Learn how Workload from Teamwork helps your business to grow by ensuring your projects are properly resourced so you can deliver results that matter. 

As a leader, it’s your responsibility to support your team by managing their work in a way that keeps them on track, focused, and productive — even when things take an unexpected turn. Workload in Teamwork allows you to do just that.  With Workload, you don’t just get an overview of where and how your team’s time is being allocated — you can also drill down and quickly see who has capacity, who’s overloaded, and where you need to reassign or re-allocate tasks.

Having the ability to see what everyone is working on and quickly rebalance the work across your team (or teams) enables you to make smarter, faster decisions about your resources. In turn, this ensures that you can respond quickly to change, prevent bottlenecks before they form, and help each person to do their best work.  Here’s how optimizing your resources is going to change everything for your team.

You picked your team because they’re the best at what they do. But when they’re overloaded with work, not only are you denying them the opportunity to perform to the best of their ability — but they also start to get stressed. According to The American Institute of Stress, a shocking 83% of US workers suffer from work-related stress, and 39% of workers said that their stress was due to a heavy workload. As a result, they say, nearly two-thirds — that’s right, two-thirds — of the workers they surveyed are ready to quit their jobs. Stress leads to burnout, and burnout leads to churn.  It’s not that you want to overload them or stress them out, of course. But without full visibility over how much work everyone is juggling, as well as when it’s all due, it’s easy for deadlines to collide, tasks to pile up, and managers to have no idea that their team members are struggling. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

With Workload, you can get the full picture of how work has been allocated and assigned across the team.  From the Overview, you can get a quick summary of everyone’s tasks, time estimated, and total capacity. The Capacity Bar shows you at a glance what percentage of their available hours has been used, and how much remains. When you need to go more granular, you can use the Planner View to get a heatmap-style overview of how that assigned work actually breaks down in blocks of time.  For example, someone could be showing as over capacity overall, but when you drill down you might see that they’re overloaded on one day and not another during that time frame. In that case, you can easily level out those resources: it’s as simple as dragging and dropping the tasks to reassign them. Now, instead of one person being swamped with too many tasks all due on the same day, you can ensure that the work is being evenly shared, freeing your team to focus on quality — not get overwhelmed by quantity.

Task management template

Task management template

No matter what you’re working on, keep your tasks moving and get more done with our task management template in Teamwork.

Try our task management template

Change is inevitable. No matter how careful you were when scoping out your project, there are always curveballs along the way. Priorities shift, people’s capacities change, and unexpected tasks get added to the list. Without a clear understanding of what resources you have available, where you can move things around, and what can be deprioritized, those unforeseen changes are going to hit you — hard. Projects are thrown into disarray, timelines go off track, and bottlenecks start to build. And the worst part? It’s not just one project that’s affected: unexpected changes often mean you need to borrow resources from other projects, so one change can have a knock-on effect across your whole business.  In client-facing businesses and agencies, this can be even more of a problem, because it puts you at risk of letting your clients down, losing their trust, and ultimately damaging your reputation.

You can’t stop change from happening. What you can control is how you respond to it. Having a full understanding of how your resources (i.e. your team members’ hours) are being spent means that you can see the big picture across multiple projects and clients. From this perspective, it’s easier to identify which task deadlines are set in stone and which ones have a little more wiggle room and can be deprioritized. If you see bottlenecks forming, you can put pre-emptive measures in place — by adding more resources or moving editing due dates — and signal any timeline shifts to clients or stakeholders in advance to manage their expectations. With Workload, you can ensure that you’re supporting your team through any unexpected changes without overwhelming or overloading them, and without sacrificing on project deliverables.

As we’ve seen, when you don’t have a big picture view of everything your team is working on, it’s hard to get a grasp on how much of an impact their work is having. You’re in the dark about where and how your team members are spending their time, so it’s difficult to measure the ROI of your efforts.  Maybe you have a small account that’s taking up a disproportionate amount of your team’s time and diverting necessary resources from other projects. Maybe you’re trying to figure out if you have enough bandwidth to take on a new client. Or maybe you’re wondering whether it’s time to hire a new person and grow the team. Without an understanding of how your current resources are being utilized, you won’t know where you can improve — you’re just left guessing and hoping you’re not too far off the mark.

Successful businesses don’t run on guesswork. With Workload, you can see the information you need to make more informed, data-driven decisions. Whether you’re thinking about business development, adding team members, or just understanding where you have gaps, Workload gives you the concrete answers you need.  With those insights at your fingertips, you’re better equipped to analyze your resourcing strategy and make educated decisions about what to prioritize, where to invest, and how to use your resources to maximize your company’s growth.

The ultimate guide to resource management

The ultimate guide to resource management

Simply put: resource management gives your projects a better chance of being successful. Having a plan to allocate, manage, and forecast what your people will be working on not only means you can make sure you have enough people for every project in your pipeline—but also those that are working won’t get burned out.

Learn more

If you haven’t started using the Workload feature just yet, start using it today and let us know what you think! As always, if you have any questions just leave a comment below or send us a mail at support@teamwork.com.

Users on the Deliver plan have access to Limited Workload View. Full access to the Workload feature is available on our Grow and Scale plans.