If your agency feels like it’s constantly sprinting at full speed with no finish line in sight, you’re not alone. Overburdened teams, uneven workloads, unclear priorities, and shifting deadlines are now the norm, not the exception.
Without visibility into who’s at capacity (and who’s quietly drowning), burnout creeps in, projects stall, and team morale dips fast. But that doesn’t mean your team lacks talent or drive — it usually points to a subpar workload management system.
...cracked the code of effective agency workload management. From smarter resourcing to real-time time tracking, automation to cultural alignment, she’s built a system where high team performance and high satisfaction coexist.
Effective workload management is the crux of agency success
Effective workload management separates thriving agencies from those burning out. It’s a strategy that drives higher profit margins, smarter hiring decisions, better client delivery, and scalable growth — all while protecting your team’s well-being. And who doesn’t want that?
You gain:
Higher profit margins
Intentional resourcing means more time on billable work, less on busywork, and higher profits without growing your team.
Leaner workforce costs
Knowing your team’s true capacity also avoids overhiring, underutilizing talent, or burning six figures on bad hires.
Impeccable service levels
48% of clients name delivery issues as the reason they fire agencies. Balanced workloads keep quality high and deadlines on track.
Successful scaling
A solid workload system helps you scale without overloading your team or sacrificing performance.
Most importantly… effective workload management is key for employee retention
Agencies often slip into burnout culture by overloading teams, taking on too many clients, cutting prices to win deals, and committing to deadlines no one can realistically meet.
In the scramble to stay competitive, they sacrifice their people’s well-being and end up paying for it in high turnover, low morale, and tumbling team performance.
Snippet from reddit.com posts
Agency owners aren’t blind to this. But they don’t always know how to fix things without sacrificing profitability. In fact, 9 in 10 believe burnout is worsening due to economic pressures.
So, can you operate at peak capacity without burning out a team? Yes, with the right workload management strategies.
How to master workload management for high profits and work satisfaction
Maxing out your team’s capacity without tipping into burnout isn’t wishful thinking — it’s a strategic choice. And Hannah McClenaghan, Operations Manager at Talk Shop, proves it’s possible.
At the helm of an integrated marketing and communications agency, Hannah plays a dual role: steering high-level operational strategy while diving into the nitty‑gritty of workflows and systems.
Her goal is to make life easier for everyone on the team by minimizing friction, streamlining processes, and removing unnecessary admin burdens. The result is an environment where people don’t just survive fast‑paced agency life — they thrive in it and continuously generate value for the business.
Here’s how she does it:
1. Determine your optimal utilization rates
Effective workload management starts (and often fails) with one number: your team’s utilization rate.
This metric determines how much of an employee’s available time is spent on billable (aka client‑paid work). It’s a powerful metric for agency leaders because it shows you whether your people are overburdened with multitasking, underused, or spread too thin across low‑impact work. When tracked correctly, utilization becomes the cornerstone of smarter capacity planning, project scheduling, and task management.
At Talk Shop, Hannah McClenaghan implemented a tiered approach to utilization management. Recognizing that different roles come with different responsibilities, her team sets role‑specific utilization benchmarks instead of applying a one‑size‑fits‑all model.
For instance, account associates, who spend most of their time on client work, are resourced at around 85% billable time. Meanwhile, managers and leads with additional oversight and admin duties sit closer to the 70‑75% mark.
The agency resources everyone based on a 35‑hour work week, intentionally leaving space for things like lunch breaks, context switching, and the inevitable “unaccounted‑for” time. From there, they work backward to set realistic utilization targets by role.
“Toggl is great for team capacity management because we can get a really clear picture of where someone is at in terms of billable versus non‑billable time.”
Pro tip
Not all work can (or should) be billable
Even at the most efficient agency, not every hour logged can go to a client invoice. Internal meetings, team training, pitch prep, admin tasks, and culture‑building activities are all essential to long‑term success, even if they don’t directly generate revenue.
Hannah’s team logs these hours under a separate “non‑billable” project in Toggl to check they’re accounted for in workload planning.
Smart agencies acknowledge these “overhead” activities and factor them into their pricing strategy. If you only budget for the hours that are directly client‑facing, you’ll end up eating the cost of everything else. Or worse, asking your team to work overtime to make the math work. Neither is sustainable.
Bottom line: Utilization rate is your pulse check on team health and efficiency. Track it, analyze it, and use it to build smarter schedules that protect your people and your margins.
