Broken deadlines, scope creep, burnout, and productivity of a floored Yugo with a handbrake on.
It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve seen small agencies battling these problems while trying to scale, and it almost always comes down to the same issue that catches up with everyone – poor workload management.
You might have heard about it before, and it may sound like a cliché, but if you find yourself (or your colleagues) stuck in things that do not impact the project's actual progress, then the problem is obvious.
So, without further ado, here are 5 tips that, if applied, will make the biggest impact on your workload management and help you grow your agency much faster.
1. Use (Proper) Workload Management Software
Workload management software serves the purpose of helping organizations optimize processes and resources in order to effectively manage their workload.
Like it or not, ignoring the advantages of a centralized project and resources management system is nothing but a missed opportunity for efficiency and productivity.
So, let’s just agree that this one is a no-brainer.
We’ve seen agencies working with complicated notebook and Excel-based systems, and even though they somehow manage to track things down, it’s incredibly inefficient.
Investing in workload management software is almost mandatory for achieving maximum productivity and efficiency, simply because features integrated within those tools all play in your favor and are not something notebooks and Excel sheets can provide you with.
Some of the most important features you’re missing out would be:
- Centralized collaboration – Multiple team members leaving feedback on the progress can easily turn into a chaotic mess
- Task automation – Manually updating spreadsheets not only takes time but also increases the chance of human error
- Visual overview – Excel is amazing at displaying data but severely limited on displaying timelines and dashboard
- Time tracking – Unless you’re using third-party software, it’s impossible to track time spent on tasks and projects. Even if you do, manual entry is still highly inefficient.
- Integrations – Workflow without integrations is heavily limited
Operating without these features is possible, but we’re not focusing on what’s possible here – we’re focusing on what’s the most efficient way to scale.
On the other hand, another super important thing is to choose a workload management tool that best fits your needs.
If your services are mostly in the marketing and design realm, ActiveCollab would be the optimal solution for you, as we solely focus on small businesses from those industries, looking to optimize their processes and scale rapidly.
As a simple-to-use but powerful productivity and collaboration workspace, managing deadlines, deliveries, and general workload is super intuitive, so you’ll be able to see its impacts from the get-go
Interested to see it in action? Try our free trial, or book a demo – We’ll guide you through everything, from an idea to an invoice!
2. Outsource Non-Core Work
Regardless of how big or small your agency is, there’s always work that has nothing to do with the actual growth of your business or delivering to clients.
The biggest problem is that this non-core work rapidly grows, and all of a sudden, you find yourself doing all these things that lower the amount of (quality) output you produce in the areas that actually matter.
According to AgencyAnalytics, 20% of marketing agencies list time constraints as their top challenge, and the majority of those agencies that list this issue as the top challenge are small agencies with up to 5 employees.
Plans tend to go south, but budgets remain the same, so you have less time available to deliver projects on schedule. On top of all this, there’s a ton of non-core work you need to take care of.
Bookkeeping, accounting, legal stuff, data entry, recruitment… Sounds familiar?
The ultimate way to manage these tasks and free up more time for your team is to outsource them.
At first, it may seem that the cost of outsourcing tasks mentioned above isn’t worth it, but every hour you spend on them is an hour you could have spent on growing your business by increasing the quality of your output or simply by delivering before deadlines.
As your business grows, non-core work will snowball, so the best time (efficiency-wise) to outsource it is right now.
3. Automate Recurring Tasks
Onboarding new clients and new employees, starting new projects from scratch, providing clients with status updates… These are just a few of the many recurring, tedious, and repetitive tasks that are directly influencing your workload.
54% of the workforce believes that they could save 5+ working hours with task automation, and those tasks are usually the most simple ones – data entry and setting up meetings.
So the solution is obvious – automate whenever possible.
But what and how do you automate your repetitive tasks?
Here are a few actions that will immediately free up a noticeable amount of time (if you apply them, of course):
- Meeting scheduling – Use Calendly, Google Workspace, or Brevo to reduce the need to go back and forth on meeting scheduling
- Content calendar management – content management tools such as Buffer, Hootsuite, and Later can help immensely in publishing and editing content on various platforms
- Marketing campaign scheduling – ActiveCampaign, Hubspot, and Mailchimp can help you automate your marketing campaigns and make finding new leads much easier
- Annual payments – not really an automation tip, but if you have monthly subscriptions, try switching to annual whenever possible, as it will save you time on paperwork, and it’s much more cost-effective.
