A team member with no tasks on their plate might scream “overstaffed project.” However, it might otherwise mean other team members are dealing with a heavy workload. And this is what you don’t want to see when managing workloads—an unbalanced workload distribution. Uneven workloads are unfair and financially ineffective. Projects with underutilized employees aren’t as profitable as they could be, and an overloaded team leads to employee burnout, turnover, and acquisition costs over time.
The list of cons is longer, but if you keep reading, you’ll find recommendations for a fair and effective workload distribution. If you put them into practice, you’ll see that balanced workloads increase job satisfaction, reduce mistakes, and help teams hit goals one after the other.
What is Workload Distribution?
Workload distribution is a set of strategies and techniques for evenly assigning tasks across team members. It consists of analyzing each employee’s abilities, skills, and knowledge and deciding which work they can do, considering their current workload and workload capacity. The end goal is to achieve an equitable distribution of work while attending to the entire team members’ competencies.
Types of Workload Distribution
Depending on the criterion, you can distribute the workload among team members in different ways.
- Task-based distribution: Assign tasks to individuals based on their job descriptions and workload capacity. They’ll own the tasks and are expected to deliver on time, yet will do the work on a schedule you won’t impose or oversee.
- Time-based distribution: In this model, deadlines govern the resource allocation. This means you assign tasks with the earliest end date first.
- Skill-based distribution: Allocate work to employees based on their skill sets and experience. And if two people have the same individual skills, prioritize according to resource availability and individual workloads.
- Project-based distribution: The allocation of tasks around projects takes into consideration not only resource availability and actual capacity but also deadlines, employee skills, and experience. Break down each project into digestible chunks (or tasks) and prioritize them based on urgency and importance.
Benefits of Proper Workload Distribution
A balanced workload distribution promotes a culture of fairness. But it doesn’t benefit your workforce only—it also benefits your company’s bottom line for many reasons.
- Increased productivity: An equitable workload distribution is essential for a productive work environment, as an overwhelmed team works slower and makes more mistakes.
- Improved employee satisfaction: Balancing employees’ work hours creates a fairer, more harmonious work environment. Lighter workloads also contribute to a healthier work-life balance, reducing employee stress and boosting employee well-being.
- Enhanced team collaboration: There’s no positive work environment without cooperation among team members. But that’s only possible when everyone has their fair share of work and enough time to help each other out.
- Better resource utilization: A fair division of tasks doesn’t generate underutilized employees or overloaded teams. Instead, it maximizes the utilization of human resources without crossing the line of maximum capacity.
The Risks of Uneven Workload Distribution
Workload imbalances are something you want to avoid at all costs, from consequences for individual team members and teams as a whole to drawbacks on projects and the business’s bottom line.
Employee Burnout
Continuously exposing staff to excessive stress due to overwork is a problem. Burnout has a significant, long-term impact on employee well-being and health.
Besides, Gallup points out that burned-out employees are 2.6 times more likely to be actively looking for a new job. Considering that the average cost per hire is $4,683, a decrease in employee retention is out of the question.
So, if you start to see signs of burnout in your workforce, it’s time to put a workload distribution strategy in place.
Decreased Productivity
Excessive workloads are not only a health hazard but also a jeopardy to company-wide productivity. According to Gallup, burned-out employees are 63% more likely to call in sick. And when these employees show up for work, the more time they put in, the less productive they are, and the lower your revenue is.
Effective workload management translates to high employee performance, which raises work quality and reduces error rates.
Team Morale and Conflict
An uneven distribution of workload creates resentment among employees, especially when the task doesn’t require specialized skills. After all, no one wants to spend the day looking at the computer screen, trying to find work to do when someone else has an abundant work pipeline.
At the end of the day, employee development and career progression depend on a track record of successful work. When the opportunity to demonstrate how valuable you are to the team and the company doesn’t come, team dynamics change negatively. Team members stop collaborating, and workplace conflicts start to arise.
Missed Deadlines and Project Failures
Overloaded employees inevitably miss deadlines. Either they have too much work to do or are working less because they feel burned out. And missed deadlines have cascading effects on entire project timelines.
On the other hand, underutilized team members are wasted resources. They’re available to take work off the shoulders of overloaded team members, yet their scheduled time is below their capacity.
How To Identify Unbalanced Workloads
Even the most well-balanced workload distribution plan calls for continuous improvement. But pinpointing the signs of workload imbalance involves various actions.
Conducting Workload Assessments
Methods for measuring individual workloads are based on the time and skills required for the completion of tasks. For instance, NASA’s Task Load Index subjectively evaluates workloads on five seven-point scales that rank the mental, physical, and temporal demands as well as the performance, effort, and frustration associated with the execution of a task.
Now, assessing workload is an ongoing process, and you must do it regularly as projects change and priorities shift. One-on-one chats and active listening help you do that. But you must also use software for workload tracking to assist you in planning resource availability and capacity, assigning and scheduling tasks, and monitoring utilization levels. The goal is to prevent unfair workloads while meeting deadlines.
Analyzing Time Allocation
Effective resource management also requires comparing actual vs. expected time spent on tasks, and the way to do this is time tracking. Using time-tracking software will make it much easier to monitor team performance and uncover time sinks and inefficiencies.
