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An important part of your job as a manager is making sure everyone on your team has the right amount of work. It’s tempting to give the workhorse more projects than others (especially if she’ll get them done the fastest) or to ease up on someone who is struggling, but you also need to be fair. How do you make sure that work on your team is evenly distributed? What do you do about the person who’s great at saying no and the one who can’t say no?

What the Experts Say
Delegating work to your team may sound like a straightforward task of management, but, in fact, it’s complicated. You are “juggling multiple interests” in the pursuit of optimal team performance, says Liane Davey, cofounder of 3COze Inc. and author of You First: Inspire Your Team to Grow Up, Get Along, and Get Stuff Done. “As a manager, you’re thinking about: What matters to our customers and shareholders? How do I get the best outcomes? How do I do it in a way that doesn’t burn out my people? How do I use my resources wisely? And how do I get more out of underperforming resources?” There are real risks involved in not distributing the workload in an equitable way, says Julie Morgenstern, productivity expert and author of Never Check E-Mail in the Morning. “If you overwork your high performers, you will lose them because they start to resent the fact that they’re doing more,” she says. Similarly, “if you’re taking away work from people who are slower,” they will lose interest. “People come to work driven to succeed, to grow, and to be acknowledged. When they aren’t given an opportunity to do that, it’s poison.” Whether you’re dividing up the workload for next year or next week, here are some strategies to help.

Have a plan
Divvying up assignments for your team members requires forethought and planning, according to Morgenstern. “You are managing the energy and brainpower of an entire group,” she says. It’s not something you can do “during the cracks of your workday in between your tasks. You must devote time to it.” Morgenstern suggests setting aside one or two hours at the end of each week for “delegation strategy and review.” She suggests you think about “What are we trying to achieve? Who are my players? Who does what well? And, who needs development and in what areas?” Those questions will help you figure out the best way to allocate assignments. Without a purposeful plan, Davey says that “managers too often do what’s easy in the short-term and ask the most talented person” to do the hard work. The problem is “then nobody else learns how to do [the tasks], and you’re not building the capacity of the team.”

Clarify roles
A key element to your delegation strategy is making sure “your team members are crystal clear on their roles,” says Morgenstern. “Each person is a player, and the surer [you and they are] of their roles and responsibilities, the easier it is for you to assign work, review work, and demand excellence.” She suggests making a list of all the work that needs to get done and then assigning tasks according to each worker’s specific function, position, and strengths. This exercise also helps you discover any gaps in talent—“You might have 10 outfielders and no one at first base,” says Morgenstern. “Put the tasks that do not fit under any specific role on a list and then figure out—with your team’s help—how to handle it.” You might need to temporarily allocate certain jobs to others. Or you might need to hire someone new. You need to “be deliberate” about how you assign work, adds Davey.

Set expectations
Continually stating the objectives you’re trying to achieve as well as emphasizing the level of effort and engagement you expect helps focus the team, says Morgenstern. “There needs to be a clearly articulated and repeated value that everyone ought to be equally contributing his or her talents, skills, and energy,” she says. Let it be known that “people should be pulling their weight” and willing to help each other, she says. One of the difficulties with making sure that a workload is fair and equitable is that employees don’t work all at the same pace; what may take Marian one hour, might take Jim all day. In other words, even when the workload is “even,” it might not look that way. “It’s important to make sure your employees understand you don’t equate hours with productivity,” according to Davey. The best way to do this, she says, is to praise openly strong performance, irrespective of hours worked. “If Jose put up great numbers last week—even if he leaves at 4:30 every day—you need to celebrate him in a public forum,” she says. “If people complain [about Jose’s hours] or you pick up on gossip, head it off at the pass,” she says. “Say, ‘I encourage you to pay attention to what people are accomplishing and contributing as opposed to the sheer number of hours they work.’”

