As your small business grows, your employees’ workloads will grow accordingly. While they’ll likely be able to handle much of this, there could come a point where they can’t.

Once they’re overworked, they’ll start suffering from stress and burnout. Their work could also start suffering.

In turn, that will have an impact on your business. That’ll not only be seen in an employee’s specific work, but it can start affecting other workers.

That doesn’t mean that tasks can simply remain undone. You’ll need to know how to reduce your employees’ workload while still getting work done.

That can be relatively complicated. There are multiple proven strategies to do this. Some will have much more of an impact than you’d think.

Why Reduce Your Employee’s Workload

You might be wondering why you should reduce your employee’s workload. There are multiple reasons to this.

If an employee’s workload is too high, they’ll start suffering from stress and burnout. In turn, these can cause their work to suffer, which can further compound the issue.

It can also affect their mental health. Stress has long been known as a cause of anxiety and other problems, especially when suffering from it long-term.

Combined with burnout, that can lead to employees quitting. That can subsequently lead to a larger workload on other employees until a replacement is found.

Employee happiness levels can plummet when they are overworked. Minimising this is vital. There are multiple ways that you can go about this.

Getting creative and implementing several workload reduction methods will help with this. Doing so will offer multiple benefits, including:

• Employees will be happier at work.
• Workers will be more productive.
• Employee retention will be maximised.
• You avoid the cost of hiring new employees regularly.
• Employees will be more likely to recommend suitable candidates for roles.
• Your company will have a better reputation among potential hires.

Your employees are your company’s lifeforce; you should treat them accordingly. Minimising stress levels, among other things, will be vital.

To do so, you’ll need to know how to reduce your employee’s workload without negatively affecting your business.

How To Reduce Your Employee’s Workload Without The Stress

Automate As Much As Possible

Automation is becoming increasingly more prominent in businesses. Quite a few tasks can be done within seconds using artificial intelligence and other automation tools.

These range from live chat for small business to invoicing and payroll. Such tasks are typically the most time-consuming and don’t increase overall productivity.

While they can be vital to the business, they don’t contribute to your bottom line. Being able to take these tasks off of your employee’s hands, you free them up to focus on more important things.

You could be surprised by how much of an impact this can make. What used to take several hours can be done in a matter of minutes.

Lean Into Their Strengths

People have different strengths and weaknesses. While all of your employees should excel at their jobs, there could be things holding them back.

Assigning them duties that they mightn’t be proficient in could mean that they’ll need more time to get it done. That reduction in speed will cause a backlog in their workload.

You can get around this by leaning into their strengths. If a particular employee is great at analysis, for example, then having them focus on that will be vital.

More creative employees may be better suited to marketing and other areas. Knowing what your workers’ core strengths and weaknesses are will ensure that they’re as productive as possible.

While you can encourage them to improve on their weaknesses, you should focus on their strengths in the meantime.

Discourage Distractions

Distractions are an inevitable part of everyone’s day. People will stop to chat in the hallway; they’ll go to the canteen to get a coffee.

That’ll lead to employees spending time on tasks unrelated to work. Over time, that could lead to things building up. Should this be ongoing, it could lead to the workload becoming stressful.

As built-in as many of these are into a day, that doesn’t mean that you can’t minimise them. While you shouldn’t ban employees from engaging in such activities, you can ask them to reduce their engagement as much as possible.

Keeping these non-work related tasks to a minimum will ensure that their productivity remains high. In time, that’ll lead to them getting through their tasks more efficiently.

Their workload wouldn’t seem as stressful once that’s been implemented.

Be Flexible

While management will be the ones leading employees, that doesn’t mean communication should be a one-way street. Taking the time to listen to feedback is vital.

Flexibility will be vital to this. Two employees may have different approaches to tackling their job duties. Forcing them to do things a certain way may lead to them taking longer to get things done.

They may have found that performing their duties in the way they suggest will let them get things done faster. Open communication will let you determine that.

Effective leaders and HR professionals should allow for this. By having two-way communication, you can improve processes while discarding inefficient approaches.

Show Them How To Prioritise

Many employees suffer from stress not because of the volume of work they have, but because they try to do everything at once. That will cause mistakes, which increases their workload, making the problem worse.

You’ll need to avoid this. Showing them how to prioritise their tasks will be a prominent aspect to this.

Management should know which tasks are the most important to the business. Ranking these in some form will let employees know what to do first.

That way, they can get the most important things done first. If they’re running late with other duties, these will likely be low priority.

As a result, they’ll typically feel less anxious about any delays. It’ll also ensure that employees don’t try to juggle several tasks at once, which can be its own problem.

Discourage Multitasking

Many people assume that multitasking improves their productivity. The reality is, however, that this isn’t the case.

Depending on the complexity of the tasks, the brain is incapable of doing both efficiently. That makes it counterproductive when done at work. It’ll also lead to problems.

Instead of shortening the amount of time it takes to get them done, it will increase it. Multitasking also increases the likelihood of mistakes being made.

When these happen, your employees will need to spend time fixing them. That’ll add to their workload, which you’d want to avoid.

When managing employees, aim to have them perform one task at a time. 

Encourage Stress Management

Stress is an unfortunate part of life. Many people find that work is one of their leading causes of this. Tackling this will be a priority.

Making work as stress-free as possible will be recommended. Alongside this, you’ll need to encourage stress management among your employees.

Should your workers suffer from excess stress, there’ll be several consequences. They’ll likely need more sick days than normal, and their work could suffer.

That could lead to other employees needing to pick up the slack, which will then lead to stress and burnout among them. You’ll want to avoid a domino effect.

Having stress management workshops regularly can be helpful with this. These sessions will highlight stress and mental health-related issues, alongside resources and techniques that can be helpful.

You should also encourage your employees to take regular breaks. By taking time away from a task, they free their mind up to relax. That could lead to them becoming more creative with tackling their workload.

Plan Ahead

Certain times of the month or year will typically be busier for you than others. With retail companies, for instance, the holiday season is the busiest time of the year.

You’ll need to plan ahead for this. With increased business comes an increased workload for employees. That can lead to burnout, among other things.

Taking the time to plan ahead will mitigate this. Keeping retail as an example; planning for seasonal workers in the lead up to the holiday season will prevent current employees from being overworked.

Evenly distributing tasks and hours across your workers will also minimise this as an issue.

How To Reduce Your Employees’ Workload: Wrapping Up

Figuring out how to reduce your employees’ workload without affecting your company’s productivity can be difficult. It’s not impossible, however.

Each of the above methods has been proven effective. Implementing each of them can reduce their workload while making sure that certain tasks still get done.

Your business will remain as productive as possible, if not more so. With the benefits that it can offer, taking this approach is more than recommended.

Not only will your employees be happier, but they’ll also be more likely to stick with you long-term. There’s no reason not to make their work-life as easy as possible.

Doing so will maximise employee retention while ensuring that they’re as productive as possible. You should also see teamwork and other areas improve over time.

HR Future Staff Writer