling them to make necessary adjustments to ensure a balanced workload distribution.

#5. Prioritize Tasks Continuously

Regularly assess the urgency and importance of each task and adjust your priorities accordingly. Identify critical tasks and focus on completing them first. Break down larger projects into smaller, manageable tasks and allocate time and resources accordingly. Review and reassess your task list to ensure you always work on what matters most.

#6. Delegate and Collaborate

When delegating tasks, it is important to carefully consider the nature of the duties and assign them to the appropriate individuals rather than doing so haphazardly.

You can always consider assigning demanding tasks to a capable team and encourage team members to collaborate as well. This way, you’ll benefit from faster task completion and increased effectiveness.

#7. Practice Self-Care

Always prioritize your well-being and self-care while carrying out your work responsibilities. Recognize that being well-rested and regularly renewing your energy will allow you to contribute more and deliver higher-quality results.

Avoid becoming trapped in work and overly dedicated, as it can have a counterproductive effect. While it may not be immediately evident, neglecting self-care can lead to dissatisfaction, increased stress levels, and reduced performance over time.

#8. Reduce Administrative Tasks

One way to manage the workload of employees is by reducing administrative tasks . Pay attention to the tasks your employees regularly perform and assess their significance in relation to overall operations.

Identify repetitive tasks that require minimal mental effort but can be time-consuming and physically draining. These tasks, if not essential, can be streamlined or automated to free up employees’ time and energy for more impactful work, and that can be done with the help of a workflow engine.

#9. Set Achievable Deadlines

If your employees consistently struggle to meet unrealistic deadlines despite their efforts, it can erode their self-confidence, motivation, and dedication. It is more beneficial to consistently progress step by step rather than remaining stagnant.

So, avoid creating stressful situations that exhaust your employees by setting excessively short deadlines. Instead, focus on good organization, open communication, team collaboration, marker observation, and adaptability.

#10. Embrace Agile Work Methodologies

Consider adopting Agile methodology and its frameworks, such as Kanban or Scrum , to enhance workload management. These frameworks promote flexibility, transparency, and collaboration within teams .

Agile methodology involves breaking down projects into smaller, manageable tasks called “sprints” or “cards” and setting short-term goals for each. Regular team meetings, known as “standups” or “scrums”, allow for quick progress updates and issue resolution.

By implementing agile practices, you can better adapt to changing priorities, allocate work efficiently, and maintain a steady workflow, ensuring that you consistently meet project milestones and deliver high-quality results.

Common Workload Management Challenges

In the previous section, we discussed the importance of effective workload management and provided improvement tips.

In this section, we will delve into some key reasons that hinder effective workload management and explore strategies to address them to create a positive work atmosphere and achieve successful outcomes.

#1. Uneven Workload Distribution

Uneven workload distribution is a common problem in organizations, where some individuals or teams are overwhelmed with work while others have lighter workloads . This leads to stress, exhaustion, and burnout for some employees and creates a sense of inequity and discord among individuals and teams.

So, have a comprehensive understanding of the workload’s complexity and volume, as well as the availability and capacity of your employees. By carefully evaluating these factors, you can ensure a fair and balanced distribution of tasks.

Encourage open communication and collaboration among team members to identify workload imbalances and make necessary adjustments.

#2. Unrealistic Expectations

Setting unrealistic expectations can significantly impact employee motivation and performance. Realistic expectations often arise when goals need to be aligned with deadlines with available resources, time constraints, or the complexity of tasks.

Therefore, set realistic goals and communicate them effectively to project stakeholders . Regularly assess and adjust expectations based on available resources and prioritize tasks accordingly. Open and transparent communication is key to managing expectations and negotiating realistic timelines when necessary.

#3. Demanding Work Culture

A demanding work culture characterized by long working hours, constant pressure, and a lack of work-life balance can significantly impact workload management. This work environment often increases stress levels, reduces motivation, and decreases productivity.

It would help if you created a supportive work culture that values work-life balance, employee well-being, and open communication . Encourage employees to take breaks, utilize vacation time, and prioritize self-care. Foster a culture that promotes collaboration, teamwork, and mutual support among colleagues.

#4. Lack of Capacity/Resources

When teams are understaffed or lack the necessary resources to handle their workload, it increases pressure and reduces productivity. Therefore, regularly assess resource needs and ensure adequate staffing levels to alleviate this issue. Consider outsourcing certain tasks or seeking additional resources when necessary.

#5. Being a Perfectionist

Striving for excellence in your work is commendable, but being a perfectionist can hinder effective workload management. The desire for perfection can lead to excessive time spent on tasks , which may result in delays and increased pressure.

Finding a balance between high-quality work and efficient task completion is crucial. Focus on delivering high-quality outcomes while remembering that perfection is only sometimes attainable within time constraints.

#6. Not Being Able to Concentrate and Maintain Focus

External factors, such as a noisy work environment or constant interruptions , as well as internal factors, such as poor organization or lack of sleep, can impact concentration and affect workload management.

To address this challenge, create a peaceful work environment, minimize distractions, and utilize productivity hacks and techniques to enhance focus and concentration. You can employ productivity techniques, such as time blocking or the Pomodoro techniques , to enhance concentration and task completion.

#7. Inadequate Time Management Skills

Employees who struggle with time management may find themselves overwhelmed by tasks and deadlines. Offer time management training and resources to help employees improve their organizational skills.

Encourage the use of time management tools and techniques, such as to-do lists, calendars, and prioritization methods , to enhance their ability to manage their workload effectively.

#8. Lack of Clear Prioritization

Without clear prioritization, employees may struggle to determine which tasks are most important and need immediate attention. This can lead to a scattered approach to work and missed deadlines.

Encourage individuals and teams to establish clear prioritization criteria based on factors like urgency, impact, and alignment with strategic goals . Implement a system for setting and regularly reviewing priorities to ensure that everyone is focused on the most critical tasks and projects.

Fostering a healthy work environment and a positive atmosphere ensures consistent success and positive results. The dedication and commitment of your team to their responsibilities greatly rely on how superiors and the organization treat them.

By implementing workload management strategies, allocating resources effectively, setting realistic goals, and promoting collaboration and self-care, you will cultivate a community of valuable and hardworking individuals, driving the growth and success of your organization.

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• Project Management

Top 20 Workload Management Tools in 2024

2019 - Present Co-founder and CEO @ Teamhood. 2015-2019 Head of software engineering department at Danske Bank. 2017-2018 Partner Associate Professor at Vilnius University. Lecturer of Software Architecture course 2011 - 2015 Managed numerous smaller IT teams at Prewise. Co-founder of RaveIT, Eylean, No Brakes Games Certified Agile product owner and practitioner. Managed large scale enterprise projects as well as launch of small startup products. MSc of Software Engineering at Vilnius University. Hobbies: Racing, MTB cycling, Windsurfing

Staying on top of people’s schedules, trying to balance just the right amount of work, or wanting to avoid project delays because of resource contention? If at least one of those statements relates to you, then you are in the market for workload management tools .

Workload management is a technique done by all of us at some level. However, when we talk about managing a team or a department, it becomes increasingly important to do it right. With the help of workload management software, it becomes easy to identify which resources are available, which are overworked, and what can be done to speed up the progress of your process.

To help find the right tool for the job, I compared the top 20 options on the market side by side. In the table below, you will see the tools, their pricing, and features listed for easy comparison. Continue reading the post below to learn more about what makes the best workload management system, and how each of them performs in real-life environments.

