Overworked and underpaid – this is a common saying amongst working individuals. However, no matter how cliché it sounds, overworked and overstressed employees will eventually have a negative impact on your company. As a manager, it is your responsibility to monitor your team’s workload and make decisions on when it is time to hire a new member in order to relieve stress. Although it may seem counteractive to take time away from your own duties to source and hire a new employee, it has to be done. You may also choose to use an administrative support services firm or staffing agency to help you fill the gap on a temp-to-hire basis. Either way, being in tune with your team and their workload is crucial for success. Read on for tips and best practices.

1. Determine if the heavy workload is seasonal or temporary

If you’ve been with your organization long enough, you’re probably aware of certain times of the year that are busier than others or certain types of projects that take up more time. Depending on your industry, it could be holiday-, season- or quarter-related. If you’re noticing that your employees seem discontent during this time, you may simply need to communicate with them that the heavy workload will pass shortly. If there’s too much work for them to handle, take advantage of temporary staff members or contractors during your time of need. Staffing agencies can help you find someone quickly without the hassle of advertising your opening, interviewing and hiring. Temporary and contract workers may also be beneficial if the heavy workload continues and they fit well with your company culture. If needed, you may be able to bring them on full time down the road.

2. Identify if the problem is related to time management or if there’s simply too much work

If you notice that productivity is down or begin hearing complaints from employees, don’t jump to the conclusion that you need to start hiring again. It may be an easy fix of training your current employees on time management. Time management training is useful for everyone, and even if it’s not the solution to your heavy workload problem, it will still help your team to become more efficient with the work they are able to handle.

3. Work with employees on efficiency tactics

On top of time management, if you feel your employees might be overstressed due to their workload, sit down with each of your team members to discuss techniques for becoming more efficient. The first step may be asking them to come up with comprehensive lists of the tasks at hand, determining deadlines for each and prioritizing. If there are certain projects or duties that can be shared with other team members, delegate them. Additionally, you should go through the lists with your team members to determine if any of the tasks can be completely eliminated or altered to take less time.

4. Verify that employees have the proper training and tools

One common source of stress for employees is lack of resources, whether it be physical tools, clear goals or thorough training. Because these three types of resources are very different, the steps to ensure they’re in place will vary. As far as physical tools go, such as software programs, properly working technology, etc… you just need to make sure your team members know where to go if something is missing or not working. Depending on your organization, you may have a help desk, operations team or IT department that can handle such requests. Another resource that may help to reduce or eliminate workload stress is providing clear goals and deadlines. If your team is very busy but no definite goals or timelines are in place, it will make it that much more difficult for employees to prioritize and figure out exactly what they need to accomplish in a given day. If it helps, you may want to announce daily or weekly goals as opposed to quarterly or annual to help reduce procrastination. Finally, providing thorough training is necessary for success. Training may focus on skills such time management, leadership and organization or may cover programs and systems needed to get the job done like Microsoft Office products, project management programs or company-specific systems.

5. Make sure that employees are taking allotted breaks and vacation days

When workloads increase and your team members become overly busy, they may choose to skip lunch breaks and not utilize their company paid time off. Although this may be beneficial for the team at the time, it will have negative effects in the long run. As a manager, it is your responsibility to let your employees know that you do not advise skipping designated breaks or preapproved vacation. Encouraging them to take some time off now will alleviate stress so they can come back refreshed and more motivated to keep working hard. Without any time off, your team members will likely start performing worse and working more slowly.

6. Evaluate the team you have in place and how tasks are delegated

If you’re still unsure of whether or not you should be looking to bring on more team members, think about your current team and all projects that are in progress. You will have already started on this earlier in the process if you met with your employees and had them provide lists of their current tasks. However, you should also be looking at your day-to-day. If you find that you’re consistently working on things that could be handled by someone else but no one on your team has time, it might be time to bring someone in. If the workload has been steadily heavy and you already use temporary or contract workers, you may want to consider hiring one of them full time.

If you’ve gone through all of these steps to find out where your team members stand and stress levels remain high, it might be time to bring on a new employee. Although recessions can cause jobs to be cut, trying to put the responsibilities of several roles on a few employees will result in profit and productivity loss, as team members may begin looking elsewhere for employment and the ones that stay will not be producing high quality work.