As an effective team manager, understanding the problems your team faces is a significant part of the battle against fatigue. But realizing that through some innovative solutions, you can unlock increased potential for your team. That’s where the magic happens. Below are some ways to effectively optimize your project delivery by leveraging your employees’ workload management:
1) Delegate tasks clearly and efficiently
A user-friendly workload management calendar makes it easy to assign work to your team members and keep track of their progress. As a project manager or administrator, you have access to see what tasks are completed, which are still pending, and even those yet to be assigned. It will also take into account the employees’ vacation, holidays, leaves, etc. so you have a better understanding of who is available and when. After all, an organized you is the first step to an organized team. And knowing how to delegate tasks according to your team member’s strengths and weaknesses is a key part of what makes a good manager great. And there’s no guesswork. With easy-to-use, cloud-based project management boards, you can visually track and manage everything, from planning to launch dates.
2) Breaking things down
The hardest part of meeting any challenge is often simply facing its enormity head-on. As a project manager, you certainly have experience with the fact that while your work may be daunting, breaking any goal or project down into manageable steps is a necessity. This is especially true if you’re in a hybrid working environment where many people already feel overwhelmed without the structure of a traditional office environment.
Fortunately, using a calendar helps you and your team stay calm and motivated. And not only can the task management feature help you break down a larger project into smaller tasks assigned on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, but an intuitive calendar, like the one in Nutcache, allows you to view the amount of work your team has completed—and what they haven’t. You even have access to an individual member’s progress, allowing you to identify who’s performing well and who might need some help. This way, if a team member is falling behind, you know sooner rather than later and can address the problem before it’s too late.
3) Encourage collaboration
While recognizing—and taking advantage of—each of your team members’ strengths is crucial to any project’s success, the best managers also look for ways to improve their staff’s weaknesses. One way this can be done is by assigning team members to work on tasks together, and pairing them with an eye towards professional development. Say one member struggles with analytics, consider pairing them with an old pro who can pass on some wisdom.
With Workspace, you can manage multiple projects in the same place. You can also share updates right where work is happening to give team members insight into the work you’re doing. Encouraging group work can also help with feelings of isolation your team might be experiencing, and it can also do wonders to maintain the strong spirit of your company culture no matter how far away the nearest water cooler is.
4) Work when you work best
Even if your early pandemic-era yoga routine has by now fallen by the wayside, it doesn’t mean you don’t still have the capacity to be flexible. Just as you and your team may not be working in traditional spaces, they might not be working traditional hours—and this might be a good thing. After all, many studies show that peak times of productivity vary vastly between individuals. Take, for example, the traditional A-type morning person vs. someone who may come alive more at night. The latter may have just as much to offer as the former, though their internal rhythm is less conducive to the 9-5 schedule of most traditional workplaces.
Use this to your advantage! After all, timesheets allow you to easily keep track of the hours your team has worked and the tasks they’ve completed without having to stand over their shoulders (or cubicles), demand updates, or even be in the same time zone. Nutcache also offers numerous different charts to visualize your team’s productivity. A Gantt chart, for example, works in conjunction with time tracking so you can see how long your project will take and how work is progressing along the way. Nutcache also allows you to track your time visually and see at a glance all the work in a calendar-like view. This way you can know who’s working on what and when and how the project is progressing. With a clear picture of where time is going, you’ll be able to make schedule adjustments to ensure no one has more work than they can handle.
5) Don’t forget about the team in teamwork
Any effective team manager knows that working together often requires more than just the tasks at hand. While technology often has the bad reputation of diminishing our amount of human interaction during the day, we can often lose sight of its capacity to enhance it. A workload management calendar allows you more time to focus on your team member’s individual needs and progress, take advantage of other tools at your disposal. For example, you can add these tasks to your project workflow so your team can quickly access resources and communicate in one place. Knowing who is doing what and when will reduce the chances of unforeseen issues or bottlenecks.
Conclusion
Effectively managing a team requires not just the industry-related expertise you’ve garnered on your path to your current position, but also knowledge of your team members’ strengths and weaknesses, a cursory understanding of human psychology, resourcefulness, and more than a little luck. Suffice to say, it’s a balancing act. But with project management software, it doesn’t have to feel like a tightrope every time you approach a new deadline. Being able to plan and monitor your team’s workload capacity will help you make sure some people don’t get overworked and stressed, while other people’s time might not be used effectively enough. Nutcache’s project management software has capabilities to track time and budgets, create reports, manage invoices, share calendars across multiple teams, and monitor the progress of ongoing projects. These features can save you time and effort so you can put your energy into building innovative products and strong client relationships.