Best workload management tools comparison table

What are workload management tools.

Workload management is a process of adjusting the task assignments for your team to ensure everyone is capable of finishing their work on time and within their capacity. Workload management tools help us see how busy the team members are and thus assign or redistribute tasks according to their schedule and priority.

The main goal of workload management systems is to ensure the transparency of team members’ schedules and to regulate their workload to avoid overworking any one resource. This is done by pooling data from different projects and initiatives, accounting for meetings, and personal time off. By having all of this information in one place, team leaders can assign and schedule work with confidence it will be completed.

How to choose a workload management tool?

There are quite a few workload management software options on the market. The decision is most often made depending on your company’s size, process, and preferences.

However, you should still consider these key features when weighing tools against each other:

• Workload view or schedule is a must for workload management tools as it pools the information from different projects into one place for easy review.
• Customizable work hours will allow you to specify how much capacity each team member has.
• Task dependencies become crucial when managing complex projects and understanding the order in which the work must be completed.
• Projects and portfolio overviews will allow you to quickly understand the overall status of things and place attention on the most pressing matters.
• Creating hierarchical structures with nested tasks allows you to break down complex projects into manageable units.
• Gantt chart becomes invaluable for planning and especially resource allocation.
• Time-tracking capabilities will assist you in monitoring productivity.
• Budget and cost-tracking features would also be essential if you have financial considerations.
• Lastly, a free version allows you to explore and evaluate the software’s capabilities before committing to a purchase.

Now, that we have covered on what you should expect from workload management tools, let’s discuss the options in more detail.

How we evaluate Workload management tools

Teamhood’s editorial team writes all of our review posts. We spend a significant amount of hours researching and evaluating each tool, measuring it against the specific criteria we’ve established for its category. Importantly, our articles are never influenced by payment from any app or links to any site. We highly value our readers’ trust in us for providing genuine evaluations of tools and opinions we find on platforms such as Capterra, G2, or other industry-authority websites.

This post will review the most popular workload management tools with a formal structure. As Teamhood is also a workload management tool, our aim is to provide a non-biased overview. Having said that, we have created Teamhood just because we did not see any of the tools being great for this specific area of people’s time and schedule management.

1. Teamhood

Capterra score : 5/5 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Key features

• Workload management
• Projects and portfolio
• Dependency management
• Powerful Kanban System
• Time tracking
• Budget and cost tracking

Teamhood is a visual project management software with a strong workload management setup. Here, you will be able to visualize the workload from one or several workspaces, set custom work hours for team members, and visualize dependencies between the items in the workload view.

Based on the capacity of each resource, you will get notifications when the hour limit has been exceeded. This makes it easy to review the assigned work and adjust when needed.

Users will also find a feature that allows them to define the hourly rate for each of the team members. Which, combined with time tracking, will provide you with the accurate cost of each task, initiative, or project.

Aside from workload management, Teamhood is a project management system. This means you will also be able to plan the projects using Gantt charts, track daily work progress in Kanban boards, and collaborate with the team members via task detail commenting.

When asked about Teamhood, users highlight the easy transition between Gantt and Kanban, visual workload management, and easy time tracking as the best features within the system.

• Workload overview for multiple projects
• Hourly rates and cost tracking merged with time tracking
• Robust project management solution
• Best-in-class Kanban board
• Efficient team collaboration features
• Some popular integrations can only be done via a no-code platform like  Zapier .
• No mobile app

Price : Free for 10 users, business plans start at $7.50 per user/month.

Website: https://teamhood.com/

Capterra score : 4.4/5 ⭐⭐⭐⭐

• Plugins for full workload management experience
• Working with epics and stories
• Sprint planning
• Backlog tracking

Jira is the market standard for project management within software development teams and thus, is a choice for many as their workload management software. While being a powerful system, it is worth noting that workload management capabilities within the system itself are limited and most users will choose to add a plugin to get the full range of features.

Within Jira, you will be able to track time on tasks and then review the workload pie chart diagram. Here, you can review all the time team members spent on various projects, Thus giving you information regarding their workload, just in retrospect.

If you wish for a fuller feature set, you will have to look for plugins such as Activity Timeline, which will give you the workload view and even the option to schedule a task for a team as a whole.

As a project management system, Jira is a powerful, yet complicated tool. It serves well for more technical teams that are used to working in an Agile environment with user stories, Epics, and Burndown charts. For those out of the software development industry, it may prove a bit harder to adapt.

• Well known tool
• Can be deployed on-premises
• Agile focused
• No native workload management
• Does not support custom work hours
• Limited to Agile methods

Price: Free plan available, business pricing starts at $7.5 per user/month.

Website: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/

Capterra score : 4.5/5 ⭐⭐⭐⭐

• Kanban Board
• Workload view
• Project updates
• Built-in feedback forms

Asana is another project management tool that allows you to visualize the workflow and track the progress. Amongst other features, here you will also find a workload management system to ensure your team members are on track and not being overused.

To utilize the workload view, you will have to schedule, assign, and estimate task duration. Then, all of this information is consolidated and presented in the totals for your review, using red color to identify the troublesome areas.

There is no option to adjust personal work hours or hourly rates, but you can track time spent on tasks and manually compare them to the estimations to understand if the budget is still on track.

As a task management tool, Asana is easy to use and visual. it offers a simple Kanban board, list view, and timeline overview. All of this provides you with a system to plan and execute projects with more confidence.

• Project focused
• Simple to start
• No custom work hours
• Limited workload view

Price: Free for personal use, business plans start at $11 per user/month.

Website: https://asana.com

Capterra score : 4.6/5 ⭐⭐⭐⭐

• Simple Kanban Board
• Visual item cards

Trello is on this list of workload management tools as an option for personal use. This visual and simple-to-use tool will be a great fit for those in need of tracking their own tasks and activities throughout different projects and initiatives.

While Trello can be used for team workload management, there is no dedicated view for this. Meaning you would have to pull the data yourself which becomes burdensome with teams larger than a few people.

As a whole, Trello is a lightweight Kanban board with a timeline view and good visualization features. Here, you will be able to track your tasks, add detailed descriptions, and use the time tracking feature to measure how much time was spent on each.

Additional project management features, such as Gantt charts, are available through power-ups, however, not all of them will be free of charge.

• Limited and gets cluttered fast
• Not suitable for larger teams or projects
• No dedicated workload view or work hour tracking

Price: Free plan available, business plans start at $5 per user/month.

Website: https://trello.com/home

5. Monday.com

• Table view with visualized details
• Automations to determine what is done after a certain action
• Integrations with other solutions

Monday.com is a work management platform that visualizes your project tasks in a table-like interface. Here, you can add important details, assign work to colleagues, and track progress as the work begins.

As a workload management software, it offers a simplified workload view, where you can quickly gauge if a person’s workload still has capacity or is already full. You will have to click on a specific person to expand their workload and see the tasks that make up the overall numbers.

One more thing to note about the workload management features is that there is no option to adjust work hours or hourly rates for the team members. You can mark which days the team members are off or on vacation, but the hour limit remains the same.

In Monday you will also find a good automation feature for tasks. It will allow you to determine what happens after a certain task is created or completed. Thus allowing to minimize manual task updates.

Overall, Monday is a powerful system with a good selection of integrations to choose from.

