Tip 160: Assessing How Your Team Spends Time

Do you know your team’s current workload? Is their volume of work keeping them from being engaged and productive? Are they experiencing burnout? What is turnover like on your team? Should you be thinking about adding another member to the team or possibly postponing a project?

Discussing these issues with your team can be tricky. Most employees don’t track what they do hour-by-hour, and you don’t want your team to feel like you are micromanaging or monitoring them all day. Consider trying these strategic tips for assessing how your team spends time.

• Be clear about why you are interested in learning more about your team’s workload.

• Implement a team status update system for greater transparency.

• Ask your team members to track their tasks for a short period, including levels of time, energy, effort, interest, and satisfaction.

• Categorize team tasks by importance and urgency so you can determine how to adjust priorities: important and urgent; important but not urgent; distractions and wastes.

• Add or remove a small task for each team member, or whole team, to test workload.

• Act on what you learn about your team’s workload.

• Check in with peer managers about their team’s workload and output.