Advice to manage your employee’s workload

1 of March, 2021

If you want to be a successful manager, you cannot just concern yourself with your own workload. You also need to manage your employee’s workload too. Whether its under-utilised time or the employee has too much on their plate, you can see negative consequences the moment their workload isn’t up to scratch.

So if you are a manager looking for tips to manage your employee’s workload, or in Human Resources wanting to see if your staff are well managed and not likely to suffer from burnout or under-utilisation. Start analysing your team’s performance and manage your employee’s workload right away with our advice and app.

How do you distribute workload among staff?

Before you start handing out work in a random way, try using a skills matrix to evaluate which employees can undertake which tasks and projects. Thanks to this you will have a good overview as to who can do what in your organisation.

Once this is done you must take into account that employees are, in most countries, obliged to abide by a maximum set of hours worked. You need to allocate tasks to your employees not just based on who is the best at what task but rather how your team as a whole can be efficient and not overworked. This means applying the law of comparative advantage at times, and not giving necessarily the most skilled employee all the tasks.

You must also prioritise your task list. This is so that employees and managers alike are aware of what is urgent and necessary to get done and don’t spend time on less important things.

How can workload be reduced at work?

Reducing your employees workload doesn’t necessarily have to impact your output. Being efficient is all about spending less time in order to obtain more value from the amount of time your employees work. By helping your employees manage their time you can help them also reduce their workload.

Establish the following practices and tips :

• Prioritisation is key when managing employee workload. You must have your employees prioritise the tasks where they are at their most efficient, or that need doing the fastest.
• As a manager make yourself available without falling into the trap of micromanagement. This means staging one to one meetings on a regular basis to monitor the employee’s work from a qualitative perspective.
• You need to monitor projects as much as employees. A project can be at a standstill or too much time spent on it by employees who could be used for something else. you may want to reallocate tasks to other employees as a solution.
• Have employees monitor their own time and use time tracking techniques themselves so that they understand how to manage their time, their break, and work in general. Help them break their tasks into smaller achievable goals.

How do you monitor and manage your employee’s workload?

To monitor staff workload you need to look at several dimensions across which you can monitor their output :

• The time schedules they are working on.
• The tasks they are working on
• What is the progress of their project
• how much time they are spending on per task
• How much value they are getting out of each task or overall project.

Using a time tracking device that also allows to track the time per task. This is what you can do to check what the tasks your employees are undertaking. Whether you need to remove or add tasks for them to keep their progress going is also a question to ask yourself.

How to assess and manage workload of employees?

Assessing the workload of your employees means undertaking an efficiency analysis. Look at where your employees are performing slowly or having difficulties with, and where they are at their most efficient. If you see that an employee is struggling with a specific task over time, it might wise to re-adjust your team around to give them extra help.