• Robust tool
• Many integrations
• Native automation engine
• Takes time to set up

Price: Free plan available, business pricing starts at $10 per user/month.

Website: https://monday.com

• Gantt Chart

Wrike is a workflow management software that aims to ease collaboration and improve the control of projects. As a workload management tool, it offers an overview of the activities of each person within a team and their remaining capacity. which makes it easy to understand who can take on a new project and who will need assistance in completing their work.

Each team member can adjust their work schedule to take account of the vacation days or when they are out of the office.

Compared to Trello, Wrike offers a full project management platform with multiple views like a Gantt chart with milestones, a timeline, a Kanban board, and a folder system to sort those views for easy navigation. Much like in Teamhood, you can use the Portfolio overview to track the status of multiple projects and know where your focus is needed the most.

One thing to take into account is that Wrike offers quite a few features and for those who need a simple solution, such selection may be a bit overwhelming.

• Good and flexible Gantt Chart
• Collaboration features
• Workload schedule adjustment
• Takes time to learn
• Complicated workload view

Website: https://www.wrike.com

Workload management system for your team

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Capterra score : 4.7/5 ⭐⭐⭐⭐

• Project management
• Document management
• Integrations

ClickUp is a productivity platform that aims to eliminate the need to switch between multiple tools when working. This is achieved through a variety of features and available integrations that help consolidate data into one tool.

The workload view in ClickUp is set up to show either weekly or bi-weekly summaries. it displays what your team members are working on and how much capacity they have left for each day. Thus allowing you to understand how busy they are.

If you wish, you can use the schedule feature to account for holidays and days off for the whole team or readjust schedules for each team member personally. Which is especially useful when sharing resources or working with freelancers. However, there is no option to put in custom hourly rates for cost tracking.

ClickUp is a fully-featured solution with many more features in other areas. In general, it is like a mini-ERP. Also, that means complexity. ClickUp may not be as intuitive or user-friendly as you would prefer. Also, using ClickUp may require a significant time investment to leverage its capabilities fully.

• Many features
• Good pricing
• Good for small businesses
• Complex to use and introduce to the team
• Bugs and performance issues

Price: Free plan available, business pricing starts at $5 per user/month.

Website: https://clickup.com/

8. Proofhub

• Content pages
• Annotations
• Collaboration
• Time-tracking capabilities

ProofHub is a project management software that helps teams execute their projects from a single source. Here you can track the efforts in multiple views, track time, and analyze reports to understand the progress.

The workload report in ProofHub is a bit different from the other tools, as it does have to be generated by choosing which team members should be displayed. As such, it allows you to check their tasks and compare estimated vs tracked time.

As such, this report will not give you a good idea of how busy the team members are but instead will allow you to compare how they are doing against the set plans.

Amongst other features, this workload management software will allow you to create forms to gather information, track time to understand how well the team is doing, and create custom reports that will be useful in presenting the results to your stakeholders.

• Flexible content structure for documentation
• Company home pages
• Good for collaboration
• Flat pricing
• The workload is only a report, not a fully featured product area
• Can be costly for an early start

Price: Pricing starts at $45 per month.

Website: https://www.proofhub.com

9. Toggl Plan

• User task timeline

TooglPlan is a colorful and simple tool for generic management. It’s designed with a user-friendly interface, offering handy features like one-click timers, project tracking, and in-depth reports.

In terms of workload management, you will not find a separate view for this purpose, but some of the information can be found in the timeline view. Which displays the team’s tasks on a calendar and thus gives an idea of the overall team schedule.

This solution will be a good fit for teams that want some of the more advanced project management features, but still in a very light interface. It is not overcrowded and has only a limited number of views and reports to choose from.

• Nice design / colorful
• Simple to start and use
• Features not suitable for professional project management
• No dedicated workload view

Price: Free plan available, business pricing starts at $9 per user/month.

Website: https://toggl.com

Capterra score : 4.2/5 ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Key features:

• workload view with custom schedules
• Gantt chart

nTask is an online work management platform with highly customizable features that can fit a multitude of teams.

In this workload management system, you will be able to review an overall task load for each team member as well as specific tasks that make up their day. To determine the capacity of the team members, you can enter their available work hours and customize them on a person-to-person basis.

This way, it is easy to see who on the team may be struggling and reassign work to ensure the process keeps moving along and no important task is left waiting.

As a project management tool, nTask offers Gantt charts, budget and time tracking, as well as list views and reports to overview the work that is being done in an easy way.

• Custom workload schedule
• Capacity remaining tracking
• Limited in more advanced project management features
• Users comment on poor support

Price: Business pricing starts at $3 per user/month.

Website: https://www.ntaskmanager.com

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More workload management tools

Accelo is a workload management software for service businesses. Here, you will be able to track your sales funnel, invoices, and ongoing tasks in one place. The workload management here is solved through the team schedule feature, which allows one to easily check how busy the team members are and what they are working on.

This solution is strongly focused on the sales team processes, thus may be difficult to adapt to other departments with different requirements and processes.

• Sales funnel tracking
• Workload review
• Good integration selection
• Limited to sales processes

Pricing: Not disclosed

Website: https://www.accelo.com

A solution between a traditional ERP system and task management software. Can be purchased as individual modules. Covers a broad range of use cases if all modules are enabled. Scoro is a workload management tool example of a view that is also not well suited for bigger teams.

• Can cover a broad range of use cases via modular features
• Suited for small or medium companies
• It will take time to setup
• It can become very expensive due to modular pricing

Price: Starting at $20 per user/month.

Website: https://www.scoro.com

13. MS Project

Probably the most well-known workload management tool on the market. Mainly focused on experienced Project managers who are required to do project planning and scheduling.

With its intuitive design and an extensive array of options and tools, this powerful tool is crafted for comprehensive project management, making it particularly well-suited for program managers and experienced professionals in the field of project management.

• Good selection of project management features
• Well-known by the market
• Complex to use
• Limited collaboration features
• Expensive licensing

Price: Starting at $10 per user/month.

Website: https://www.microsoft.com/en/microsoft-365/business/task-management-software

14. Teamwork

A good workload management app for daily collaboration. It can be used for task and team management. On the cons side, it lacks in the project management area while some users have found the navigation in Teamwork to be challenging. Furthermore, the software lacks a user-friendly mobile interface

• Simple to use
• Has a free plan for small teams
• Good collaboration features
• Not suited for larger or more complex projects
• Limited project management features

Website: https://www.teamwork.com

15. Zoho Projects

Zoho Projects offers a suite of tools for seamless team communication and collaboration through planning, scheduling, and report customization. With features like group chats, virtual meetings, and task management system capabilities such as reminders and automation, it supports effective remote work. While praised for its user-friendly interface and affordability, its full potential is unleashed when integrated into the broader Zoho ecosystem, encompassing CRM, financing, IT, and HR solutions.

• Free version available
• Limited task classification available

Website: https://www.zoho.com

Capterra score : 4.3/5 ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Podio is more a CRM software than a management tool but still, it encompasses some functionalities and we decided to include it in the list. Also, it is one of the workload management tools free version available.

• Does not have a workload management view
• A bit outdated GUI
• Lacks quite a few essential project management features such as G a ntt

Price: Free plan available, business pricing starts at $11 per user/month.

Website: https://podio.com

17. Bitrix24

Capterra score : 4.1/5 ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Lots of features from Video calling to CRM. That also includes employee resource management and project tracking. Bitrix24 serves as a Kanban solution to enhance CRM capabilities. It offers effective communication with clients and colleagues. Track your status of tasks, view summaries of item values per column that provides clearer insight into the lead pipeline.

