How To Allocate Work to Team Members: Help For Managers

A good team manager knows how to assign tasks to the right team members, monitor progress, give constructive feedback, and maximize productivity. They also know how to monitor the morale of the team, and enhance the skills of key team members so that they don’t lose valuable players. 

Nice! I mean this is the benchmark set by top productivity and management books, and gurus who know what they’re talking about. It makes sense. 

When the Society for Human Resource Management did their survey in 2020, it emerged that American workers think their managers could improve the following skills: [1]

• Communication
• Using team members skills in the right places
• Managing and delegating work correctly
• Cultivating a positive and inclusive work culture to increase employee satisfaction
• Managing team performance

So the gurus and the employees all agree. But what if you’re struggling to deliver expected performance, and keep your employees engaged? This is where we’re stepping in to help. Don’t pay thousands of dollars attending another management course when your problem could be solved by combining a few best practices with a smart resource management tool (driven by intelligent AI technology). 

Introduction to task delegation

Timewise Calendar keeps projects on track by aligning tasks with long-term goals, ensuring steady progress for your whole team.

What should task delegation look like in a perfect scenario?

Project management is a term broadly used to describe the action of assigning tasks, and monitoring results when working with remote teams and creative teams, and In a perfect world delegation is about assigning responsibility and authority to team members to complete specific tasks or projects. 

Often it looks more like this. Manager delegates tasks, team members take up the tasks; manager follows up, chases up and monitors work allocation. Not really the ideal situation, but if you can get this process to look like it should, you can match tasks to people who are enthusiastic about them, and spend much less time monitoring progress. Proper allocation will also encourage team members to provide feedback, use available resources and help to balance workloads.

What task delegation is not

The best way to cheese off your staff is to allocate all the mundane and routine tasks to them while keeping interesting and challenging tasks for yourself. Sorry, someone had to say it. Also, are you looking to burn yourself out, or what?

Don’t worry so much about a loss of control. That’s not what delegation is at all. You can allocate tasks and still keep your finger on the pulse. In fact project managers worth their salt are those rare creatures that know how to give the right tasks to the right people, and still seem to have eyes in the back of their heads, and a six sense about project delays. 

It’s also not about offloading task assignments without a clear goal in mind. The successful completion of a project is like taking an important journey. If you had to reach your destination, with all your team members intact and thriving, who would you take with you? Who would get the job done? Those answers will tell a lot. 

Preparing to delegate

Timewise Calendar builds a sustainable routine, leading to a positive outlook, and enhanced morale in your team

After you’ve been in business a while you get some valuable insights. One of these insights is about the attitude of your team members. Time and time again it’s been proven that you can do more with a few competent people and a good attitude, than you can by having every skill in the playbook. The adage goes: Attitude determines altitude. Well it also determines how you assign and prioritize tasks.  

So before you start looking down the list of who has appropriate skills, take some time to see who is leading out front. Those employees who seem to relish task assignment and never tell you that they have too many tasks, they are the ones you start with when you have an important project. 

Yes, their current assigned tasks, tight deadlines and skill set will play a role but that’s easily managed with resource management software. You can’t teach inner drive to anyone, nor can you schedule it and yet it’s a deal breaker when you want to increase productivity. 

Now that you’ve separated those firing on all cylinders from those who are taking a leisurely stroll, you can get on with allocating tasks. Work that is critical for success, deadline driven, involves making complex decisions, and needing expertise can go to the star players, while work needing concentration, a specific skill set, or very structured working methods can be distributed to those who meet the task requirements. 

Let me assure you, that slow and steady is sometimes the thing that makes the whole project, so this is not about low value work, it’s about using resources correctly. 

Work that is highly sensitive or confidential is best kept close to home, involving only those that must be involved. 

Communicate expectations clearly

Timewise Calendar reduces the mental load of manually tracking resources, providing clarity and reducing stress for project managers.

One thing that happens far too often, when tasks are being thrown randomly at employees (a bit like a dart being thrown at a dartboard), is that communication sucks. A team member can’t read your mind regarding project deadlines, quality standards and desired outcomes, and available resources. Yes, you are busy and you need all hands on deck, but you also need to spend 5 minutes communicating important details. This is going to solve many of your problems. 

Make it a habit to draw up an email, record a video, or leave a voice note with the following information:

• The deadline of the task/project and all its expected milestone dates. Be clear about non-negotiables. 
• The desired outcome, quality standards and effect on organizational goals. This will help the team member to set clear parameters for themselves.
• The resources available for the task/project, and any available support if they get stuck.
• The appointed responsible person for the completion of the project, and who must be kept in the communication loop. 

