Creating a happy high performing team through workload capacity analysis

Understaffed, overworked or failing to meet performance expectations? It’s time to work out how efficiently your team is working.

All team managers know how many staff (FTE) they have to do the work that needs to be done. However, they may not have a true understanding of whether staff are delivering work efficiently and therefore, how many FTE their team really needs.

Knowing the FTE and effort required to deliver the work and having confidence in the appropriateness and efficiency of existing processes is crucial to workforce planning. It assists with:

• managing staff performance
• identifying underperformance
• ensuring the team is appropriately staffed to meet its targets
• setting realistic and appropriate targets for the volume of work to be completed.

Our client’s challenge

Understanding the time needed to deliver tasks is a challenge one of Grosvenor’s Commonwealth clients recently faced. Mira Shennan and Georgina Roberts were part of the Grosvenor team which helped our client uncover and determine:

• whether existing processes used for each task are efficient
• whether staff are performing to their full potential
• the volume of work the team should be able to complete with the current FTE
• the appropriate staffing level of the team.

In the 12 months prior to the project, our client identified that staff were unable to meet workload targets and suspected inefficiencies around processes and service delivery. Together with a range of staff changes, this resulted in low staff morale, negatively impacting the team’s overall performance.

A lack of documented processes prevented managers from understanding the effort required to deliver work tasks. This impacted on the accuracy and efficiency of processes used to deliver work tasks.

In short, it was not clearly understood how much the team could and should be doing, and in what way.

So how did Grosvenor help?

Mira and Georgina conducted a comprehensive process mapping exercise to develop a detailed understanding of the existing processes and the time required to complete each task.

The process maps, verified through observations and the review of relevant procedures, were used to calculate the:

• total time and FTE required to complete each task
• volume of tasks the current FTE should be able to complete
• total number of FTE which would be required to meet the team’s workload targets.

Analysis confirmed the team had not been working to its full potential

Analysis confirmed the team had not been working to its full potential, with far fewer tasks completed than it had capacity for.

In addition, Mira and Georgina identified a number of inefficiencies in the processes and service delivery model. They recommended improvements which, if implemented, would achieve a substantial increase in the productivity of the team.

At the completion of the project they also provided our client with a flexible and practical “Workload and Capacity Analysis” tool to assist the team’s manager with ongoing workforce planning, even if existing processes change. This tool enables the team to calculate either:

• the number of FTE required to deliver a target number of tasks
• the number of tasks which could be completed with a set number of FTE.