Working from home can be a huge adjustment, especially when it comes to workload management. Having a huge number of set tasks as well as feeling the growing pains of your company transition might all feel a little overwhelming.
Knowing where to begin can be hard, especially in the absence of co-workers and team-mates. In this blog, we’re going to recommend workload management tools, workload management plans, and workload management strategies to ensure that remote working allows you to thrive and succeed instead of fall behind.
Workload Management Tools
A workload management tool refers to anything that helps you to measure, understand, and essentially manage your work. This might be an app like HomeSquad.io where you can track, measure, and pause, and play tasks.
Alternatively, they might be a written down schedule where you decide what to work on, in a specific order and when to take a break.
When it comes to the more digital side of workload management, there are 4 distinct categories of workload management tools. These are:
Resource Management:
These are primarily used by team leaders and managers to take a step back and analyse overall work. Resource Management software allows employers to directly view employee availability regarding their working hours. It is primarily used to shuffle resources between departments and optimize work output.
Automation Software:
Automation Software is a form of workload management software that can be an invaluable asset for a business. It’s an incredible tool when it comes to analysing individual employees and configuring the best possible outcome. After analysing what tasks best suit individual employees, automation software assigns the best possible task to the best possible employee. This ensures that work is always performed by the perfect person for the job and to the best possible standard.
Work and Resource Management Platforms:
Work and resource management platforms are alternative kinds of workload management software that works by predicting potential issues. They analyse work output and detect trends and patterns of work activity on a more general level. This means that they can anticipate potential discrepancies in long-term plans or advise on upcoming events based on historical data.
Productivity Tracking
Productivity Tracking is what HomeSquad.io is all about! Productivity tracking software essentially tracks employee productivity levels to depict work patterns. This allows employers to address discrepancies if spotted or spot previously unnoticed abilities in an employee. In creating a clear data set of individual work activity, productivity tracking can be an invaluable asset in remote working management for both employer and employee.
Workload Management Plans
Workload management plans are frequently employed in a business environment in collation with resource management software to create detailed plans, addressing employee availability, and optimizing every potential asset within the business to ensure a completed task. Translating a workload management plan into a remote format simply takes away the more public side of presenting and physically deliberating information.
A fantastic platform to accurately configure workload management plans is with a workload management excel template. Excel is easily adaptable for any task and allows you to essentially program your data from your workload management tools into an easy to understand colour coded plan. If you’re not particularly adept at using Excel, a template and guide can be easily accessed online for you to reference and draw on when creating your workload management plan. Your workload management excel spreadsheet can then be emailed across relevant departments before being disseminated into individual tasks for employees to work on.
Workload Management Strategies
Managing a heavy workload as a career means naturally evolving as a worker and personally developing strategies over time. As a means of complementing the work you’ve already put into managing your workload, we’d like to advise on strategies that we think might support your work life.
Before starting to employ any new strategies, it might be helpful to take a step back and identify anything you’re currently doing or not doing that might improve your efficiency. Are you keeping hydrated? Are there tasks that others might be able to perform better? Try analysing a few day’s work to identify discrepancies before you work on adding anything new. This will help ensure that the changes you make more purposeful. It’s also a strategy in itself, as it enables proactive change.
Procrastinating is often a symptom of mental fatigue and overwhelm. If you find yourself procrastinating stop and take a break. This doesn’t mean stopping every half an hour when you start to feel less motivated, alternatively, it means spacing your break throughout the day to try and stop mental fatigue before it happens. By staying mentally refreshed, you will find it easier to focus and work productively. It can also help curb habits like checking emails unnecessarily and performing other technically productive but realistically unproductive tasks.
Wrapping up
In this blog, we’ve addressed specific workload management tools, workload management plans, and workload management strategies to make remote working more of a comfortable place.
We hope you’ve found the blog informative and that you’ve been able to take something away from it; be it an improved understanding of how workload management can work in a remote environment, or the motivation to try out a new strategy to improve your productivity.
Remote working can be a fantastic way to develop independent working skills, by reading this blog, we hope we’ve equipped you with the skills you need to adapt to a new working environment.
