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Is Your Team Struggling? (Signs Of Overwhelm, And What To Do About It)

By Nimmi
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Do you believe the team at your talent agency is a group of productivity superstars? Yes? Then it’s time to take off your rose-tinted spectacles and make a more detailed evaluation. 😎 Won’t you see a whole slew of employees chewing nails, with irritable attitudes? Fret not, because you aren’t the only manager who is handling an overwhelmed and maxed-out workforce; a recent Gallup poll survey states that around 67 percent of employees admit that they are significantly stressed out at work, with 44 percent experiencing this occasionally and 23 percent feeling it pretty often.

We know it’s tempting for managers like you to bury their head in the sand, thinking that this is a dilemma that will get better when they get through a particular project or a tight schedule. But let’s tell you – that is hardly ever the fact. Overwhelm, instead, will have a snowball effect, and as a manager, it is your responsibility to identify and fix it at the earliest. However, this isn’t an easygoing gig, but luckily, it is doable. Here we will dig into how you can recognize the initial signs of burnout among your talent agency members, and how you can set them to work at their best, without pulling their hair out!

Are Your Team Members Stressed? Here’re 3 Warning Signs:

Wouldn’t it be great if you have a siren that went off each time when your team began to feel burnt out?

Well, we can’t really make that possible.😉 But, if you keep a close eye on how your employees are feeling and performing, you are more likely to see any of these below-mentioned red flags:

🚩 Uncharacteristic Disengagement

When an employee among your typically enthusiastic team feels burnt out, you may see him glued to his desk most of the time, or sitting quietly with his arms crossed in the corner of the meeting room, without communicating to co-workers around. That’s because stress is directly related to fatigue.

As a person who manages an entire agency, you might have gone through this yourself – think of the last time you had a lengthy to-do list, but opted to take a nap instead. Don’t feel hesitant – that wasn’t because you were lazy; it was just a psychological response of your body to the immense stress you were handling with.

🚩 Decrease In Productivity And Quality Of Work

When you begin to notice a hike in client complaints and missed deadlines – there’s a likely chance that your employees are stressed out. Lack of engagement is certainly a big reason for this dip in quality and productivity, and this disengagement might be caused due to the reason that your employees are overworked.

When a person is overworked or overburdened, he/she won’t have enough time and strength to pay ample attention to quality, leading to a serious decline in productivity.

🚩 Complaints, Complaints, And Complaints!

Bad days may happen for everyone – but your typically confident employee mumbling “Ugh, this isn’t going anywhere” isn’t that normal. Be informed – such irritabilities and anger are obvious symptoms of stress.

Surprised? Then just think of how terse were you with the people around you when you were abnormally stressed last time? The same has happened here with your team.

So, that’s all about symptoms of overwhelm. While everyone handles stress in distinctive ways, keeping an eye out for the above-stated responses frequently can help you to implement what is most required to bring the situation back into balance. And if you are thinking “Damn! What should I do now“, here’re steps you may take in order to address and overcome employee burnout.

What You Can Do To Fix Your Team’s Overwhelming Feeling

Fixing such overwhelms can be really challenging; however, being a manager, you need to do what you can. Even though it’s possibly going to tweak your agency’s current way of working, these steps can definitely help you take some of the burdens off from your employees’ shoulders, ultimately elevating their productivity levels.

💡 Organize The Mess

‘Overwhelm‘ is not always a consequence of having a lot to do – sometimes it can also be about not having an accurate idea of where to begin from the tangled mess of projects, and tasks.

To get rid of such situations, you can bring in a proper structure and order to your team’s workings. You can try out something that will help your team to have a clear understanding of what needs to be tackled next, along with providing all the resources for them to work without wasting time searching for what they need to finish off each of their tasks.

This is where an all-in-one talent agency management software like StarAgent can come in super handy. With this, you can have a shared workspace for your team that gives each employee access into details related to talents, clients, and projects, what’s being worked on by other members of the team, and when each task is due, thereby limiting the use of overfilled spreadsheets and endless email threads.

Additionally, StarAgent modelling software’s ‘Tasks‘ feature makes it easy for managers like you to break down big projects into smaller manageable tasks and delegate them to team members according to priorities. This is a surefire way to make projects seem less daunting, and, consequently, less stressful.

💡 Get Time For Self-Care

Implementing the GTD (Getting Things Done) framework with the help of StarAgent will let your team achieve this point. The framework is based on FIVE simple steps:

Start by helping your employees capture all their tasks for a day. Guide them to check ‘My Tasks’ under the ‘User Calendar‘ on StarAgent, when they start their day so they can view all tasks assigned to them and when they’re due.
Next, ask them to clarify the tasks they have to do for the day. With each task having the start and due dates on the StarAgent Calendar, your employees can categorize them to those that need action today or not.
Now, let your team organize those tasks that need action today by priority. They can check the timespan of each task and then plan accordingly.
Get them to enter the priority labels (High-Priority, Mid-level priority, Low priority) in the description part of each task, then revise all the tasks, and then pick what task each of them should be working on first.
Finally, let them start working. At this stage, everyone from your team will have all their tasks that need to be finished on a day organized by priorities. Now while working, direct them to follow the Pomodoro Technique, in which they will finish off a task within the allotted time, then take a short break, and then repeat with a new task, if there’s more to do.

💡 Efficient Workload Management

Workload management is nothing but the process of sharing and managing work efficiently across your team. When successfully done, this is capable of melting away any chances of chaos in your agency, leaving everyone happy at the end of the day rather than feeling overwhelmed.

For this, you must ensure that your team’s workload is divided fairly among them. But this isn’t an easy task, unless and until you have a modelling agency management tool like StarAgent.

With StarAgent at hand, you will get a complete picture of who’s staffed across which initiative, see who has too much or not enough work to do on a day, so that you can reassign and reschedule tasks, and thereby prevent burnout as well as boredom, and make sure your team gets the right work done at the right time. Means, you are going to kill 🦅🦅 with just one stone!

💡 An “Open Door Policy” For Communication

Here’s an alarming statistic – around 75 percent of employees think approachability is an essential quality of an effective manager. However, most employees might be confused about when to approach their managers with questions and feedback. This means it is vital for managers to be readily available to their team at least during the working hours. StarAgent, as a hub for both work and communication, allows creating public messaging channels for different projects and topics, and private direct messaging for 1:1 communications.

You can also choose to have a separate channel for initiating candid conversations with your team so that you will be more in tune with how your team members are feeling.

Now, It’s Time To Work!

Now that you have every tip you’d need to move forward a group of infallible productivity stars. Still, managing team overwhelm is a two-way street. Even though it’s your job as the manager to keep a watchful eye on people, and handle burnout issues before they skyrocket, the onus is also on your employees to let you know when they are stretched to their limits. So, along with implementing these tips, ensure that you are one such approachable manager to whom your employees feel comfortable to voice their stress.

In the meantime, if you wish to learn more about StarAgent or get a free demo, do get in touch.

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