Communicate one-on-one
Having individual conversations with team members about their share of the collective workload is critical to ensuring employees stay motivated and engaged. “You have to make time for one-on-ones,” says Morgenstern. “You have to be accessible.” Consider these conversations as an opportunity to talk to your team members about their professional goals, gather insight on team dynamics, and resolve problems. Here are some suggestions for what to say.

• To your can’t-say-no workhorse: “You don’t want your workforce to feel abused,” says Davey. “You need to demonstrate the extent to which you recognize you rely on this person.” Before you lean on that person for yet another high-profile or time-sensitive project, you need to acknowledge that she “may have a lot on her plate.” Then say: “’For reasons A, B and C, I want to assign this to you. Let’s talk about what else you may have going on,” and which projects can be moved to the backburner. And then follow through on your words.
• To the person who’s struggling: “It’s your obligation as a manager” to deal with employees who are not managing their load, says Davey. Be frank in your feedback. “Say, ‘I’ve noticed you’re not getting through your work as quickly as your teammates are. It takes you three days to write this report where it takes your team members one day.’” Probe a little. “Ask, ‘What’s the issue here? Do you need more training or more support?’” Perhaps there are interventions you could offer. But the fact is, “some people don’t belong in the jobs they’re in, and you might have to make a difficult decision to move someone out.”
• To your star: Many high performers are constantly “seeking out heavier workloads, more exposure, and more opportunities,” says Davey. That is usually a good thing, but building your team’s capacity and making sure the workload is even requires you to share the wealth of the best projects. “Be transparent,” about your priorities. If, for instance, you are offering a particularly attractive assignment to someone other than your star, “Say, ‘the reason I am not giving you this assignment is that I need to have multiple people on this team who know how to do X.’” You might ask your star to support or mentor the colleague you’ve assigned. “Involve the person in another role.”
• To the person who’s not motivated to pull his weight: “Some people work to live, not live to work,” says Davey. These people may be smart and even pretty good at their jobs, but they rarely pitch in when then the team needs help. “You need to be clear to this person about how his level of effort has consequences in terms of his chances of promotion, financial incentives, and choice assignments,” she says. “Here is where equity comes into play.” Be direct about how he is failing to meet your expectations, says Morgenstern. “Say, ‘we are team and we need to evenly share the workload,’” she says. “And then be clear and concrete about what you want the person to do and take on.”

Be flexible
Of course, even with the best-laid plans and regular communication with your team, projects crop up that can instantly shift priorities. You need to be flexible while also thinking about “what fairness means” to you, says Davey. “There are moments when fairness must be weighted heavily” in terms of how you distribute the workload, but there are other times “when you need a certain outcome” to complete a particular project in a tight timeframe and you don’t have the luxury “to be fair.” Put simply, try as you might to make sure the workload is even, it might not always happen in the way you’d like. It’s also important to bear in mind that your team’s workload is not static. “You’re going to toggle between different strategies in different situations depending on the circumstances,” she says. Certain team members may need to burn the midnight oil on a project, while others have an easier time. The next quarter may be a different story. The goal is that “over the course of the year, it all balances out.”

Principles to Remember

Do

• Devote time in your schedule for thinking through your strategy for delegating.
• Make a list of all the work that needs to get done and then assign tasks according to your team members’ specific function, position, and strengths.
• Create a culture that values productivity over hours worked by openly praising strong performance.

Don’t

• Be overly rigid about your workload delegation strategy; when projects crop up and priorities shift, you need to be flexible.
• Burn out your top performer. Before you lean on her more, identify the projects that can go on the backburner.
• Beat around the bush with an employee who’s not pulling his weight. Be direct about your expectations.

Case Study #1: Create a culture where team members help each other and collaborate
Michelle Garvey, Director of HR Transformation at Ford Motor Company, strives to make sure the workload on her team is even. But she recognizes that as a manger, her job is to help team members remain flexible.

“Workload will vary at any given time across any given role,” she says. “The art is to monitor it regularly and create an environment where the team members assist each other during peak [times].”

