Workload management tools for effective workload planning

Plan ahead to manage team workloads

Divide and conquer

With efficient workload management, break down larger tasks into manageable subtasks. Assign them to different people and get work done in parallel.

Prioritize and stay alert

Set task priority like low, medium, or high, and create reminders so you never lose track of approaching deadlines. Good workload management tools help you keep tabs on everything that needs your attention.

Make people your priority

Well-defined roles

Give each member of your team a customized role and profile, and assign tasks that suit their role. In this way, team members can avoid multitasking to complete an extensive list of activities for too many hours, and they can pick up and complete skill-specific tasks within the specified deadline. A good idea would be to use team workload management tools that help streamline these processes for you.

Clear resource availability

The workload report shows you how occupied your team is. Effective workload planning can help you identify who has time to work on other tasks and who is overloaded, and distribute work accordingly.

Time-off management

Sanctioned leaves for a user appear on the calendar whenever you add a new task to them in the workload report, so that managers can distribute work accordingly.

Access colorful reports and charts

Comprehensive Gantt charts

Get a clear idea of your project schedule, task dependencies, and critical tasks at a glance. Know which tasks need your immediate attention.

Planned vs. actual

Plan and set aside hours for each task in advance. See how you have progressed and where you stand with your plan using a planned vs. actual chart.

Collaborate for better workload management

With workload management tools like Zoho Projects, communicating any ad hoc work through a set of social features like Feed, Comments, Forum, Chat, and Pages becomes seamless. Get important work done on the go by brainstorming over documents, chats or virtual meetings.

So, what exactly is workload management?

Workload management is a step-by-step process of meticulously assessing and optimally allocating workloads to teams based on their availability, skills, and other realistic factors that decide how much work each member can take at a time.

What are workload management tools?

Workload management tools facilitate seamless work distribution across teams in such a way that each member is assigned just the right amount of work. This means that they can pick up tasks without biting off more than they can chew.

Top features to look for in workload management tools

Resource allocation:

This feature delves deeper into how your teams are placed for the day, displaying the amount of work each member has on their plate, and how easy or far you can go with distributing work without burying members in a pile of tasks.

Collaboration:

For relevant work to move around faster and reach the right people, the method of communication is key. When it comes to keeping your teams up to date about recent developments or touching base with your colleague about last minute work, collaborative features like chat options, forums, and audio or video calls are a blessing.

Automation:

Be it weekly review meetings or daily stand-up calls, set them up to recur without any manual effort; automate every repetitive task out there and save precious time.

Time tracking:

Your team might be proportionately assigned to tasks, but who is keeping track? Utilize an efficient time tracking feature and allow it to do the task for you. Monitor time, submit timely logs, and know how much time goes into every task.

Integrations:

Let your apps speak to each other, and bring your favorite apps to work with you, wherever you are. Tight integrations with apps that you use regularly help you get work done quicker and minimize context switching.

Task management:

Know what to pick up on priority and what to keep on the backburner with an efficient task management system that brings order to your tasks.

Reporting:

Get deeper insights into your project progress with contextual reports that reflect each team member's effort towards tasks assigned to them. Use these reports as a reference point to compare with future projects and their performance.

What are the steps of proper workload management?

You know you can tick "proper workload management" off your to-do list when your teams are assigned relevant, proportionate work based on their skills, expertise, availability, and bandwidth. The main goal is to ensure teams are not overworked. There's no one way to do this—you can employ any strategy that's best for you. Here's a list of steps that we've put together to help you kick things off.

• Have an open dialogue with your teams:

  This is the first step to set yourself up for success. Encourage open conversations with your teams and understand the root cause of any issues. Here are a few questions you can ask:

  • What are you working on currently? Is the work assigned to you aligning with your skill sets and expertise?
  • Do you have bandwidth to complete your assigned tasks?
  • Are you chasing unrealistic deadlines?

  The answers that you receive can help you gain deeper insights into each member's grievances and tailor your workload management strategy according to individual capacity.

• Break down work:

  Give structure to your project by breaking it down into smaller elements, and have an overview of what the team's upcoming weeks look like.

• Prioritize:

  Lay out every task's deadline and duration, and rank them in order of importance. Figure out what's critical and what's trivial. Then, assign high-priority tasks first, and tackle the rest later.

• Have check-ins:

  Always know what each member's bandwidth is like for the week. Ensure each task goes out to a member with relevant experience; learn if they've already worked on tasks of similar nature before, or if this is a first. Keep your teams in the know, and always tell them why you've assigned a particular task to them. If they're already optimally loaded for the week, hand over work to someone who has a relatively free schedule.

• Use an efficient workload management tool:

  A lot of time can be saved if you invest in workload planning tools that do all the heavy-lifting for you. All you have to do is onboard your team members, monitor real-time insights, have frequent discussions with your team, and let the tool take care of the rest.

Why is workload management important?

