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Your resources are your most valuable players at your agency. Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for agencies to experience bouts of poor resource management which can lead to poor performance and dissatisfied employees and clients (which is never good!).
Have you been wondering if your agency is struggling with resource management recently? No need to fret, we've put together four of the top tell-tale signs that indicate your agency could be experiencing poor resource management and how you can nip these problems in the bud.
Resource management can be tough, to say the least. But we hope these points help you to get back on track! Here are four tell-tale signs to look out for when assessing how your resources are being managed at your agency.
You have a low employee retention rate
If you're wondering whether or not your agency has poor resource management, a low employee retention rate might give you an indication. If you’ve been experiencing a lot of turnover as of late, there’s a strong chance that poor resource management could be a big contributing factor.
Employees want to work at an agency where they are doing work they enjoy, learning and gaining new experiences, building connections, and having fun while they are at it. If your agency is struggling with ineffective resource management, it's unlikely that your employees will reap all of these benefits.
Work-life balance has never been more important. In fact, 85% of companies that offer work-life balance programs for their employees report increased productivity and 33% of employees who receive work-life balance benefits plan to stay in their current companies. If your agency is stretching your resources too thin, you can be sure these dissatisfied employees will move on sooner or later to find better opportunities (and there are many, it’s a hot market right now!).
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Behind most overworked and burnt-out teams is a lack of visibility. Having a lack of visibility into your resources will lead to work being distributed across the team in an ineffective way and before you know it, you've got yourself an issue with burnout.
Now, more than ever, it's critical for businesses to provide a sustainable, enjoyable environment for their employees. If you're not doing a good job at creating this for your team, you can be sure that plenty of your competitors are. Neglecting to focus on keeping your employees satisfied and preventing burnout can also have damaging effects on your agency's brand reputation in the long run.
Long story short? Always keep an eye on your employee turnover rate and be sure to address root-cause problems like poor resource management before it takes a toll on your business.
You see reduced employee performance
Reduced employee performance is one of the first noticeable factors that indicate poor resource management. Unrealistic expectations and poor resource allocation can lead to employees feeling overwhelmed with unmanageable workloads. Performance can drastically drop when your most important resources (your people!) are drowning in work.
Poor resource management often leads to employees putting in longer hours than they should in order to meet pressing client deadlines. This pressure for employees to get the job done on top of other work increases the likelihood of mistakes happening. Sure, we all have to work under pressure at times, but if your employee’s performance is at risk, this is a big issue.
On the other hand, not accurately accounting for the different skills and interests of each employee when delegating work can lead to a decrease in engagement, productivity, and performance as a result.
That’s why it’s so important that you have insight into not only the different skills and interests across your team but also the bandwidth they have to take on new projects from clients when allocating resources.
Employee performance can be affected by many variables like burnout and dissatisfaction. Keep an eye on how your team is performing across the board, and if you notice a dip in performance, look into how your resources are currently being managed and what can be done to improve it.
You can get a complete picture of your team’s capacity at a glance, easily reassign tasks, and avoid bottlenecks, with Teamwork.com’s Workload Planner, check it out for yourself!
Your team is repeatedly failing to meet deadlines
Without effective resource management at your agency, things can get messy really quickly. Without a centralized place for planning, visualizing, and keeping track of projects and tasks, important details and updates can slip through the cracks. This can often lead to mistakes being made and time being wasted, or worse, billable hours being left on the table.
Without adequate resource management, you risk putting people on the wrong projects and overloading certain team members over others, which leads to unhappy employees.
A lack of visibility into your team may result in resources being allocated to projects that are not reflective of their skills and competencies. This can lead to missed deadlines as your team may be spending large amounts of time and energy trying to understand what to do before executing. Failing to meet deadlines will also have a negative impact on project costs.
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We all love the idea of having full visibility into our resources, but actually making it happen can be difficult. Having one single source of truth is the best way to gain full visibility into your resources. With Teamwork.com’s resource scheduler, you'll be able to gain full visibility into your team's capacity and availability, making it simple to assign the right people to the right projects.
At the end of the day, when employees are constantly struggling to hit tight deadlines, the quality of their work often suffers. Deadlines and workloads need to be realistic if they are to be met on time and on-budget—even your top-performing employees will slip up and make mistakes when they are stressed and overworked.
In research undertaken by Gallup into employee burnout, they state that employee burnout can cause major problems in both individual and organizational performance.
Gallup reported that employees who are burned out are 63% more likely to take a sick day and 2.6 times as likely to be searching for new job opportunities. Burned-out employees that do stay, tend to have 13% lower confidence in their performance and are half as likely to discuss performance goals with their manager.
You see client churn
Burnout, low employee retention rate, reduced performance and missed project deadlines are all going to affect one of the most important parts of any successful agency: your clients.
When it comes to resource management, when you experience problems it's usually an accumulation of smaller resource issues that lead to a larger problem. That’s why it's so common for agencies to sweep their resource problems under the rug until the problem gets too big and becomes impossible to ignore..
When your resource management issues start to affect your clients and cause churn, you know it’s really become a big problem.
One of the main contributors to project failure is poor resource management. If your projects are repeatedly off-track or over-budget due to the resource management issues that your agency is experiencing, it's not just your employees that will begin to leave and find better opportunities.
Just as poor resource management within your agency can negatively impact your employer brand reputation and increase turnover, it can also do the same for your agency's reputation amongst past and potential clients.
Staying on budget and delivering work on time can be tough—especially when your resource management isn't exactly working out for you right now. The more you stay on top of tracking your project budgets, the more accurate future proposals will be. Plus, you’ll also be able to give your clients more precise estimates of the cost and when the project will be delivered. Learn more about Teamwork.com’s project time tracking feature.
Ready to take your resource management to the next level?
It’s clear that resource management is important amongst all businesses, but it's particularly essential in the agency and client-work realm. Without a strong resource management solution, you’re going to struggle to have adequate visibility into your team's capacity, finding yourself stuck between juggling underutilized or exhausted resources.
Implementing a resource management solution like Teamwork.com will help banish the chaos from your agency and bring security to the way your team works.
If you're ready to wave goodbye to the issues mentioned throughout this blog and take your agency to the next level, why not take the leap today and give Teamwork.com a try?
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