How to Efficiently Distribute Jobs Across Field Teams?
Natasa Djalovic
Last update on:
April 18, 2024 2:35 AM
Published on:
Do you need help distributing work across your field teams? You are not alone.
When employees work in different locations, delegating the workload and ensuring the job gets done efficiently is challenging.
On top of that, it’s even harder to assign jobs to your team members fairly. After all, you don’t want to risk your high-performing employees being overworked and burnt out due to the workload they just can’t carry.
This article will offer a few smart tips on distributing jobs efficiently across your field teams and highlight the crucial role staff management and other apps can have in achieving this goal.
Looking for a Way to Manage Your Field Teams Efficiently?
Timeero’s tracking and scheduling come to the rescue.
Workload management is efficiently distributing and managing jobs across your team.
If you manage the workload successfully, you will maximize employee performance, engagement, and job satisfaction rather than overwhelm them with work.
Successful workload management will also help your team members feel more confident about their workload to achieve team goals and deliver higher-quality work faster.
What Is Unbalanced Workload Distribution?
You must manage the workload successfully across your remote teams to avoid ending up with unbalanced workload distribution or, to put it simply - overworked and underworked staff.
There are quite a few signs that can help you identify unbalanced workload distribution in your team.
Below are some of them:
Some employees work overtime hours to complete their tasks, while others aren’t pulling their weight.
Some employees are overworked and struggle with work stress or burnout.
Some employees need more time to complete specific tasks because they don’t match their skill sets.
An employee's workload oscillates - sometimes overloaded and other times underemployed.
Conflicts between employees over the workload and job dissatisfaction.
An increase in employee churn.
If you identify unbalanced workloads in your organization, it’s clear that you must improve workload management.
By efficiently assigning duties to your team members so that they match their skills and capacity, you will improve team performance, prevent churn and improve employee engagement, and secure your business better outcomes.
How Do You Distribute Tasks Among Team Members?
Now that we’ve briefly covered the basics of workload management and (in)effective team job distribution, we’re ready to move on to improving our practices for a more balanced and efficient workload.
Below are a few tips on how to best approach this matter.
Use Tools Fit for Field Teams
The recent technology solutions are crucial in efficiently managing field teams.
Scheduling is one of the apparent job distribution issues where technology can come to the rescue.
Why is it important to schedule tasks?
Scheduling and distributing jobs ahead of time ensures no sudden due days or schedule conflicts could negatively impact your workflow. This way, scheduling helps you cover all crucial tasks while splitting the workload evenly across your teams.
At the same time, your employees will feel confident about their workload and their shifts so they can better prepare for work and focus on their tasks.
Scheduling predictability is crucial for employee well-being and work-life balance. Employee research has determined that scheduling predictability is crucial for employees' well-being and work-time balance. Employees with less predictable work schedules experience more work-related stress and interference with their family life and non-work activities.
In the long run, inefficient scheduling can also devastate your team’s performance.
How do you distribute tasks among team members?
There are several ways to schedule jobs across your field team members.
The first is traditional scheduling, which is mainly manual - using pen and paper templates, spreadsheets, and multiple channels to communicate new shifts or shift changes with employees.
In companies with field employees or remote workers, such as home healthcare, construction, delivery, etc., a scheduling process is more often than not time-consuming, exhausting, and, moreover - highly inefficient.
With no real-time data on employee availability when creating schedules and no clear and transparent communication, companies face recurring problems, such as scheduling conflicts, constant shift-switching requests, and employee absenteeism.
Employee scheduling software streamlines this process, helping employees deliver the best work and companies overcome the scheduling challenge.
Timeero Scheduling: Admin View
Certain field team management solutions, such as Timeero, also have robust scheduling capabilities. They can help your managers and shift leaders see their staff availability and create and communicate schedules, jobs, and tasks in minutes.
Timeero Scheduling: Efficiently Distribute Jobs Across Field Teams
When creating a schedule, Timeero lets you choose a job or a work task and delegate it to a single field employee or a group, depending on their availability and skills. You will know who is available, as all the shifts and PTO are also shown in your schedule, leaving you no room for mistakes.
Besides assigning a job or a task, you can add other details on the job important for your employees - job description, workplace location, contact details, etc.
When you create a schedule, your field employees will know instantly - they’ll receive a notification via the app and email.
Scheduling: Email Schedule Notification
Scheduling: Employee Mobile App View
Moreover, you can leave them the option to reject or accept shifts, solving many problems even before they occur.
When you combine scheduling with employee monitoring: GPS time clock, GPS and mileage tracking, and geofencing, it becomes even more powerful, helping you distribute jobs efficiently and evenly and ensuring a smooth workflow.