A few years ago, Michelle oversaw the implementation of a global HR technology platform—named “Genesis”—designed to improve workforce planning and analytics for Ford’s 150,000 employees across 42 countries. The Genesis team included 12 HR professionals located in the US, Mexico, China, and Germany as well as other employees from IT, finance, the office of the general counsel, and purchasing.

Genesis was challenging for a number of reasons, according to Michelle. “The work itself was highly complex and highly interdependent,” she says. “The workload was also hard to predict and varied on a daily basis.”

First, Michelle devised a plan for distributing the workload. The plan involved matching her team members’ “roles and responsibilities,” with the various tasks associated with Genesis and figuring out “how [each] role fit into the bigger picture.”

Next, she set clear expectations with her team members and reminded them—both in one-on-one conversations and in team meetings—that their jobs were to support the overall team objectives and that they may need to adjust their role from time to time. Her goal was for the Genesis team to “feel a strong sense of purpose.”

Third, she used project management tools—including work plans and milestone charts—to make sure Genesis was on track and to address workload issues on an ongoing basis.

Michelle wanted to make sure that everyone was pulling his weight and that no task fell through the cracks.

To make sure this happened she held regular forums for issue and risk management. “If only a few issues were being raised, I asked the team, ‘What are we missing? What is keeping you up at night? What help do you need?’” she says.

From time to time, Michelle says, the workload was uneven, but she made it a point to help her team members remain flexible. “They accepted that on occasion certain team members felt the burden of the task at hand and helped if they could,” she says. “They also knew their time would come.”

Over a four-year period, Genesis had over a dozen successful launches within Ford. “The team was proud of its accomplishments and enjoyed the journey with each other,” says Michelle.

Case Study #2: Talk to your employees one-on-one about their share of the collective workload
Kyle Arteaga, CEO of The Bulleit Group, the communications company, says that making sure his team’s workload is even is a challenge—particularly when it comes to managing the workload of his high achievers and workhorses. These talented employees are usually the most deserving of choice assignments, but Kyle realizes that he mustn’t overwork them and that he needs to spread projects around in order to develop other team members.

Earlier in his career when Kyle headed up a team at Reuters, he managed a star performer named Janice. He remembers one time in particular, a high profile and interesting assignment arose, and Kyle’s impulse was to ask Janice to work on it. “I knew her work ethic,” he says. “She never missed a deadline. And she was reliable.”

But before making the request, Kyle had a candid one-on-one with Janice. “I talked to her about what was currently on her plate. I also encouraged her to talk to her clients and team members to determine if this additional work would fit into her schedule,” he says.

Janice was able to take on the assignment, but Kyle helped her be strategic about other tasks that came her way. “Sometimes, she would purposefully put herself on the bench to wait for a better opportunity around the corner,” he says. “She was very self-regulated, so I helped her assess opportunities.”

Today Janice runs corporate communications for a large consultancy in Europe.

For another employee, Christina, things were quite different. “Christina was a good writer, but she didn’t want to talk to clients; she didn’t work well with her teammates, and she didn’t seem interested in taking on any more responsibility.”

Kyle’s first order of business was to figure out why Christina was underperforming. Was it a lack of confidence? A lack of aptitude? Or a lack of interest? During a one-on-one conversation, he got his answer. “It turns out her long-term goal was never to work in communications, so together we tried to figure out where she wanted to be professionally in five years,” he says.

He and Christina worked jointly to come up with specific tasks within her role that she could accomplish to make sure she was pulling her weight. “My goal as a manager is to give my employees every opportunity to succeed, but if they don’t seize that opportunity, then it’s time to move on,” he says.

Christina now works as a broadcast anchor.

When management divide tasks into smaller units it is called?

What is the process of dividing the work and assigning tasks to workers group of answer choices?

Is the process of dividing the work and assigning tasks to workers?

Why managers are divided into different departments?