- Client feedback – instead of spending hours collecting client feedback, streamline the process by automating it – set up advanced surveys that are automatically sent to your clients.
These strategies will most certainly help you improve your (and your team’s) workload, freeing up time for more important tasks.
If we focus specifically on project management and processes used for providing services to various clients, ActiveCollab can help automate things even further:
- Create new projects from templates – don’t waste time creating every project from scratch. Instead, build templates that will cut down your project launch time by 80%
- Automate the creation of recurring tasks – daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, or custom. Whenever you want it
- Add time estimates on all recurring tasks – track down how much time they actually take in certain time frame to complete
- Get progress reports daily – see what has been completed the previous day and what tasks are due
- Automate invoicing and payment tracking – set up invoices you want to be raised every month and integrate with Stripe, Paypal, or Braintree
- Create reports in a click – since all your work and communication lives in a single place, now you can automate any type of reporting, spending a few minutes instead of days
Besides these 5, there are a ton of automations you can set up with ActiveCollab that will help cut down the time spent on recurring tasks immensely.
4. Encourage Time Blocking
One of the most essential practices for improving workload management in any collective is encouraging time blocking.
As a leader, you can significantly improve workload management by promoting time blocking and encouraging your team to adopt this practice.
Time blocking is the ultimate way to eliminate distractions and reduce the noise of everyday tasks that interfere with the work you need to focus on.
The methodology is quite simple: create time blocks representing a group of tasks or a single big task. For example:
- If you have multiple meetings during the day, try to sum them up in a single time frame (e.g., 10 AM - 13 PM) and time block that time as “Meetings”
- If you feel that you’re most productive during early morning hours, time block that time specifically for focused work
- Leave the time frame of an hour or so to reply to emails and messages, and block that time as well
…etc.
By practicing time blocking, you’ll free up several additional hours you typically lose as you jump from one task to another.
If you want to implement the time-blocking strategy within your agency, you can use ActiveCollab for better task prioritization and integrated time tracking. You will be able to prevent procrastination by breaking down big tasks into smaller ones and giving you a better overview and data on where your working hours really go.
We already covered this topic in detail, so if you want to know more about time blocking, check out this post!
5. Automate Client Reporting
Reports take so much time, and truth be told, they are very exhausting…
According to Wellington’s annual The State of Project Management Report, more than 50% of project managers take more than one day to compile all the reports, and even half of them take more than two days. So imagine spending all those hours each month on something way more productive - like….
Knowing how detailed reports can be and how much time project management software saves on compiling all the data and building a custom report, one can safely say that one of the most significant benefits of using project management software is report automation.
On the other hand, the more detailed the report, the better – clients want to see the ins and outs of what’s going on with their investment!
That brings us to the #1 tip, where using workload management or a project management tool is essential – with ActiveCollab, reporting is super easy, and if the project is properly run in-app, building detailed reports takes no longer than a couple of minutes.
Besides that, once you onboard the client on ActiveCollab, they can opt-in to daily emails that notify them about the progress, status of the tasks, potential blockers, and deliverables.
This is very beneficial as clients value transparency – however, you can choose if you want a specific client to be involved in a project or a task and share their comments and feedback or if you prefer them to be a spectator.
That said, the automated reporting feature is indispensable for optimizing workload management and achieving maximum efficiency.
Conclusion – ActiveCollab as Valuable Asset For Teams Seeking To Optimize Workload
Let’s be straightforward here: you don’t need fancy tools to optimize your (and your team’s) workload properly – you can still do that with a messaging app, Excel, and notebook.
But the core message here is optimizing workload and a few easy steps on how to do it.
Ultimate workload optimization is impossible without proper tools that allow you and your team to free up hundreds of hours monthly you normally spend on poor task prioritization, manual reporting, and procrastination.
With ActiveCollab, you have everything in one place – The Workload.
The Workload is ActiveCollab’s feature set that provides a real-time overview of your team's workload by combining data from time tracking, task management, and project management. As a manager, you can easily monitor your team's workload, identify potential burnout risks, and ensure that everyone is appropriately utilized.
Interested to see how it works?
Don’t just take our word for it – make sure to try it out for yourself or book a demo and our agents will also showcase our other powerful features designed to simplify your agency's operations and help you focus on growth!
