Workload: how to gain insight and prevent overload

What is workload?

Workload is the amount of work an employee, team or other resource needs to complete within a certain period in relation to the available capacity.

Suppose an employee has 32 hours available this week and has 28 hours of work scheduled. That leaves four hours of available capacity. If that same employee has 38 hours of work scheduled, more work has been planned than can be completed within the available time.

Workload isn't simply about how much work there is. It's primarily about the relationship between:

planned work and available capacity.

Comparing the two helps you answer questions such as:

• Does someone still have capacity for a new assigment?
• Which employees are fully booked over the coming weeks?
• Where is overload likely to occur?
• Can a new project be completed within the required deadline?
• Should work be distributed differently across the team?

Workload is therefore an important part of workforce planning, resource planning and capacity planning.

What is the difference between workload and work pressure?

Workload and work pressure are closely related, but they don't mean exactly the same thing.

Workload is primarily about the amount of work in relation to the available time and capacity. To a large extent, this can be objectively visualised within a schedule.

Work pressure is about how someone experiences that workload.

Two employees could both be scheduled for 36 hours of work per week, for example, while one manages it comfortably and the other experiences significant work pressure. This may be due to the complexity of the work, tight deadlines, unexpected disruptions, responsibility or other circumstances.

A high workload therefore doesn't automatically mean that someone experiences excessive work pressure. Conversely, someone may experience considerable pressure even when their workload appears normal.

For planners and team leaders, workload is particularly useful because it's something you can anticipate and manage. If you can see that someone is consistently being assigned more work than their available capacity allows, you can intervene before bigger problems arise.

Why is it important to have insight into workload?

As long as a team is small and everyone roughly knows what their colleagues are working on, you may still be able to estimate workload based on experience.

But that changes as more employees, projects, customers or departments become involved in the planning.

For example, a project manager schedules an employee for twenty hours on project A. Another planner schedules the same employee for sixteen hours on project B. Meanwhile, the employee has also internal work and a day off scheduled.

Each individual schedule might look perfectly achievable. It's only when you combine everything that you realise the employee doesn't actually have enough capacity.

A lack of workload visibility can therefore result in overfilled schedules, shifting deadlines, unevenly distributed work and unexpected capacity problems.

The opposite can happen too. You might decide not to accept a new assignment because the team appears fully booked while there is actually still sufficient capacity spread across several employees.

Good insight therefore doesn't just help you prevent overload. It also helps you make better use of the capacity you already have.

How do you measure workload?

The simplest way to determine workload is to compare the amount of planned work with the available capacity. A simple calculation is:

Workload (%) = planned hours / available hours x 100

For example, an employee has 40 hours of capacity and 32 hours of work scheduled.

32 / 40 x 100 = 80% workload

In theory, that leaves eight hours of available capacity. What if the same employee has 44 hours scheduled?

44 / 40 x 100 = 110% workload

More work has then been scheduled than fits within the available capacity. In practice, however, determining actual capacity is slightly more complicated than simply using contracted hours.

Contracted hours aren't the same as available capacity

An employee with a 40-hour working week doesn't automatically have 40 hours available for scheduled work.

Annual leave, sickness, training, internal projects, meetings and other activities all take up part of the available time.

If you only look at contracted hours, you'll quickly get a distorted picture.

For example, an employee works 40 hours per week but has one day of annual leave and spends another four hours in internal meetings. Their actual available capacity for projects is therefore considerably lower than 40 hours.

A realistic view of workload starts with a realistic view of capacity.

When is workload too high?

From a planning perspective, the clearest sign of excessive workload is when more work is scheduled than there is capacity available.

In this type of calculation, a workload above 100% means that someone theoretically doesn't have enough available time to complete all the scheduled work within that period.

However, this doesn't mean every employee should be scheduled at exactly 100% capacity at all times.

Planning always involves uncertainty. A task takes longer than expected, a customer calls with an urgent request, a machine breaks down or a colleague unexpectedly needs help.

If you schedule every available minute in advance, there's very little room to absorb these changes.

A healthy workload therefore depends on the type of organisation, the nature of the work and how predictable the process is. In a highly predictable environment, capacity can be used differently from an environment with lots of urgent assignments and changing priorities.

What's more important than one fixed percentage is being able to see where the limits are and when you're consistently exceeding them.

Signs of excessive workload

Not every case of overload is immediately visible in the schedule. There are several signs that may indicate that work is no longer being distributed realistically.

Tasks may regularly be pushed into the following week. Employees may consistently work overtime. Deadlines may increasingly come under pressure. Urgent work may mean that the rest of the schedule constantly needs to be adjusted.

Large differences between employees can also be a warning sign. If one colleague is continuously fully booked while another still has plenty of capacity available, it may be time to redistribute the work.

However, if you only look back at what happened, you're always too late. That's why it's much more useful to gain insight into future workload in advance.

How do you prevent your team from becoming overloaded?

Preventing overload doesn't start with working harder. It starts with more realistic planning.

Make sure your capacity is accurate

Start with the actual available capacity of employees and teams. Take working patterns, days off, annual leave and other activities into account.

A schedule can only be realistic if the capacity it's based on is realistic too.

Look further ahead

Don't just check whether today or this week is achievable.

An employee might still have plenty of capacity this week but already be fully booked next month due to other projects. Looking further ahead helps you identify future capacity problems sooner.