Look for tasks that are taking much longer than estimated to complete. Then, investigate why that’s happening. For instance, you might have assigned those to someone who lacks the right skills or experience.
Employee Feedback and Surveys
There’s no better source than your employees to identify workload imbalances. So, regular check-ins, one-on-one chats, and active listening are fundamental for a balanced distribution of tasks.
Additionally, designing and running effective workload surveys allows you to gather actionable employee feedback on workload distribution. And that’s why creating a safe environment for honest feedback will help you adjust and achieve a fair allocation of personnel.
Performance Metrics Review
When you conduct performance reviews, you get to spot outliers and patterns in productivity levels. And it’s okay for productivity to fluctuate slightly throughout the days. But continuously low productivity levels might indicate workload issues that you must solve.
That’s why monitoring workload metrics is so important. By monitoring key performance indicators or KPIs, such as the number of on-time deliveries or hours above capacity, you obtain data to make informed workload decisions.
8 Ways to Balance Workloads Effectively
Once you identify an unfair workload distribution, you must balance it effectively. Whether that’s using the right software, offering corporate training, or planning capacity better, effective resource management runs on different avenues.
1. Implement Project Management Tools
Ideally, your workload and time-tracking tools are embedded in your project management software. But it’s okay if they integrate with it instead. Together, these tools enable you to assign roles and tasks and track progress against deadlines. They also detect peaks in worked hours, highlight underutilized employees, and alert you about overbooked staff members. That’s how you prevent capacity bottlenecks while maintaining an equitable workload distribution.
2. Cross-train Employees
One of the effective strategies to balance workloads is corporate training. And in this case, it involves training employees in the skills they need to complete tasks they’re struggling with. This means they might need to learn skills that don’t fit their job description.
Sure, the effects of corporate training might not be immediate, and you might need to overcome resistance to learning new skills. But a multi-skilled, versatile workforce is priceless when the time to distribute tasks comes, especially in small companies with few funds to hire multiple people for the same role.
3. Prioritize Tasks and Projects
After setting realistic deadlines for your projects and tasks, you must prioritize them before distributing work. Consider their urgency and importance to organizational goals. Then, assign resources starting from the most urgent and important activities.
You may follow techniques for task prioritization, such as the Eisenhower Matrix. Just make sure to communicate priorities to the team as clearly as possible.
4. Encourage Time Management Skills
No effective distribution of workload survives an inefficient use of time, so you must teach your employees to manage their time efficiently. By offering training programs and resources they can go back to whenever they need, you’ll build a culture of efficient time use.
Time management techniques help your staff plan how to use their time in advance to execute the assigned tasks. For instance, they’ll learn to plan breaks with the optimal duration and frequency and rely on tracked time to get a better sense of where they’re spending their time.
5. Regular Team Capacity Planning
It’s always best to plan team capacity proactively, which means not waiting for capacity bottlenecks to define workload limits. By evaluating how much work each individual can realistically take on, factoring in meeting, administrative, and vacation time, you’ll conclude on your team’s true capacity. And after that, you just need to keep adjusting the plan based on changing circumstances.
6. Utilize Flexible Work Arrangements
You may offer various types of flexible work options to your personnel. For instance, part-time work arrangements are excellent for reinforcing your full-time team’s capacity during peak hours. Another example is flex-time arrangements, which allow you to manage a team’s collective workload throughout the day by setting different start and end times per member.
But implementing and managing flexible work arrangements with spreadsheets alone would be laborious and time-consuming. Instead, resource management software with time-tracking capabilities assists you in assigning work and tracking task progress.
7. Automate Repetitive Tasks
Not all workload distribution tasks can or should be automated with workload management software. But a good indication is how frequently you do them and how subjective they are.
Choosing the workload distribution tasks suitable for automation and configuring workplace automation tools to do them for you is your job. The rest, which is actually doing those tasks, is the job of software. The result is increased efficiency and not few times a simplified version of your old workload distribution practices.
8. Foster Open Communication
Effective leaders involve their staff in the process of distributing workloads. They transparently communicate their decisions about who will do what, when, and why, especially when redistributing tasks.
Still, you must encourage your employees to speak up about workload issues. And for that, you must create and maintain open channels for workload discussions. We also recommend that you hold regular team meetings to distribute workloads.
How Teramind Makes It Easy to Monitor Workloads
Teramind is a leading workforce management software. Here’s how you can use Teramind to improve productivity, optimize workloads, and more.
- Real-Time Insights: Gain instant visibility into individual and team performance metrics, allowing for dynamic adjustments to workloads and resource allocation for maximum efficiency and minimized downtime.
- Enhanced Collaboration: Facilitate better teamwork with intuitive tools that balance task distribution, streamline project management, and enhance communication, leading to more cohesive and successful project outcomes.
- Data-Driven Decisions: Leverage comprehensive analytics and reporting to make informed decisions about workload distribution, identify bottlenecks, and continually refine processes for sustained operational excellence.
Conclusion
Don’t wait for signs of workload imbalance to surface. Instead, be proactive about building a culture of fairness in which underutilized employees don’t battle overworked ones for equality at work.
With effective workload distribution, you show your employees that you care about their work-life balance and provide a healthier work environment, but you also increase productivity, job satisfaction, and employee engagement.