• Well featured
• Has a free version for small teams
• Features are rather limited for professional use cases
• Can become quite complex

Price: Free version available, business pricing starts at $49 for 5 users/month.

Website: https://www.bitrix24.eu

18. OpenProject

Open Project is a PM solution that has construction management features like BIM. It has many functionalities for everyday PM as well as portfolio. It’s straightforward to use, sporting nifty features like work packages, Agile backlogs, bug tracking, and a Gantt chart.

• Well-suited for construction projects
• BIM integration
• Good PM focus
• Takes time learn
• The BIM module is an additional purchase

Price: Self-hosted free, cloud starting at $6 per user/month.

Website: https://www.openproject.org

A simple tool for freelancers or small teams working remotely . It has workload features. GUI could use some refreshments, but overall, it seems like a not overloaded tool (at least not like Monday or ClickUp). Though Breeze is not a workload management tool.

• Simple tool
• Has essential PM features
• Includes workload view
• UX could be better (similar comments in Capterra)
• Limited reporting options
• Nu custom work hours

Price: $9 per user/month.

Website: https://www.breeze.pm

20. MS Planner

Native MS tool for simple task management. It is well integrated into MS Teams. It can be used as a checklist or Kanban board to organize and track people’s tasks/workload, but the workload is definitely a workaround more than a feature since Planner is not a workload management tool.

• Integrated into MS Teams
• Simple interface
• No project management features
• No workload management view
• Becomes limited very fast

Price: Included in Office365 subscription starting at $12 per user/month.

Website: https://tasks.office.com

Summary 

All workload planning tools mentioned in this list are great for their specific users. You can find something for any purpose, company structure, or industry and enhance the Kanban application within your team. 

To ensure your search is fruitful, first, compose a list of requirements and then evaluate the options available on the market. This way you will be able to identify the options that are right for you.

Still on the fence? Try out Teamhood – it is free to use for up to 10 users and offers a variety of flexible workload management features.

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Workload Management: 8 Tips to Improve Your Team’s Efficiency

Table of Contents

We know that managing teams and projects can get quite challenging , whether you’re a beginner or not.

That’s why we have prepared a list of workload management tips to increase your efficiency and productivity.

So, read on and discover how to track and manage a workload!

• Workload management refers to the organization and distribution of tasks across the team.
• Using a workload management tool will help you organize and track your team’s workload. 
• A good workload management plan helps you reduce overwork and improve the quality of work. 
• It’s crucial to break down the workload into manageable tasks and assign those tasks to the right people in the team.

What is workload management?

Workload management is the process of organizing and distributing tasks to team members depending on their skills, availability, and experience.

To be a skillful project manager you must be able to organize a workload so that it boosts the team’s productivity and efficiency. 

What causes workload problems?

We have spoken to Dimitry Graf , a PMP and PgMP-certified manager, and asked him about the most frequent causes of workload problems. This is what he singled out:

“Two of the most common problems are unexpected crisis situations and poor workload management.”

Besides these 2 causes, workload problems may also arise due to: 

• Uneven workload distribution,
• Insufficient use of resources, or
• Incompetent managers. 

To avoid these and other potential problems, make sure to implement the tips below. 

8 ways to better manage your workload

We have selected the 8 most important project management tips that will help you track and manage your workload more efficiently:

• Have clear goals,
• Use a workload management tool,
• Break down tasks into smaller chunks,
• Match the right people to the right tasks,
• Introduce flexible working hours,
• Forster positive energy in the workplace,
• Set realistic deadlines, and
• Remain flexible.

Now, let’s analyze each of these tips. 

Have clear goals

Before you even begin working on a project, make sure you have a clear picture of what it is you want to achieve — what is your final goal? Then have that goal serve as a lighthouse on the horizon, to navigate your way.

You should also figure out all the small steps you’ll need to take to gradually get there.

When you and your team have a list of both short-term and long-term goals, and you know what you’re going for — you’ll be more motivated to work towards achieving them. 

All the tasks that you need to do, even the small ones, will feel important and give your team members a sense of purpose. 

💡 Plaky Pro Tip

If you struggle with setting goals, try implementing S.M.A.R.T. goals criteria:

• How to Define S.M.A.R.T. Goals in Project Management

Use a workload management tool

Managing workload is a complex endeavor. Luckily, there are project management tools to help you in the process. 

Plaky is a perfect tool to manage projects and turn workload planning from complicated to easy and fun. 

Here’s what managing workloads looks like in Plaky :

Plaky will make the workload management process easier, more transparent, and more intuitive by enabling you to control and monitor the entire project with a single tool.

The fun part is — you get to organize everything by color, making your space visually appealing, and easy to navigate.

Apart from project managers, all the other project team members will be able to access relevant project information at any time. 

Keeping the entire team in the loop with all project activities will directly increase the team’s overall efficiency.

Break down tasks into smaller chunks

To avoid your team members feeling overwhelmed with their workload, you should break it into more manageable units. 

The best way to do this is to use a work breakdown structure (WBS) — a hierarchical breakdown of project scope into its constituent tasks. 

Having the project simplified and broken down into parts will allow both you and your team to visualize the process and better understand its scope.

This can help mitigate unwanted project risks and avoid missed deadlines . 

Match the right people to the right tasks

To be a good project manager , you need to know your employees’ capacities and preferences. 

So, skilled project managers will be aware of their team members’ specific: 

• Strengths, 
• Skills, and
• Project experience . 

These individual factors can, to a large degree, determine the team members’ capacities for the completion of certain tasks. 

You should also be careful about the actual workload you assign to individuals.

A productivity expert and author, Julie Morgenstern, has the following to say on the subject of assigning tasks to individuals, as cited in the article Make Sure Your Team’s Workload Is Divided Fairly : 

“If you overwork your high performers, you will lose them because they start to resent the fact that they’re doing more . If you’re taking away work from people who are slower, they will lose interest.“

So, a skilled project manager doesn’t neglect individual factors when distributing tasks, as they have a significant impact on the team’s overall motivation and performance.

If you’re not exactly sure which task will suit what team member — here is what you can do about it:

• Encourage open team communication , to figure out preferences and what motivates individuals to work, 
• Learn more about individual team members,
• Involve your team in the planning process — it helps in establishing trust, and
• Encourage independence, e.g. — let team members pick their own tasks.

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Improve your project success by assigning tasks and managing workloads with Plaky.

Introduce flexible working hours

According to the Gartner 2021 Digital Worker Experience Survey , flexibility in working hours is the most cited factor enabling greater productivity, selected by 43% of respondents whose work-from-home time increased since January 2020. 

This shows that every project manager should give their employees as much work schedule flexibility as possible, giving them the freedom to work at their own pace.

Foster positive energy in the workplace

Teams achieve greater efficiency at work and cope with workloads better if they work in a healthy and positive environment. 

In their article The best leaders have a contagious positive energy , Emma Seppälä and Kim Cameron refer to great team leaders as positive energizers . 

According to their research on positive leadership, organizations with leaders displaying positive energy are, among other things, more:

• Innovative,
• Teamwork-oriented,
• Financially stable, and
• Productive.

However, Seppälä and Cameron also highlight that positivity doesn’t refer to superficial or false positivity, e.g. trying to think happy thoughts and ignoring real problems. 