Identifying tasks and assigning them to teams is one thing; distributing them equally to the right people in a way that promotes increased productivity and a healthy work climate is a whole other ballgame. This is where effective workload management comes to play. We've listed down a few reasons why it proves essential to any business.

Turn down the heat, avoid burnout

Improper allocation of work leads to burned out employees, which not only puts a damper on the work environment, but also markedly dwindles the team's productivity. With proper team workload management in place, employees know what they're working on and are motivated to amplify their performance, which will boost team morale and improve workplace wellbeing.

Work smart, avoid multitasking

Efficient workload planning enables teams to prioritize important tasks and get more work done, rather than multitask to complete a bundle of insignificant items that bear little to no fruit.

Promise stellar deliverables

Workload management helps offload work on people with the right skills. When teams are conscious of what they are working on, boredom is knocked out of the window, and the results that follow are of the finest quality.

Ramp up productivity

With a fine balance achieved in workload planning, a happy workforce is guaranteed. A happy workforce results in a healthy work climate, ultimately leading to a rise in productivity.

What are the benefits of workload management?

Workload management provides the following benefits:

• Boosts team performance
• Improves productivity
• Reduces the chances of burnout
• Improves team morale
• Effective resource utilization

What is workload management software?

Workload management software is software that enables managers to optimize their team’s workload by considering the overall work status, individual and team workload, as well as the specialized skills and efforts required by individuals to perform a particular work item.

Workload management challenges

Sooner or later, businesses are likely to come face to face with demanding challenges, and those around workload management are no different. Here are a few common ones:

Unbalanced work distribution

If some team members are spread thin while others are twiddling their thumbs, it means a team workload management problem has developed. This can cause team morale to diminish, burnout cases to spring up, and attrition rate to peak.

Absence of prioritization

With a sea of work items flooding in, it could be quite difficult to put a finger on what is critical and what can be put off for later. Productivity could take a hard hit if the issue isn't addressed quickly.

Weak resource planning

When there is a lack of prioritization, resources are either insufficient for high-priority tasks or at an excess for subordinate tasks, which can produce bottlenecks and affect the project's timeline.

Worrisome deadlines

When expectations aren't communicated properly, teams go into a state of jeopardy. They end up distributing work unevenly when they already have a lot on their plates. Deadlines become unrealistic and cannot be met, which leads to failure in completing deliverables.

Why is workload planning software important?

Here are some of the reasons why workload planning software is important:

• Optimally balance individual and team workload
• Effective resource planning and allocation
• Skill management for performing efficient work
• Making sure quality work is done
• Meet all project management metrics
• Accommodate real-time changes and automatically re-allocate workload

Top workload management tools

Here are some of the top workload management tools:

• 1. Resource planning software

  Resource planning software is a dedicated tool that helps organizations in performing capacity management, resource planning and allocation. It helps in the smart workload planning based on their time-offs, availability and team workload. It also helps in predicting the resource availability based on their current allocation pattern. This type of workload software helps in planning for future work too.

• 2. Workplace collaboration tools

  One of the simplest ways of performing workload management is via workplace collaboration tools. This could be anything from an org-wide intranet portal to an online spreadsheet platform. Although this method is not as effective as a dedicated project/ workload management software, employees can still assign tasks ad-hoc based on individual availability. This type of tool may be better suited for smaller teams with work that doesn’t require much planning.

• 3. Task management software

  Task management software can double up as workload planning software too. Since work is broken down into manageable partitions in a task management platform, it would be easier to allocate the available workload via this tool. While resource optimization may not be possible, simple allocation and progress tracking can be effectively performed. Workload management using this method is also better suited for startups and small businesses.

• 4. Project planning software

  Project planning software is used to establish a work breakdown structure and hence can be used as a workload tracking software. The planning stage in project management involves allocating time, resources, and budget to various work items. This is often done by taking into consideration the overall workload, employee skills, and time available. Real-time optimization may not be possible, but it’s still an effective way to manage workloads.

• 5. Project management tools

  The best way to manage employee workload is using a project management tool with workload management capabilities. This is because, in addition to workload management, these tools also have time tracking features that tie-up well to optimize the whole process. Be it a small business or an enterprise, these tools can scale and adapt to unprecedented changes and re-allocate work in the most optimal manner.

How to plan, track, and manage team workloads with Zoho Projects

Zoho Projects is one of the best workload planning tools on the market, with a robust set of features that aids in effective workload management. Here’s how you can plan and manage your workload using Zoho Projects:

• Step 1: Establish a work breakdown structure by dividing the scope into milestones, task lists, tasks, and subtasks,
• Step 2: Set task priorities to estimate the time and effort needed to complete them.
• Step 3: Allocate time, deadlines, a budget, and resources to the work items using Zoho Projects’ resource allocation features.
• Step 4: Set the baseline and dependencies, and visualize the project timeline using the Gantt chart.
• Step 5: Track employee work hours using time tracking features.
• Step 6: Compare planned vs. actual progress to monitor delays.
• Step 7: Use the workload report to optimally reallocate tasks if needed so the project gets completed on time.