Does this complaint from an employee sound familiar to you?
A simple solution from a leader might be to suggest the employee simply take a time management class or learn how to think through their priorities.
But what if you as the leader can be part of identifying the problem and potential solutions for your employees?
Here are four suggested actions you can take to help your team members feel a little less overwhelmed:
ONE: Explore the tasks that are bogging down team members — and understand the “why.”
The reality is that everyone experiences workload surges from time to time. However, sometimes workload surges come from a trend that is outside of the employee’s control. Maybe there is a volume increase of projects for their position. Other requests may be coming from adjacent departments. Perhaps key initiatives have been assigned to them without determining what other tasks should be delayed in the process.
Solution: A strong leader should not only understand the workloads for their employees, but probe for details to learn what tasks are getting in the way or causing disruption.
- Giving the employees the ability to delay some projects/tasks may be all that is needed.
- In other cases, shifting a project to another team member, or sharing the work between them could be the solution.
- In the example above, the employee has seven meetings. Maybe attendance could be cut to every other meeting, or their attendance determined unnecessary for a couple of those.
- Lastly, new resources (such as contractors, software, or processes) may need to be utilized to improve the situation.
TWO: Know where to intervene with other entities to deflect/delay non-important work.
Many times, other team leaders or departments reach out to employees for work to be completed. Managers of those team members being asked to help are often not even aware of those requests! Those other leaders may not understand the time required to complete the request, or the other projects already in queue for that employee. In these cases, it might be more challenging for an employee to say “no” or “later” to such requests, for fear that they will be perceived as “not a team player.”
Solution: A good leader should know all the projects, tasks, and meetings each of their direct reports has on a regular basis — ideally weekly, via 1:1s.
- A leader can take the burden away from the employee by saying “no” or “later” to such requests. By escalating that message to other department leaders on behalf of the employee, priorities for what can be accomplished in a reasonable time frame can be established.
- Frequent requests from other teams may also highlight other resources that need to be evaluated to remove work overload from existing team members, i.e. the new resources (such as contractors, software, or processes noted in solution #1) may need to be introduced.
THREE: Demonstrate to your employees how to prioritize.
While time management classes can be effective, a more effective and direct way to address time management with your employees is to talk directly about how you would evaluate tasks and projects.
Solution: As a leader, you can reinforce the importance of the top priority projects by demonstrating your own strong time management and project management skills — and help lead by example.
- Share examples with your team so they can apply the same methodology to their own tasks.
- Make sure that your team priority projects are reviewed in quick status meetings every week or two.
- Work collaboratively with your employees to identify priorities and even re-evaluate deliverables for some projects that can be scaled back or re-envisioned.
- Make sure there are no outlier projects from other departments that you are not aware of.
FOUR: Take an honest look in the mirror to see if you are part of the problem.
This might be the hardest step to take – and admit – but many times we here at CPL see leaders that spend most of their time creating fire drills for their employees. This could be inviting people consistently to same-day urgent meetings, (and asking them to drop other meetings in the process), or asking for quick slide creation, quick email explanations, quick customer escalation responses. You have probably made any one of these requests recently, but do you do it all the time? Understand that your actions and behavior can drive employees to think that your culture is a “yes” culture, and that success is responding quickly to the latest emergency. When this happens, a leader should not be surprised when priority projects move to the backburner.
Solution: If you are brave enough to look in the mirror and see this unfolding, we advise that you pause and look at the three steps above as a partial way to change your behavior.
- Brush up on your own time management skills if needed.
- Step Three will be helpful for sharing your process for many different situations.
- When assigning a “now” request, let your employee(s) know that another project can be delayed, allowing time for the emergency.
Even if your employees are not struggling, we strongly suggest you apply one or more of these steps as part of your routine. Avoiding having overworked employees is even better than trying to go back and make them feel less overwhelmed. We’d love to hear your success stories of applying them!