Instead, true positivity is rather a demonstration of good actions, such as: 

• Forgiveness, 
• Compassion, 
• Humility, 
• Kindness, 
• Trust, 
• Integrity, 
• Honesty, 
• Generosity, 
• Gratitude, and 
• Recognition within the organization. 

Set realistic deadlines

Setting unrealistic deadlines can lead to unnecessary project risks. 

Therefore, as a project manager, you should pay special attention to this aspect of workload management.

That way you can avoid undesired outcomes such as:

• Missed delivery dates — it could lead to unsatisfied clients and stakeholders .
• Reduced quality of deliverables — if your team always chases an unattainable deadline, their work would eventually result in a lower quality product. 
• Increased costs — if you set your project budget according to unrealistic deadlines, you’ll probably suffer budget overruns. 
• Stress that leads to burnout — team members will undoubtedly feel stressed if they constantly have to overwork themselves to reach a deadline, which in turn can lead to burnout. 

It’s strange how a single factor such as an unrealistic project deadline can trigger a chain reaction and cause so many negative consequences. 

The bottom line is — carefully choose deadlines that are based on the realistic capacities of your team, and you will have increased efficiency as a result.

Remain flexible

Despite meticulous planning, nobody can predict the future and know what changes may occur during a project. So all project managers, especially those working in Agile , must be ready to review their plans and adapt to changes.

It’s your job as a project manager to show that you’re flexible and respond adequately by rethinking the plan and reassigning certain tasks to maintain the team’s workload in good balance.

You must consider both the inside and outside factors (e.g. work environment or the market) that might affect the workload, and make the necessary changes, if needed. 

Of course, always follow official change protocols and procedures to avoid scope creep and gold plating . 

Flexibility will ensure that the project goals are met smartly and the team members stay on top of their assignments.

Why is workload management important?

Workload management is important because it:

• Provides a realistic overview of your team’s capacity,
• Reduces overwork, and
• Improves the quality of work.

It provides a realistic overview of your team’s capacity

Knowing your or your team’s limitations and capabilities is important when organizing work.

Dimitry Graf says that workload management helps you identify these limitations:

“Workload management gives you a realistic view of your team/department/organization’s capacity, for example, the ability to deliver work of a specific volume. Which, in turn, allows for an optimal use of human resources and prevents employee burnout.”

It reduces overwork 

A well-managed workload means there are no unrealistic deadlines and therefore no need for team members to stay long hours and overwork themselves.

This is especially important for the health of the employees. According to the estimates on the influence of working long hours on loss of life and health made by the World Health Organization and International Labour Organization, working 55 or more hours per week is connected with an estimated 35% higher risk of a stroke and a 17% higher risk of dying from ischemic heart disease, compared to working 35–40 hours a week.

Therefore, organizing work in a way that doesn’t require any individual to put in long hours ultimately improves their quality of life, which in turn leaves you with happier and healthier workers.  

It improves the quality of work

We talked to David Ciccarelli , CEO and Founder of Lake, an online vacation rental platform, who pointed out how workload management improves by accounting for all tasks:

“Managing workload allows for better focus on each task, which improves the quality of work produced. This is especially true if you can have sub-tasks itemized in a checklist to ensure nothing gets missed.”

Workload management with Plaky 

You can manage your entire workload with ease using Plaky.

In a Plaky space, you can create boards for your projects and organize work however you want, as the customization options are endless.

You can create a new board for each of your projects, either from scratch or from one of various project management templates . If you choose to start from scratch, your board will look like this:

The first step to managing a workload is to divide the workload into tasks and enter them into Plaky. 

Then, you can add assignees to each task and even reviewers or supervisors if necessary. 

You can also add a deadline, and various categories to tasks, such as:

• Priority e.g. High, Medium, or Low),
• Status (e.g. To do, In Progress, or Done), and 
• Label (e.g. department labels, such as Development, Design, or Marketing).

As we mentioned, projects inevitably encounter changes. You must be able to adapt to them quickly to stay organized at work . Plaky helps you adapt without a hitch by offering a wide range of customization options such as: 

• Dividing workload into groups of tasks,
• Rearranging tasks within a group and moving them between groups,
• Adding a new field to a task at any point,
• Changing the order of the fields in the task, 
• Sorting and filtering tasks, and more. 

In Plaky, you can search for the name of a team member on a board and see all tasks that mention that team member. This will enable you to have a clear overview of each person’s workload and judge whether you can assign more work to them or not. 

Workload management is paramount if you want your projects to be successful, so you must make sure it’s done right. Luckily, there’s Plaky to help you organize and keep track of your workload. Sign up for Plaky’s free account today and try it today .

Isidora is a project management author and researcher at Plaky. She graduated from the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade where she got her MA degree in English. Isidora’s guiding principle as a writer is to create reliable content enriched with both textbook and real-life examples.

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Workload Management: Importance, Process, Examples

Home Blog Project Management Workload Management: Importance, Process, Examples

Workload project management is an essential aspect of successful project execution. The process involves assigning tasks to team members, ensuring they have enough time to complete and monitor their progress. Effective workload management increases efficiency improves team morale, and better project outcomes. This article will cover the vital aspects of workload project management, its significance, and how to manage workload in a team effectively.

What is Workload Management? 

Workload management is the key to success in any organization. It is managing and balancing the workload of different employees or departments within a company. With proper workload management, businesses ensure their employees are well-rested with enough work or underutilized with too little work. Effective workload management means the identification of workloads, prioritizing tasks, delegating responsibilities, and monitoring progress. With effective workload management, businesses ensure employees have optimal work and consistently deliver high-quality results.

To understand workload management better, check out the Project Management training program led by expert instructors and an innovative curriculum to equip you with the skills and knowledge to thrive in the fast-paced world of project management. 

Below mentioned are the fundamental phases of the workload management process :

Workload Forecasting: The most crucial aspect of workload management is comprehending the present and future project workload requirements. To do this, the manager needs to assess how well the workload capacity and resource utilization align with the business forecasts and client demand projections. The company may need to make new hires or purchase new assets, such as raw materials or equipment.

Workload Distribution & Scheduling: Once the project manager decides what your team's workload will scrutinize in the future, the manager distributes the duties to the team members. The project manager also uses workload management tools to delegate jobs depending on the expertise and the overall resource availability.

Workload Monitoring: To ensure tasks have been performed on time and within budget, planning and scheduling are as vital as workload tracking. The project manager uses workload management strategies to understand the resources and the business priorities that need to be accomplished and establishes a management plan to monitor the team workload.

Causes of Workload in a Project

Several factors can contribute to an increased workload in a project, including:

Unrealistic expectations: Overestimating the team's capabilities or underestimating the complexity of tasks leads to an excessive workload.

Poor planning and scheduling: Inadequate planning and scheduling upshot in team members needing to be more manageable with tasks, ushering in unmanageable workloads.

Need for more resources: A lack of adequate resources, such as staff or equipment, can increase the workload for existing team members.

Changes in project scope: unexpected changes in project scope can lead to additional tasks and increased workload for the team.

Ineffective communication: Poor communication among team members results in jobs being duplicated or overlooked, leading to an increased workload.

Who is Responsible for Managing the Project Workload?  

The project manager is responsible for managing the project workload. As the person in charge of the overall project, the manager ensures the workload is distributed evenly among team members. They also assess whether everyone has the resources to complete their tasks on time and within budget. 

