Agency Under Pressure? Simple but Effective Tactics to Manage Your Team's Workload

Agencies have increasing workloads, which leads to tremendous pressure on the employees as well as management.

Part of the problem lies in the fact that most agencies want to remain lean and thin because of uncertain market demand patterns and intermittent periods of weak demand when employees do nothing but sit idle and tap their toes.

To build a strong project pipeline, agencies constantly practice aggressive marketing tactics. However, they end up securing more work than they can handle. They agree to work on new projects without realizing that they are already over-committed.

But keeping the workflow consistent is easier said than done, as inconsistency in work breeds many unprecedented problems and negative developments.

According to a recent American psychological association study, almost 50% of respondents disclosed that an unbalanced workload was the main cause of stress in the corporate world.

Seven of ten respondents who felt stressful conditions at work revealed that they intended to change jobs within a year.

It should ring alarm bells for the agency owners as they can potentially lose their best employees if they don't find a solution to prioritize workload management. As an agency, you should ensure that projects are completed successfully and on time without causing stress to your employees, which may lead to dissatisfaction and demotivation.

What Is Workload Management?

Workload management can efficiently prevent stressful situations and lower productivity rates in organizations caused by the inefficient and variable distribution and management of work across different individuals.

Workload management is a process that maximizes employee performance. It diminishes chaos so that your employees stay contented and satisfied at the end of each workday without feeling overwhelmed with inconsistent work pressure.

The best part of workload management is that your employees can achieve high productivity without compromising the quality of work.

Image Source: Splunk

Handling Workload Management in the Agency Environment

Workload management is a considerably new practice rare in the agency business. Earlier, managers assigned work based on one's skills, capabilities, and billable time, so things needed to be more flexible and easier to improve.

Currently, agencies practice dynamic and effective workload management, involving frequent meetings and training sessions. This way, you can equally delegate tasks without sending loads of work to a handful of employees and keeping the rest idle even if they are not skilled or experienced.

Here are some of the objectives of workload management:

• Utilize resources efficiently
• Make optimized and realistic project schedules
• Have realistic workload expectations
• Keep projects on track
• Prevent cost escalation
• Making the best use of the available resources

Tips to Manage Your Team's Workload

Here are some tips you can use to manage your team's workload -

1. Assess Your Team's Workload and Capacity

You often have a normal workload, but the scattered work, different project briefs, improper allocation of resources, and inadequate planning make it quite confusing.

It makes the assessment of the overall workload quite difficult.

To work around this, we can take the following measures.

• Grab the full list of the projects and processes you are supposed to manage
• Determine the scope of work and time taken to accomplish multiple deliverables
• Split bigger projects into smaller tasks and processes
• Prioritize the tasks based on urgency
• Assess your team’s bandwidth
• Assess the workload on each team member
• Use tools and templates to accomplish different tasks on time

Pro Tip: If the work is outside your team's bandwidth, hire white-label services. DashClicks offers quality white label fulfillment services to thousands of agencies worldwide and helps them thrive in this tough marketplace.

2. Allocate Resources and Breakdown Individual Workload

When you clearly understand who is responsible for what and how to accomplish the entire project in time, assigning work will become pretty straightforward. While allocating resources, keep in mind an individual's skills, availability, and capacity.

Here are a few tips for balancing your team members' workloads during resource allocation -

• Give preference to top-priority tasks first
• Implement time management practices
• Assign the job according to the expertise and experience of an individual
• Keep all channels of communication open and conversation flowing seamlessly. Implementing an employee communications app can be an effective way to achieve this, enhancing team collaboration and keeping everyone connected in real time.
• Keep everybody in your team in the loop as tasks are completed

Image Source: Asana

Pro Tip: You can use tools like Trello, Kanban board, or project management tools like Asana.

3. Monitor Schedules and Project Progress

The 3rd phase is the most crucial. In this phase, you need to track the employee performance and be ready to change things if necessary.

Pro Tip: Conduct meetings if required. If major meetings are difficult to conduct because of a lack of time, you can conduct brief meetings to resolve smaller issues and bottlenecks. Japanese are perfect at this art so you can learn from their popular management practice Kaizen.

Agency Tip: You can use DashClicks Projects App, a project management app created especially for agencies to manage your agency's workload. Our white-label project management app provides the easiest and most powerful way to manage your projects, teams, customers, and processes. Use our white-label platform to run your entire business. Save time, hit your goals faster, and create a transformational experience by leveraging the DashClicks ecosystem.

Managers should make sure that the high productivity targets are achieved without burnout. If you feel that an individual is facing difficulties accomplishing certain tasks, you can reassign those to someone else.

Keep asking for status reports when the tasks are in progress and ask the individuals if they face any difficulty performing them.

4. Have Realistic Deadlines

Unrealistic deadlines are a prime reason why a heavy workload of unfinished tasks piles up. The best strategy to resolve this issue is to split huge tasks into smaller ones, assess the skills required to complete them, and assign them to the right individuals.

Pro Tip: You can also try task batching which is a productivity strategy involving grouping similar jobs together to complete them in a single batch.

Image Source: MintLife Blog

One major advantage of using this technique is that you can accomplish a lot of tasks in little time without wasting time multitasking on non-similar tasks. It allows you to focus on similar tasks and perform them in rapid succession.

Must Read: 8 Proven Ways to Overcome the Daily Grind for Agencies

Final Words

Implementing team workload management could be a game changer for your agency, allowing you to accomplish your tasks quickly without causing burnout and employee dissatisfaction. Planning is the best part you must focus on, followed by the tools and processes.

Never underestimate the importance of training and mentoring. If you think that some of your team members need training, be quick to conduct small sessions. Cut most manual processes and try automation. You will be amazed at the productivity levels you can achieve with these measures.