Setting Geofenced Job: Admin View
For example, when you assign a geofenced job to an employee, you and your employee will know whether they’ve clocked in and out on-site, as their timecard will be flagged.
You can even set up the app to receive alerts for late arrivals or punching in out of bounds.
In addition, to help you solve the timekeeping problem, the app can send employees reminders to clock in on arrival and out on departure.
With employee gps tracking app, you have real-time data on what’s going on with your team members during their shifts, their jobs, tasks, schedules, and availability - all in one location. Such data is essential to distributing tasks fairly and achieving a balanced workload.
Timeero Who’s Working lets you distribute jobs across field teams efficiently
For example, when you switch to an employee monitoring and scheduling app, such as Timeero, you can see how each of your employees is spending their working hours - real-time and historically, no matter where they are.
Who’s Working dashboard lets you see all available employees in a single dashboard. When you have an urgent job, you will easily find a solution, as you can see who is working nearby and on what task. This way, you’ll have an effective team ready to cover
unexpected situations.
Timeero Routes: Admin View
If they work in various remote areas, you can see the routes taken from one site to another, so you will know if your team members are taking longer routes or running private errands.
The Suggested Mileage feature will show the shortest or most efficient route to their destination, thus saving both your employers and employees’ time and your resources.
Suggested Route Vs. Route Taken
If you’re wondering how all we’ve mentioned above relates to job distribution, the answer is pretty straightforward. Besides all other benefits, the app that combines all these functionalities provides a clear insight into how your employees spend their working hours, lets you analyze their performance, and helps with decision-making.
So, suppose you notice that an employee’s timecard is often flagged, that they’re clocking in late or taking longer routes from one workplace to another. In that case, you have every reason to question their accountability.
What’s more, you have a tool that can help you improve employee accountability, which consequently, when combined with efficient scheduling, leads to fair job distribution and more efficient teamwork.
How Do You Distribute Tasks In a Team Strategically?
However, besides reliable software that can help you efficiently distribute jobs across field teams, you need to address this issue strategically to achieve the best results.
Access Your Team’s Workload
This means accessing your employees’ workload and balancing it.
To assess the employees’ workload, there are two essential things you should take into account: their time and skills.
When assigning jobs, you must evaluate how much time an employee will need for each task. You can achieve this by setting a regular 1-1 check-in with your team members to track progress. This will help you determine whether your employee will be underutilized or overworked.
But, since the time an employee needs to complete a task highly depends on their skills when accessing the workload, you must also consider the type of task you’re delegating.
The key to successfully distributing workload is delegating jobs to employees with the appropriate skill set to complete them efficiently.
Along with accessing your team’s upcoming workload, you need to evaluate your team’s capacityby considering your team members' skills and availability.
More often than not, it turns out that you have limited resources and an unbalanced capacity to handle an assignment or a project. This knowledge will help you decide whether to take on a new project, hire an employee, and so on.
Plan the Workload Ahead
To achieve balanced and efficient job distribution, it’s best to plan ahead. You must be able to categorize and prioritize your task list, to get an insight into the upcoming workload and all the due dates.
When you plan, you can allocate your tasks more efficiently and create a better schedule for your employees.
When ongoing tasks are distributed equally among team members, you will have more control over team progress and better leverage, especially when managing multiple projects or taking on more work.
Clarify Roles and Responsibilities
Your employees should know everyone’s roles and responsibilities. If they lack such clarity, it leads to inefficient teamwork.
In such circumstances, the odds are high that high-performers will pick the slack up routinely or that some tasks will be unfinished or duplicated.
You need to get your team on the same page so they know how the tasks are assigned and how they need to handle them.
Set Clear Goals
Your employees will be more empowered and motivated if they know how their performance contributes to achieving common milestones and set goals.
When they have a chance to discuss goals, performance metrics, and workload, the job distribution process will become more transparent, and they will gain more control over it.
This can be a massive step towards a positive work culture, higher engagement, job satisfaction, and better performance.
How Can Timeero Help Me Distribute Jobs Across Field Teams Efficiently?
If you need a tool to efficiently manage your field employees - schedule and distribute jobs, track time, location, and mileage, and have real-time insight into your field employee's whereabouts during working hours - Timeero has it all.
Natasa is a writer specializing in the IT and software industry with 6+ years of experience in content writing and online marketing. During that period, she wrote more than 1,000 articles and several ebooks. She majored in English language and literature and loves cats, sneakers, and candy. When she's not working, she's probably binge-watching Netflix.
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