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SearchA practical review to detect imbalances, prioritize, and reassign tasks based on the team's actual capacity, not just the number of pending items.
In an SME, imbalances often go unnoticed when some people resolve urgencies, absorb others' tasks, or sustain processes that depend on their knowledge. To assess workload, it is advisable to look beyond volume: complexity, deadlines, interruptions, responsibility, and the resources available to complete the work are also important.
Workload can be physical, when it requires bodily effort or sustained postures; mental, when it requires concentration, memory, or frequent decisions; and emotional, when it involves managing conflicts, handling difficult situations, or supporting other people. These dimensions can coincide. Therefore, two positions with a similar number of tasks do not necessarily have a comparable demand.
The goal of measuring is not to monitor individual pace or reward those who accumulate more tasks. It is to identify whether the demand is reasonable given the time, skills, tools, and support available, and to detect where work adjustments are needed.
Start by defining a review period—for example, a representative work week—and gathering a shared picture of the tasks. For each one, record who performs it, how much time it usually requires, when it must be ready, how often it appears, and what knowledge it requires. Add dependencies: a task may seem brief but still block several people if only one can approve or complete it.
Combine the data with individual and team conversations. Ask what is difficult to finish, what interruptions prevent progress, where waits accumulate, and what invisible work does not appear in the plans. People's perception provides context that a list of pending items does not show; in turn, contrasting it with times and deliveries helps avoid the evaluation depending on a single impression.
Some signs that are worth investigating are:
These signs do not prove by themselves that there is overload. They may also indicate a process problem, a unclear assignment, or an inaccurate estimate. The review must seek the cause before moving tasks.
For a first assessment, a shared table may suffice. Include task, responsible person, effort estimate, deadline, priority, status, and obstacles. Review the estimates together with those who do the work: available capacity is not equivalent to all hours of the workday, because there are also meetings, coordination, attention to inquiries, and other obligations.
If the work is difficult to compare or requires a more structured assessment, workload assessment instruments exist. NASA-TLX allows valuing dimensions such as mental and temporal demand, effort, and perception of performance. The Cooper-Harper scale is another method for assessing workload, designed for tasks where execution difficulty is analyzed. They are not universal formulas for calculating how many tasks each employee can take on: the method suitable for the type of activity must be chosen, and its results interpreted with context.
In an SME, these tools can complement—not replace—task analysis, conversations, and process observation. If the functions include physical risks or occupational health factors, the assessment must be handled within the obligations and procedures applicable in the corresponding territory; these organization techniques, by themselves, do not determine legal compliance.
The Eisenhower Matrix helps order work according to two criteria: importance and urgency. Its usefulness lies in making explicit what requires immediate attention and what can be planned, delegated, or stopped. It does not solve the lack of capacity by itself: an urgent and important task may still be unfeasible if time or resources are not freed up.
| Type of task | Management response | Question for the team |
|---|---|---|
| Important and urgent | Address first and check what other tasks must be postponed | What gets blocked if this is not done now? |
| Important, not urgent | Reserve time and plan in advance | What realistic date prevents it from becoming an urgency? |
| Urgent, less important | Consider delegation with sufficient instructions and authority | Who can take it on without creating another bottleneck? |
| Neither urgent nor important | Reduce, simplify, or remove if it does not add value | Is it necessary to keep doing this work? |
The classification should be reviewed with the people who know the impact of each task. A request may seem urgent to the person making it and not be a priority compared to an operational or client commitment. Agreeing on criteria prevents every incoming request from displacing planned work.
Before changing responsible parties, identify the bottlenecks and ask why they exist. Capacity may be lacking, but so may a quick decision, a tool, an instruction, or coverage for absences. If the limitation is structural, transferring tasks to someone who is already at the limit only displaces the saturation.
Next, compare the requirements of each task with the actual capacity of the people. Take into account experience, training, available time, and current commitments; do not assume that an agenda with fewer visible tasks equates to free capacity. For a delegated task, clarify the expected result, the deadline, the margin for decision-making, and who to ask for help. When necessary, organize a knowledge transfer or a mentoring period.
Make changes explicitly: communicate what is reassigned, what is paused, and who maintains final responsibility. If the total volume exceeds the team's capacity, the options are not limited to distributing more. It may also be necessary to renegotiate dates, reduce scope, simplify steps, or decide what work will not be done.
Maintain a simple and updated view of the work: a board, a shared sheet, or a project management tool can show responsible parties, statuses, deadlines, and blocks. The tool does not automatically balance loads; it serves to make commitments visible and to discuss them.
Agree on a brief periodic review and reassess when projects, demand, or team availability change. Observe if delays and blocked tasks decrease, but also ask if priorities are understood and the distribution is perceived as sustainable. If a reassignment generates new delays or concentration of work, adjust the plan.
Useful workload management does not consist of ensuring that each person has exactly the same number of tasks. It consists of balancing demands and resources, making decisions visible, and correcting the assignment when conditions change.
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