A brilliant one, if you are able to provide it, is to tell the employee how they will be measured when completing this task, and if there is any reward for completing it earlier than required or within budget etc. 

Keep the communication lines open until everyone is satisfied that you have achieved the goals you’ve set out to achieve. Also, don’t be afraid to acknowledge those who do a great job. This will increase employee morale. 

Free up your time to provide support and monitor progress

Timewise Calendar facilitates continuous improvement in productivity, making teams more agile and responsive to changing project demands.

Here’s where the real value of a manager comes in. Your job is team morale, allocating work, employee engagement and decision making. When there’s decreased productivity, you need to know about it and respond quickly. 

You also need to make the decision making process as easy as possible for your key team members. But you can’t do this when you’re snowed under trying to fix mistakes made by giving tasks to the wrong people, or compensating for the lack of skills in your team, or generally just dealing with a lot of noise from work activities and clients. 

So, what can you do to turn the tide?

Start using a resource management app, like Timewise Calendar to help you align your team tasks to strategic objectives. This is about using innovative and cutting edge AI technology to rid you of the mental effort required to keep track of everyone, and everything. 

You want to be there for your team members, then you need software that can help you with the following:

• Keep projects on track by aligning various tasks with long-term goals, ensuring steady progress.
• Enhance time management skills by creating a balanced schedule that incorporates all project aspects.
• Increase efficiency by ensuring every task contributes to overall objectives, minimizing wasted time and effort.
• Enhance team productivity by automating schedule adjustments, enabling better focus on certain tasks and client work.
• Helps your team optimize their workflows, leading to better project outcomes and time management.
• Ensure smooth project execution by automatically suggesting alternative timings for conflicting events and unforeseen events.

TAKE TIMEWISE FOR A TEST DRIVE

Give constructive feedback and fine tune the delegation of tasks

Once you’re in a position to truly monitor the progress of each team member and interact with them about their individual tasks, then you’ll also be able to give some constructive feedback. By using a resource management app, you’ll remove the stress of keeping track of projects and you’ll be able to figure out who is thriving and who is barely surviving, and why. 

Managing people doesn’t have to be confusing when you know that the basic desire of all employees is to be seen as valuable, and to feel like they are contributing to the overall success of the team. 

Yes sure, there are those employees that have no inner drive, that only want to do their bit, take their pay check and go home to their families. But, the vast majority are there trying to find meaning in their 9-5 jobs, beyond the pay they take home. 

Now constructive feedback is about balance. What went well, what didn’t. It’s about open communication that goes both ways. The employee should feel that they can contribute to the task allocation choices. This will make them more willing to take responsibility for the outcome.

Watch out for employee burnout, including your own. Some team members set deadlines that are impossible to keep, trying to prove themselves. It’s your job to help your team manage their individual expectations, in favour of the overall health of the team. This isn’t going to be easy to do sometimes. That’s why you need to move as much of the ‘administrative functions’ to a capable software platform. 

Success embraces failure as it’s greatest teacher

Why do we want to stick our head in the sand when we’ve failed? We should treat failure the same way as many of the world’s most successful businessmen and women. Instead of hiding from failure, they highlight it to their teams and encourage everyone to learn from it. Not only that, they don’t care about failing. It doesn’t break them, and many of them have built their empires on the rubble of massive failures.

As a manager, cultivating this attitude in yourself and your team will help a lot. Refusing to shy away from failures and encouraging people to deal with them and be better, is what creates and fosters a culture of high performance. Contrary to this kamikaze approach to eliminate all traces of failure from the workplace, it only serves to cultivate all the wrong behaviors such as high staff turnover, high absenteeism and despondency. 

A personal productivity coach for managers

Effective delegation is not just about assigning tasks; it’s about strategic alignment, clear communication, and continuous support. 

Along with our helpful advice on how to allocate work to team members, Timewise Calendar tackles the concerns of employees about their managers. Let’s remind you what they were:

• Communication
• Using team members skills in the right places
• Managing and delegating work correctly
• Cultivating a positive and inclusive work culture to increase employee satisfaction
• Managing team performance

Timewise Calendar is an invaluable support for managers, enhancing productivity by intelligently aligning tasks with long-term goals, rescheduling dynamically, and providing insightful data to optimize workflows. The more your team uses the software the more it will learn about what you want, and how you work. This turns it into the personal productivity coach everyone needs, and eventually won’t be able to live without. 

References:1. Society for Human Resource Management