9 Actionable Steps to Prevent Team Burnout and Boost Productivity
Follow this step-by-step guide to manage your team workload with confidence. Audit your workload, define capacity, and assign workload profiles. Prioritize tasks, conduct regular check-ins, build in recovery time to encourage autonomy, and use the right tools to visualize progress.
This guide is written for project managers who want to design smarter workloads and boost team performance. It even includes actionable steps you can apply this week. Learn how to perform an audit of your team’s real workload, calculate realistic capacity, and build role-based workload profiles that align work with skills. You’ll also get guidance and practical tips for balancing assignments visually, prioritizing by impact (not just urgency), and facilitating open conversations around workload. Ready to dive in?
1. Audit Your Workload Landscape
You can’t improve anything until you know what your team is actually doing. That means getting beyond project plans and to-do lists to truly understand the complete picture of work, both visible and invisible.
Follow these steps to conduct a full audit of your workload landscape:
- List all active projects and their related tasks.
- Identify routine or recurring responsibilities (reporting, client calls, quality checks, etc.).
- Chart out all your meetings (ad hoc and regular meetings, and internal and external meetings).
- Identify all invisible work (mentoring, training, knowledge sharing, context switching, or last-minute requests).
A typical audit will reveal that 20 to 30 percent of time is not accounted for in traditional project tools. That hidden stress immediately translates into missed deadlines and burnout.
You can also use the audit to identify and eliminate legacy tasks that no longer provide ROI, further improving team performance (and lightening your team workload).
Apply it this week: Create a team workload inventory using Smartsheet to track all the different kinds of work that your team does each week. Update it quarterly to stay aligned and get ahead of potential issues.
Optimize your team’s capacity and workflow with this guide to workload management.
2. Define Actual Capacity
Before diving into the formula for defining actual capacity, let’s assume that most teams adhere to a 40-hour work week. This means that actual available time is closer to 24-30 hours a week, after accounting for meetings, approvals, and ad hoc requests.
To create a realistic capacity model, start with your available work hours. Subtract time commitments (standing meetings, administrative tasks) and add a realistic focus buffer (to avoid overcommitting people or causing burnout). Then, multiply this figure by each team member’s availability. Knowing your real or actual capacity allows you to plan with certainty and avoid accidental overload.
Apply it this week: With Resource Management by Smartsheet, you can assign and visualize capacity by team member so you can forecast availability weeks and months in advance.
3. Build Role-Based Workload Profiles
Rather than distributing work on an ad hoc basis, create a baseline workload profile for each role. This gives you a clear picture of how much time a given role should typically spend on different categories of work.
This technique helps you catch when someone’s effort is skewed from their intended focus — for example, if a senior engineer is spending 40 percent of their time in status meetings. Try co-creating workload profiles as a team to help align expectations and figure out where you might need to shift expectations.
Apply it this week: Choose one key role on your team and draft a rough workload profile based on how time should be spent. Compare it with actual assignments in Resource Management by Smartsheet. If there are any misalignments, start an open discussion about adjusting priorities.
4. Visualize Assignments to Balance the Load
Planning and workload management is about visualizing how work piles up, peaks, and spreads out over time. Visual tools for scheduling make it easier to prevent bottlenecks, avoid spontaneous project spikes, and spot idle periods that could be better used for training or creative activity.
Apply it this week: With Resource Management, you can build a live schedule view by person, project, or team, and make adjustments in real time.
5. Prioritize Tasks by Impact, Not Urgency
How many times have you been in reactive mode, doing whatever task is the loudest or most urgent? But, we all know that urgency doesn’t always equal importance.
Create a prioritization system that takes into account strategic impact, customer or stakeholder value, time sensitivity, and estimated effort. At your next status meeting, ask each team member: “What’s the least important thing you’re doing this week, and what happens if you skip it?” This will help everyone reflect on the “why” behind their work, and not just the “what.”
Apply it this week: During your next team sync, create an “Impact vs. Urgency” matrix and chart three to five tasks related to in-flight projects. Use the discussion to highlight low-impact, high-urgency work that can be postponed or delegated, and shift attention to high-impact priorities.
6. Make Workload Discussions a Weekly Habit
Workload discussions should happen before someone starts experiencing burnout, rather than after. Establish a rhythm of check-ins based not on status updates, but on load rebalancing. Regularly rebalancing workloads can help make your team culture more transparent, and can prevent workload from becoming a problem.
Add these questions to your team’s weekly sync to help make the shift:
- How manageable did your workload feel this week, on a scale of 1 to 10?
- Where did you feel stuck or overcommitted?
- Does anyone have extra capacity to lend?
Apply it this week: Set up custom utilization thresholds in Smartsheet. When someone is booked at 90 percent, you’ll get an alert and can act before it becomes a problem.
7. Build in Recovery Time, Intentionally
After a big launch, product push, or fundraising sprint, your team needs time to recover and recharge, rather than jump straight into the next deliverable. Recovery time is a strategic investment in future performance, not time wasted.
Consciously build recovery into your workflow by scheduling low-demand “cool down” weeks. Make time for retrospectives, personal development, or team activities, and try not to schedule meetings right after major deadlines.
Apply it this week: Block off the day after your next big deadline as low-demand time on the team calendar. Label it “recovery” to set expectations and leave space for rest or reflection.
8. Encourage Self-Assignment and Autonomy
People feel motivated when they have a sense of ownership over their work. Some work must be assigned top-down, but leave space for pull-based tasks, which team members can take initiative on as they have the capacity. Maintain an open “task pool” or backlog where anybody can claim work that aligns with their interests. You can also mark certain tasks as growth opportunities and build skills slowly by training team members in skills outside their primary role. This approach fosters autonomy and growth.
Apply it this week: Rotate routine responsibilities, like meeting facilitation or documentation, so no one carries a repetitive burden too long.
9. Systematize Workload Planning with Templates
Don’t reinvent the wheel every week. Use templates to plan time by role and task type, build in default assumptions (including a 20 percent buffer on all projects), and establish recurring cycles (weekly, monthly, quarterly). Templates streamline workload planning, which makes it more predictable and scalable across departments.
Streamline your resource allocation with this collection of team workload templates.
Apply it this week: Use built-in templates to launch new projects with pre-loaded capacity assumptions, role assignments, and utilization tracking with Resource Management by Smartsheet.
Improve Resource Management Efforts with Smartsheet
Resource Management by Smartsheet is a powerful resource management software that helps to effectively manage the who, the what, and the when behind projects.
With Resource Management by Smartsheet, you can more easily build the best team for a project, keep project schedules and budgets on track, and confidently forecast business needs.
When teams have clarity into the work getting done and by whom, there’s no telling how much more they can accomplish in the same amount of time. Watch a free demo to learn more about Resource Management by Smartsheet.