This is particularly important when projects are scheduled weeks or month in advance.

Don't automatically fill every available minute

Leave room for unexpected work where necessary. The right amount of buffer will differ from one organisation to another. A manufacturing environment with a highly predictable process requires a different buffer from a service team that deals with urgent requests every day.

Distribute work based on capacity

New work doesn't automatically have to go to the person who would normally carry it out.

First check who actually has capacity available within the team. This helps you distribute workload more evenly.

Adjust your planning regularly

Plans are constantly changing. Customers change assignments, tasks take longer or less time than expected and employees may become unexpectedly unavailable.

Workload isn't something you calculate once. It needs to change along with your current schedule.

How do you gain insight into your team's workload?

You can calculate workload manually in a tool such as Excel. For a small team with relatively few changes, that may be enough. It becomes more difficult when several employees are working on different projects at the same time.

You then need to keep track not only of each employee's capacity, but also of how much work is scheduled, the period over which that work is spread and what happens when the schedule changes.

With multiple teams and projects, it's easy to end up with different versions of the same reality.

A change to project A, for example, should also affect the available capacity shown for project B. If it doesn't, an employee may appear to be available in one schedule while they're actually already booked elsewhere.

That's why organisations with more complex planning increasingly use workload software or capacity planning software that directly connects planning and capacity.

Which software can help you visualise workload?

Good workload software shows you more than a simple list of tasks. You need to be able to determine how much capacity employees and teams have available and compare this directly with the work that's scheduled. The schedule should also update when work is moved, extended or assigned to someone else.

For organisations managing several projects simultaneously, a central overview is particularly important. This prevents different planners from allocating capacity separately without being able to see what their colleagues have already scheduled.

Ultimately, workload software should help you answer one simple question:

Do we have enough capacity to complete the work we've planned?

And when the answer is no, you want to be able to see immediately where the bottleneck is and what options you have to make adjustments.

Visualise workload with vPlan

With vPlan, you combine operational planning with capacity. This means you don't have to calculate workload separately from your schedule.

The Workload feature is available in vPlan's timeline and gives you direct insight into the relationship between your planning and available capacity.

While planning, you can therefore see not only what needs to happen and when, but also whether the people or teams responsible actually have enough capacity to do it.

View workload directly alongside your planning

Workload can be enabled directly from the timeline. The capacity overview then appears alongside your schedule. Here, you can view remaining or planned capacity in hours or percentages.

There's no need to open a separate report or Excel spreadsheet to check how much capacity is still available.

As you plan, you can immediately see the impact of the choices you make.

View capacity by employee, group or stage

Not every organisation plans in the same way. Sometimes you want to know how much work an individual employee has. In other situations, the total capacity of a team or a particular phase in the process is more relevant.

In vPlan, you can therefore view workload from different perspectives, including by phase, group and employee.

A project manager might check which employee still has availability, while a production planner may want to know how much capacity a particular production phase has over the coming period.

See immediately where overload occurs

Capacity is displayed visually in vPlan. When plenty of capacity is available, the display is lighter. As more capacity is used, the display changes. As soon as more work is scheduled than the available capacity allows, the overload is shown in red.

This means you don't have to calculate the workload of every employee manually. Capacity problems immediately stand out in your schedule.

Choose between planned and available hours

Simply knowing that someone is 'busy' doesn't tell you enough. That's why Workload allows you to view either planned hours or available hours.

If an employee is already scheduled close to their full capacity, for example, you can see exactly how much room remains before assigning them a new job.

This makes it easier to schedule new work at the right time and assign it to the right person.

See the impact of your planning immediately

The major advantage of having workload information within your schedule is that you don't just identify a problem – you can act on it immediately.

If you see that an employee is becoming overloaded, you can move a task to another time, adjust its duration or add extra capacity. You can then immediately see what that change means for the workload.

This turns workload from a static report into an active tool for day-to-day planning.

A practical example

Suppose a new project comes in that requires 60 hours of work over the next three weeks. Without insight into workload, a planner might simply assign the project to the employees who normally carry out this type of work. Only later do they discover that part of the team is already largely booked on other projects during that period. With a capacity overview, you can check this before scheduling the work.

You might see that employee A is almost fully booked for the coming weeks, employee B still has capacity in week two and employee C becomes available from week three.

Instead of assigning all the work to one person, you can distribute the project or schedule parts of it for a different time.

The result isn't just a better distribution of workload. The project schedule becomes more realistic too.

From workload to realistic planning

Visualising workload isn't an end in itself. The ultimate goal is to create a schedule that you know in advance is actually achievable. To do that, you need to connect three things:

1. What needs to be done?
2. When does it need to be done?
3. How much capacity is available?

When this information is spread across separate spreadsheets, calendars and project schedules, it's difficult to see the full picture.

Bring planning and capacity together and bottlenecks become visible much earlier. You can see which employees still have room, where overload is likely to occur and whether future work fits within the available capacity.

This turns workload into something you can actively manage, rather than something you only notice once your schedule has already started to fall behind.

With vPlan, you get planning and workload in one visual overview. This helps you distribute work more effectively, make better use of available capacity and create schedules that are realistic in practice.

Want to see how Workload works in vPlan? Try vPlan for free and discover how much capacity your team actually has available.