Team leaders work closely with members to assign tasks and meet deadlines. They also communicate with the project manager and other team leaders to ensure everyone is on the same page. 

Team members proactively communicate with their team leader if they struggle with their workload or need additional resources. 

Stakeholders also have a role to play in managing the project workload. They need to be clear about their expectations and priorities. It helps the project manager and team leaders to allocate resources appropriately. 

Want to take your project management skills to the next level? The knowledgeHut  PMP course offers you everything you need to pass the PMP exam and become a certified project management professional. You can learn at your own pace and on your schedule—the interactive and engaging learning opportunity, with plenty of hands-on activities and real-world examples. You will also have access to a supportive community of fellow learners and expert mentors to answer your queries and provide guidance as needed.

Importance of Workload Project Management 

Effective workload project management is crucial for several reasons:

Improved efficiency: Proper workload management ensures tasks are allocated and scheduled optimally, leading to increased productivity and more efficient use of resources.

Enhanced team morale: A well-managed workload prevents team members from feeling overwhelmed or underutilized, directing improved job satisfaction and overall morale.

Reduced burnout and turnover: By managing workload effectively, organizations can minimize the risk of employee burnout and turnover, which can have significant costs and negative impacts on project outcomes.

Promotes Communication and Trust: Employees will put in more effort when they understand why their commitment is what it is and why they oversee a specific task. Production and efficiency will rise with a well-designed system.

Better project outcomes: Proper team workload management ensures projects are completed on time, within budget, and to the desired quality standards, contributing to overall project success.

Workload Management Examples 

Let us look at three workload management examples to understand the process clearly:

In the first workload management example, let us take ABC Corp, a leading tech company struggling to keep up with the demands of its clients. They are experiencing a high volume of incoming requests, which causes delays and missed deadlines. To address this issue, the project manager can implement a robust team workload management system to track and prioritize tasks based on urgency and importance. As a result, this will improve their response times, reduce errors, and boost customer satisfaction levels.

Next on the list is XYZ Inc, a fast-growing startup facing a different challenge - managing the workload of remote teams. With employees working across different time zones and geographies, it is becoming challenging to coordinate tasks and ensure everyone is working efficiently. To overcome this, a manager can implement a cloud-based project workload management tool for team members to collaborate and track progress on shared tasks in real time. It will streamline their workflow, improve communication and achieve better results. 

In the last example, DEF Ltd, a large manufacturing company, is struggling to optimize its production line. They have many idle machines and need more workers to manage them effectively. To address this issue, they can implement a workload management system to balance the workload across different machines and prioritize tasks based on complexity. It will reduce idle time, improve their output and increase profitability. 

How to Effectively Manage the Workload in a Team?

Here are some steps and tips for managing workload effectively in a team:

Assess current capacity and workload: Evaluate the existing workload and team capacity. It will help you identify any imbalances or bottlenecks and workload management plan accordingly.

Assign tasks based on priorities and skills: Allocate tasks to team members based on their skills, experience, and availability, focusing on high-priority tasks first.

Set realistic deadlines and expectations: Establish achievable deadlines and communicate clear expectations for each task to ensure team members have sufficient time to complete their work.

Monitor progress and adjust as needed: Regularly track the progress of tasks and make necessary adjustments to workload allocation or deadlines.

Encourage open communication: Foster a culture of open communication within the team, allowing team members to voice concerns or provide feedback on their workload and assignments.

Utilize workload management tools: Leverage tools with built-in features to help track and manage workload in real time.

Continuously improve workload management practices: Learn from past experiences and adjust workload management practices as demanded to optimize efficiency and effectiveness.

The  PRINCE2 certification course is perfect for those who want to boost their project management skills and become certified. You will learn valuable techniques and tools to help you plan, execute and manage successful projects. Also, with the Prince2 credential on your resume, you will be in high demand in today's competitive job market. 

Top Workload Management Tools 

Trello: Trello is a project workload management tool that utilizes a board and card system to organize tasks. You can create boards for each project and then create cards for each task within that project. These cards can then be moved around the board as tasks are completed. This makes it easy to see what needs to be done next and what has already been accomplished.

Float:  Float facilitates effective task management by simplifying resource scheduling. It is simple to start new projects, discover available resources, and assign tasks or resources. A broad overview of your team's workload and the opportunity to dig down to a specific team member's schedule for a particular day are provided to you, the team leader, or the project manager. The ability to manage time allows you to compare project plans and timesheets to track how well your team is meeting deadlines.

Accelo:  Accelo includes sales, projects, tickets, retainers, timesheets, and resource features. Its platform also includes client communications, transforming it into a one-stop shop for all project and task management activities. The application improves skills in CRM, project management, time workload tracking, capacity planning , business growth, and financial reporting. Accelo is capable of delivering excellent outcomes for large firms.

Basecamp: This tool is a perfect centralized location application for all project-related communication. Basecamp provides a single platform for teams to communicate, share files, and collaborate on tasks. It also allows you to set deadlines, create to-do lists and track progress. 

RescueTime:  RescueTime tracks your time on various websites and applications throughout the day. It provides a detailed report of how you spent your time, allowing you to identify areas where you could be spending more time or getting sidetracked. This tool makes you mindful of your patterns and helps you to make changes to improve your productivity.

Effective workload project management is critical for team members to work efficiently and productively and contribute to the overall success of projects. By understanding the causes of workload, assigning tasks based on priorities and skills, setting realistic deadlines and expectations, and utilizing workload management software and tools, project managers can effectively manage workloads and create a more satisfying work environment for their team members.

Do you want to become a certified project manager but need help finding the time to attend in-person courses?  KnowledgeHut's online project management certification courses can take your career to the next level by learning valuable project management skills from your home. Industry experts teach online courses and cover topics from Agile and Scrum methodologies to risk management and stakeholder engagement. With flexible scheduling, KnowledgeHut makes it easy for you to earn the project management certification to succeed in today's competitive job market. 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Yes, absolutely. Workload management involves organizing, prioritizing, and delegating tasks effectively to maximize productivity and achieve desired outcomes. A person with workload management skills can easily handle responsibilities and work efficiently under pressure without compromising quality.

The three components of workload management are Time management, Prioritization and Productivity.

There are two types of workloads in workload management: static and dynamic. 

• Static workloads remain consistent over time, such as routine tasks that require the same number of resources. 
• Dynamic workloads fluctuate depending on the demand, such as customer support or online traffic.

The four principles of managing workload are:

• Prioritization is key. It is essential to identify your most important tasks and tackle them first.
• Time management is crucial. Manage your time wisely and allocate enough time for each task to ensure everything gets done efficiently. 
• Delegation can help you immensely—delegate tasks based on their strengths and workload capacity.
• Communication is vital. Be clear about deadlines and expectations with your team or colleagues so everyone is on the same page. 

Kevin D.Davis

Kevin D. Davis is a seasoned and results-driven Program/Project Management Professional with a Master's Certificate in Advanced Project Management. With expertise in leading multi-million dollar projects, strategic planning, and sales operations, Kevin excels in maximizing solutions and building business cases. He possesses a deep understanding of methodologies such as PMBOK, Lean Six Sigma, and TQM to achieve business/technology alignment. With over 100 instructional training sessions and extensive experience as a PMP Exam Prep Instructor at KnowledgeHut, Kevin has a proven track record in project management training and consulting. His expertise has helped in driving successful project outcomes and fostering organizational growth.

