Managing your Employees Workload is Critical to Success – Here is Why

Your employees’ engagement and productivity are significantly impacted by how reasonable their workload is. More than ever, while we’re dealing with continued uncertainty due to the pandemic and a tight labor market, managing workload expectations is critical to ongoing performance and productivity. 

The research is compelling. Multiple studies have uncovered a strong connection between workload imbalance and stress, burnout, and lowered productivity:

• The American Institute of Stress reported that 46% of workers cite unmanageable workloads as significant stress.
• 26% of employees are often or very often burned out, and 22% are juggling to balance work and their personal life. 
• Unreasonable heavy workloads cause stress and anxiety, leading to accidents, health issues, conflicts, and poor overall performance.
• In a 2017 survey by Bizfluent, 60% of workers said that work-related pressure has increased over the past 5 years.
• Not surprisingly, a recent study by KPMG reports that Covid 19 has increased work-related stress, with 94% of workers reporting stress and anxiety.

Employees who are stressed are more likely to experience anxiety, depression, and health-related issues. Working longer hours leads to hypertension, fatigue, changes in mood and behavior, problems with focus, decreased motivation, and concentration issues. Covid 19 has exacerbated these symptoms, reduced productivity and employee engagement, and impacted many companies’ profitability. 

As the impact of the pandemic lingers, your team is still struggling with balancing family and work responsibilities and often doing more than their job as open positions become harder to fill.

As a manager, one of your critical roles is to advocate for what your team can and can’t reasonably accomplish and identify resources to support their efforts. The first step is to understand how each employee evaluates their workload and the support they need to succeed.

• Prepare for one-on-one discussions by identifying what mental and physical demands your team members face to perform their responsibilities efficiently. 
• Have one-on-one conversations with each direct report to evaluate their current workload:
• Ask, “How are you doing with your overall workload?” “Are there additional resources you need?”
• For each project, routinely check in by asking, “How is that project going?” “What can I do to support you?”
• Work with each of your direct reports to uncover meaningless and time-consuming tasks. These typically drain energy, decrease productivity, and lead to a lack of motivation.
• Identify ways to automate repetitive tasks if possible or find lower-cost resources to complete them.  Maximize your team’s focus and energy on doing the work that matters.
• Manage deadlines – don’t let your lack of planning be your teams’ emergency. 
• Plan ahead and create a reasonable project timeline, including a margin for the unexpected – because it always occurs.

Today, more than ever, managing each of your team members’ workload is critical. Doing more with less staff, reacting to ongoing uncertainty, and managing employees in different locations make communication and planning around workload and deadlines the key to success. Ensure that your team has what they need to succeed and reduce the scramble due to unreasonable deadlines and poor planning. Productivity, engagement, and employee motivation will increase, leading to higher retention and a better quality of work.