Workload Management and Its Key Uses

Today's business world is demanding to say the least. Organisations are often met with onslaughts of work, short deadlines and high expectations to meet, all creating an environment in which staff are led to feel frustrated, overworked and burnt out. What if there was a better way to tackle these pertinent issues?

Enter workload management.

What Is Workload Management?

As its name implies, workload management is the process of efficiently managing and distributing an organisation's workload among its team members. It centres around talent optimisation, considering a group of staff's skills and strengths in assigning tasks. This process aims to distribute responsibilities across the workforce more fairly, ensuring that employees have the time and resources necessary to complete tasks to the most successful extent possible.

Why it's important

In a business landscape that's primarily defined by fluidity, turbulence and challenges, organisations are in a greater need than ever to remain efficient in everything they do. Simply delegating work on an ad hoc basis doesn't cut it anymore, especially considering the increasingly demanding nature of work today.

Unmanaged workloads can often lead to several problems within an organisation, including:

• Employees feeling overwhelmed and stressed
• Increased instances of mistakes and errors being made
• Missed deadlines
• Poor quality work
• Underutilised staff members

4 Tips For Effective Workload Management

It's obviously in every organisation's best interest to avoid imbalances in their workloads, whether for staff burnout, errors or missed deadlines. Workload management is an excellent solution and can effectively support a company's operations to mitigate these risks.

But of course, it's one thing to say you want to implement workforce management and another to do so. Several efforts can go into the process, each with its necessary steps and considerations.

With that in mind, we've compiled a list of the most important and what each involves.

Understand Resource Availability

Effectively capitalising on assets and talent is essential to implementing workload management and can only be done through a deep understanding of an organisation's available resources. Resource levelling and resource utilisation are some useful strategies for understanding resource availability.

It's essential to take the time to thoroughly review staff schedules, skills and experience when distributing tasks. By getting to know the ins and outs of each employee's capabilities, organisations can develop a clearer sense of who is best suited for specific tasks - allowing them to be more efficiently completed.

Allocate Evenly

Of course, the goal of workload management is to balance the distribution of tasks among employees. This can be done in several ways, with each organisation finding what works best. 

That being said, some general tips can be followed to more effectively distribute workloads:

• Assign tasks according to skillset - consider who is best suited for a specific task when delegating
• Take into account employee availability - be mindful of staff schedules and current workloads when making assignments
• Encourage collaboration - rather than overburdening one individual, consider assigning tasks to a team

Understand Capacity

Everyone has their limit, so it's essential to know and recognise the points at which workloads become too much for the staff. A big part of workload management is not only evenly distributing tasks, but also being able to discern what quantity is tangible. This means understanding the capacities of both individual employees and the organisation as a whole.

If an organisation consistently finds itself putting out fires and addressing issues as they arise, it may indicate capacity issues. In cases such as this, it's best to analyse to what extent the problem is occurring and make changes accordingly - whether in terms of staff, processes or both. Organising your team's resource capacity planning, can also be crucial in understanding and allocating according to your staff's capacity.

Set Priorities

Workloads will undoubtedly ebb and flow over time, with some periods being more demanding than others. During these times, it's best to have a system to set priorities and ensure that the most critical tasks are completed first.

One way to do this is using the Eisenhower Matrix, which helps individuals better understand and prioritise their tasks by urgency and importance. Other tips to prioritise your staff workload efficiently include utilising the pareto distribution for your workload, setting up a weekly workplan, having a project kick-off meeting to achieve your project objectives in your project pipeline.

Utilise Workload Management Tools

Workload management tools and software are the twenty-first-century solutions to the age-old problem of organisational inefficiency. Specifically designed to address the issue, these solutions enable companies to visualise, administer and complete the work they assign more effectively to kickstart your digitalisation journey towards digital acceleration.

Workload management tools are resources built and used for optimising task delegation. They can come in several forms and execute different functions; however, all work to make the process of workforce management easier on organisations that implement it. Here are a few examples.

Resource Management Tools

Resource management tools are a simple yet powerful asset that can help managers see a better picture of their allocations at large. They centralise and simplify the process of managing organisational resources, making it easier to shuffle or adapt situations as necessary.

Automation Software

It's 2022, and organisations have more resources than ever to automate and streamline their operations. These solutions are easy to find and implement and can be used for several workload-specific tasks. Automation software can help with scheduling, time tracking, and even billing - taking the burden off employees and managers.

Data Tracking Systems

Although data is already essential in business for so many reasons, it finds yet another place of value when it comes to workload management. Data tracking systems can allow for proper insight and help to identify issues early on, preventing them from becoming more significant problems down the line. They can also be used to understand staff capacities better, predict future needs and more.

Looking For An All-In-One Workload Management Solution? Tessaract Can Help.

Tessaract is a cloud-native, low-code workflow automation solution designed to help businesses of all sizes manage their workflows more efficiently to achieve agile workflows. From small tasks to extensive processes, Tessaract's digital adoption platform can automate it all - and with ease.

With Tessaract, you can:

• Automate any process or task, no matter how complex
• Get real-time visibility into your company's workload through digital workflows
• Reduce the need for manual input and repetitive tasks to improve efficiency
• Manage tasks in one place - no more missed deadlines or forgotten tasks

Contact us today and request a demo to see how you can take your operations to the next level.