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Effective Team Workload Management

• Collaboration & Team Building
• Feb 28, 2024
• By Traqq Team

Did you know that workload is the biggest cause of stress among U.S. employees? According to the 2019 StressPulseSM survey , 39% consider overwhelming tasks as the top cause of stress at work.

Of course, this can lead to low morale, burnout, poor performance, and eventually a high employee turnover rate.

Effective workload management lets you spot overwhelmed employees and reassign tasks accordingly.

However, you have to find the right people with the right skills for the project. The problem is, it’s not possible to evenly distribute work every time.

The person with the right skills may already have their plates full. On the other hand, employees who have the time to take on new assignments may not have the required skills or experience.

“Boost team productivity with our comprehensive approach to workload management. Explore effective strategies for assigning tasks, prioritizing work, and ensuring balanced workloads among team members. With Traqq’s insights, discover best practices for balancing workloads, managing priorities, and promoting a healthy work-life balance.”

Track work hours effectively to ensure fair pay for actual effort, not idle hours.

That’s where team workload management comes in.

What Is Team Workload Management?

Workload management is the process of distributing tasks among your employees while monitoring their activities and progress to ensure a smooth workflow. It’s more than just assigning the right job to the right people. This is a useful leadership skill, especially when you’re managing remote employees .

As a manager, it is your responsibility to ensure that each employee or team is assigned work according to their capabilities. The primary goal is to make sure that the project objectives are met within the specified time frame. There are plenty of free time tracking apps that will help you manage deadlines and ensure maximum efficiency.

How to Manage Team Workloads

1. identify the work that needs to be completed.

First, you need to figure out how a project is going to be carried out. Start by creating a list of everything your team needs to get the work done. You’ll also need to identify people assigned to specific tasks while checking if their schedule is already full.

Here are examples of the things to include on your list:

• Reading and replying to emails
• Planned time off
• Mandatory training sessions
• Process improvements

Be sure to list down everything your team will be undertaking to get the full picture of what to expect.

2. Prioritize Projects/Tasks

Once you’ve written down what needs to be done, you need to organize your list in order of priority. Start by grouping the items on your list. You can group tasks based on urgency, importance, and the amount of time required to complete them.

Include Every Little Task to Your List of Priorities

Remember, no task is too trivial. Even tasks like cleaning up personal desks or making coffee need to be accounted for since they will affect your timeline. Grouping and prioritizing tasks keep you on top of things and ensure that you know what needs to be done next. It also makes it easier to distribute workload to relevant teams or individuals.

Track Project Time

If you use a  time tracking tool , you can use historical data to estimate the amount of time each task will take. However, since you’re starting a new project, remember to include everything else that your project management software doesn’t track.

Check out these task prioritization tips from Tim Ferriss, author of the best-selling self-help book, 4-Hour Work Week :

3. Figure Out Your Team’s Capacity

Capacity planning is also at the forefront of operations management. According to a Planview study , 4 9% of companies realign their resources to quickly adapt to the ever-changing work environment. In the same vein, you need to know how much the team can handle to be able to react instinctively to unexpected scenarios.

Keep in mind that each team member has unique skills and personalities and assignments should be allocated based on their skillset. This will help you find the right person for the job.

Some individuals can easily manage multiple tasks and still meet the deadline. Others can only work efficiently on specific tasks that they specialize in. That’s why assessing your team’s capacity is crucial.

Keep an Open Line of Communication

Avoid assigning tasks based on your knowledge (or perception) of an employee. Instead, involve them in the decision-making. Ask how they’d feel tackling specific tasks and if they can take on more work. This information will help you divide work fairly, without putting unnecessary pressure on specific employees. Plus, it will minimize conflicts among employees. 

Understand How Every Individual Works

Furthermore, when assessing a team’s capacity, it’s crucial to note that each team member works differently. Some prefer to work in time blocks . For example, some perform best in the morning, leaving the afternoon for emails and meetings. Therefore, try to embrace their work strategies and create unique workloads to suit each team member.

4. Break Down Projects

Now that you’ve mapped out your team’s workload, the next step is to break down big projects into smaller, more manageable tasks. This will help unburden your team’s workload and makes it easy to track their progress.

When breaking down projects, multitasking should be out of the picture. Not only is it a waste of time , but it also reduces a worker’s ability to focus and concentrate. Employees can work more effectively if you let them tackle one task at a time, rather than multiple tasks concurrently. It’s also at this point where you need to identify and eliminate unproductive tasks like unnecessary meetings. Instead, allocate that time to more pressing matters.

Make sure that the most difficult or highest priority tasks are handled by your team first. Tackling complex tasks earlier on in project management can reduce stress and mental exhaustion, especially where the deadline is looming.

Check out how Jennifer Bridges, ProjectManager.com founder, breaks down projects:

5. Be Prepared to Make Adjustments

Communication is of utmost importance in workload planning. You need to check-in regularly with your team members to make sure that the projects are on track. If issues arise, you should be able to deal with them promptly to avoid delays. For instance, if a team member is absent, you should be prepared to reassign tasks accordingly.

Assist Overwhelmed Employees

A project management tool encourages team collaboration, communication, and engagement, allowing you to identify under-allocated and over-allocated staff. You can then move tasks from overworking employees to those who don’t have enough to do.

Ask Before Giving Extra Workload

Shifting tasks around helps you to balance team workload and ensures project goals are met. One way to keep your team members happy is to ask if they can take on additional workloads. Avoid dumping work on their laps, expecting to get excellent results. So, be sure to keep everyone on the team informed on any changes you intend on making so that you’re all on the same page.

6. Set Aside Time for Teams to Connect

Deloitte’s 2016 Global Human Capital Trends report revealed that 82% of respondents find team culture an important part of team and organizational success. Now, effective planning also involves saving time for team building. This applies to people that work in-office as well as in distributed and remote teams.

Organize regular team-wide face time, say weekly or biweekly, to help teams interact and connect. Remember that feedback can also help improve team performance. So, don’t forget to praise high performers and encourage underperformers. Strive to ensure that team members share the same goal and are willing to achieve the company’s mission.

7. Use Workload Management Software

Indeed, there are several strategies you can use to manage team workload. However, it wouldn’t be a smart decision if you monitor everything manually. You’ll only end up becoming frustrated because you miss important details and deadlines.

Now, imagine having a tool where you can see everything happening on a project. There will be a single location where you can manage your employees’ workload, ensuring the workflow is seamless. If you want to save time, use one of these project management apps:

Asana is one of the most popular workload management tools that use a card-based system. Managers can create cards for tasks, then assign team members to them. They can break down projects by adding deadlines and uploading related documents to the cards.

Notable Features:

• Kanban board for convenient workload tracking
• Mobile app version that allows project management on-the-go
• Project calendars for easier task tracking
• Integration with tools like Slack, Salesforce, and Google Calendar
• Permission and privacy controls for optimal security
• Excessive features that may be overwhelming for new users
• Limited exporting options
• Lack of time tracking feature

Like Asana, Trello is a workload management tool that uses a Kanban board system. You can also create cards and assign team members and deadlines to them. If you want extended storage for your project files, you can integrate Google Drive and Dropbox. This will help streamline workflows and improve productivity.

• User-friendly and aesthetically pleasing cards
• Mobile app version
• Trello Butler that allows workflow automation
• Simplified pricing structure
• Reliable notifications, especially on deadlines
• Doesn’t work offline
• Attachments are limited to 10MB per file
• Cannot handle big projects

Pro Tip: Manage Workload by Tracking Time

Indeed, Asana and Trello can help you manage your team’s workload better. However, how do you help them cope with their tasks?

Well, for one, you shouldn’t micromanage them. The last thing you want is for employees to feel like you don’t trust them to deliver on their work. Monitoring projects gives you an overview of whether the concerned employees will get the job done before the deadline.

The best solution here is to monitor their productivity by using a time tracker like Traqq . Here’s how the app helps employees manage their workload:

• Traqq shows you how much time is spent on an activity.
• The tool monitors the websites that employees visit and the apps that they use.
• You will get a report on the activity levels of a user, allowing you to determine if they’re struggling with their workload.

Indeed, Traqq encourages team-wide transparency and promotes team productivity. The best part is, up to three users can use this app for free! At no cost, you can access its time tracking, employee monitoring, and reporting features.

The Importance of Workload Management

Overworking has been identified as one of the top reasons that negatively affect an employee’s performance. If a team is overwhelmed by the workload, productivity will suffer. This may lead to poor customer service, half-finished products, and probably the downfall of your business.

While project managers need to ensure that everyone on the team stays on top of their workload, it’s imperative to devise strategies that ensure work efficiency . The thing is, the workflow will not always be smooth, and new challenges may crop up. For example:

• Changes to the project may require a new set of skills. This means you have to switch the approach of the entire project or assignment,
• Change in management, like a new project manager, may cause delays.
• New deadlines, absent employees, and a lack of immediate resources can also be setbacks.

All these pressures can build up along the way. Effective workload planning, combined with the help of workload management tools, can help ease such issues.

Workload management ensures:

• Effective utilization of resources
• Projects are on track and within the budget
• Effective time management 

A  lack of balance in work distribution will cause problems for your teams. Now, when teams are frustrated, stress levels increase and productivity suffers. Considering how important employees are to your business, you must find ways to manage workloads. In return, your workers will be happier and more productive.

Team Workload FAQs

Q: How is team workload split?

You need to plan according to the project requirements. You must also know the skills and strengths of each team member. This way, you can assign roles efficiently. Of course, you’re going to set achievable goals for the whole team and ensure that you regularly communicate with them.

Q: How do you monitor employee workload?

The most efficient way to monitor employee workload is to use a project management tool. With the right app, you will get an overview of the number of tasks that each team member is working on. You will also see who’s struggling and who’s able to take more tasks.

Q: How do you manage different tasks and workload onboard?

• Don’t multi-task
• Prioritize tasks according to urgency and importance
• Adjust when necessary
• Communicate goals clearly
• Have reasonable requirements
• Be open to suggestions
• Assign the difficult tasks first to highly competent team members

Q: What tools do you use to manage your workload?

• Asana for task tracking for bigger projects
• Trello for breaking down projects into smaller chunks of tasks
• Traqq for monitoring productivity levels

Q: How do you handle workload pressure?

• Accept your limitations
• Know your unique skills and strengths
• Don’t be afraid to ask for help
• Prioritize efficiently
• Maintain a healthy work-life balance

Wrapping Up…

Remember, heavy workloads result in more stress. Effective workload management will keep your employees happy, productive, and healthy. Your company, on the other hand, will enjoy consistent profitability and growth.

If you want a team that excels every time, invest in the right workload management software. Such a tool automates workload planning, streamlines workflows, and keeps track of tasks in real-time. Your primary goal should be to ensure your teams work efficiently and effectively.

Get started with Traqq today

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ProjectManager’s project workflow software at a glance

ProjectManager is cloud-based project workflow management software that’s equipped with robust features such as kanban boards, Gantt charts and task lists. Here are some of its key features.

Kanban boards

Automate task approvals on a visual workflow board with easy drag-and-drop cards.

Project management dashboards

Monitor the progress of your workflow with automatically updated project metrics.

Project calendars

Save important tasks and assignments that sync with your Google Calendar.

Execute your workflow on task lists that show percentage complete, status and more.

Workload charts

Keep your team’s workload balanced for greater productivity with color-coded charts.

PPM roadmaps

Track multiple workflows to see all your projects on a timeline and manage resources.

Gantt charts

Manage tasks, dependencies and milestones on the industry’s best Gantt chart.

Cloud-based timesheets

Secure timesheets track hours spent on tasks in your workflow.

Why do you need project workflow management software?

Easy-to-build project workflows.

With project workflow software like ProjectManager, you don’t have to be a programmer to add triggers that automate workflows. Simple dropdown menus in our workflow software create triggers that automatically change status, priority, assignee and more. Set up as many triggers and actions as you need to manage your workflow.

Intuitive project workflow software

Make workflow automations for the kanban board, Gantt chart, sheet or task view. Dropdown menus let you set the description, transition and approvals you want. Review your draft and hit publish when you’re ready to implement it. ProjectManager’s workflow management tools allow you to automate processes across your organization.

Role-based approvals

Secure workflows move forward as planned with task approvals that can be set by project role, skillset and more. You decide who can and who cannot move a task from one status to the next. Approvals can be set up at any point in the project. Approvers are alerted via email or in the mobile app when it’s time to approve, making it easy to manage workflows on the go.

Safe and secure

Manage your workflow in any of our multiple project views that let those who work in traditional methods collaborate with others who use agile methods. All updates are shared across the project workflow management software to make sure everyone is working from one source of truth. With ProjectManager, you have the freedom to manage tasks how you want within the efficiency of an automated workflow.

Powerful planning tools

With our project workflow management software, you can create workflows that operate within a larger project plan. Managers can plan on Gantt charts or manage several workflows on roadmaps that capture them all on one shared timeline. Link dependencies, set milestones, filter for the critical path and even set a baseline to measure variance to keep your workflow on track.

Generate custom project reports

Pull data from your workflows and manage your team’s progress and performance with reports on time, costs and more. Project management reports can be filtered and shared. But don’t forget the real-time dashboard that’s like an instant status report. No workflow management software offers better tracking and reporting for your projects.

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Examples of Multiple Managers for an Assignment

You must define at least one line manager for an assignment. Optionally, you can add other manager types. Line managers see the line-manager version of a person's spotlight and other restricted worker information.

Other manager types can also see restricted worker information if their roles have the required security access.

Let's see some examples of assignments that need multiple managers.

Matrix Management in an Engineering Company

An engineering company uses a matrix management structure. An engineer reports to the lead engineer for everyday functional guidance and to the operational manager for project assignment and tracking.

In this example, you define the lead engineer as the line manager and the operational manager as the project manager. This is because the lead engineer interacts with the team members every day and evaluates their progress. The project manager's role is restricted to assigning projects and tracking project completion.

Temporary Project Managers in a Service Company

A service company assigns workers to third parties to deliver contracted services. Each worker has a manager whose primary task is to help the worker find their next assignment. The manager is common for all of the worker's assignments. You define this manager as a line manager.

The worker also has a temporary project manager who manages a particular assignment but may not manage all of the worker's assignments. You define the project manager as an additional manager (for example, as a project manager) in relevant assignments.

Managers in a Global Company

A global company is organized functionally and workers report to a functional manager who may be in a different time zone. You define the functional manager as the line manager for the assignment.

For day-to-day administrative purposes, such as approving leave or absence, each worker also has an administrative manager. You define this administrative manager as an additional manager for the assignment.