2. Implement team workload monitoring
You can’t optimize what you can’t see. And in agency life, that lack of visibility can cost you. From missed deadlines to employee burnout, it all stems from not knowing who’s working on what, when, and for how long.
That’s why workload monitoring is essential.
You need clear visibility into task distribution, important milestones, due dates, dependencies, and individual bandwidth to keep things running smoothly. And that starts with tracking time, not for surveillance, but for insight.
Time tracking tools reveal how work is distributed across teams, projects, and tasks and whether it aligns with client goals. Hannah centralized time monitoring across all clients and projects in Toggl Track by grouping employees into three core teams: PR, Social/Digital, and Integrated. "That alone cut down my admin time on workload management by about 20%," she says.
The employee buy-in was easy because Hannah personally “trains people on how to use Toggl when they are onboard and how to track their time and what a time entry looks like and what the components that we need.”
The result? There’s no ambiguity around why this is necessary, nor the lingering whiff of feeling monitored.
⏲️ Transform time entries into operational insights
The real power comes from what you do with the tracked time entry data.
Hannah and her team dig into Toggl tags to uncover time drains and validate where their efforts are going. For example, if a client questions project progress, the team can point to eight hours of logged meetings to show how much time was spent on communication alone.
“Time tracking helps us validate where we’re in terms of client results.”
When used intentionally, time‑tracking becomes the foundation for smarter, fairer, and more transparent workload management. And with Toggl Track, you gain more insights on how to balance priorities, optimize project planning, or reallocate resources across projects.
Example of the Workload report in Toggl Track
Workload analytics visualizes how teams spend their time and how much revenue is generated at the team, project, client, task, or individual levels.
Check where the most resources are allocated, who’s underutilized, or who spends more time on project tasks than they should (aka at risk of burnout). This way, you can optimize time backlogs, resolve project bottlenecks faster, and coach people on better time management strategies.
Run multi-level profitability analysis to measure profitability, revenue, and labor costs by team members, clients, projects, or tasks to improve your pricing, budget pacing, and resource allocation.
3. Pair resource management automation with a human touch
There’s no shortage of workload management tools out there — and for good reason. These apps let you drag and drop tasks on a Kanban board, assign and reassign due dates, build Gantt charts, track important project milestones, and dish updates to stakeholders.
But just because you can automate every element of workload management doesn’t mean you should.
Creativity needs breathing room. Overloading calendars with repetitive tasks kills autonomy, drains motivation, and turns great teams into box‑checkers.
That’s why Talk Shop combines smart automation with human discretion in resource management.
“We have VPs in every market looking at the spread of accounts and understanding who's going to be resourced on what. All of these conversations are in a Slack channel that’s there to discuss things like ‘when you sold this, did you have any team members in mind?’ or ‘do you have any recommendations on who you would like to be on this project.’”— Hannah McClenaghan
But project scheduling isn’t all top‑down. Team members can express interest in specific projects, and those requests are prioritized.
“At the end of the day, we want our team to be stoked to work on the clients they’re assigned to. So if someone raises their hand, we absolutely make space for that.”— Hannah McClenaghan
In agency life, where the pace is fast and the work is varied, giving people a say in what they work on can make all the difference. It keeps engagement high, supports professional growth, and reinforces a culture of trust and autonomy.
So, by all means, use workload management software to organize task lists. But don’t lose the human touch either!
✍️ Copy Talk Shop’s workload management process
Step 1: Use Slack for resource allocation
Each new client account starts with a Slack workflow that gathers input on who was scoped, who’s a good fit, and who wants in, making resourcing proactive and people‑first.
Step 2: Centralize client info with Slack Canvas
Each client channel pairs with a Slack Canvas — a shared, living doc that houses all the project essentials to reduce admin back‑and‑forth.
Step 3: Set up team templates in Toggl Track
Rather than juggling dozens of individual time entries and task lists, create unified team workspaces to log and track billable hours.
Step 4: Set realistic billable targets by role
Talk Shop bases targets on a 35-hour workweek (to allow space for breaks, context-switching, and admin) and then plans role-specific resource utilization rates.
“Toggl Track data is the foundation of our operations. It fuels our resource allocation and capacity projections.” — Hannah McClenaghan
4. Optimize for the right metrics
Every agency aims for top team performance. But some leaders fall into the trap of “productivity theater” — pushing for longer hours, higher billing, and constant busyness instead of meaningful, results-driven work.
Yet, true team productivity means doing the right work at the right time, in the most efficient way possible — and that requires better metrics than just logged time.
Talk Shop measures productivity through a trio of core KPIs tracked monthly across the entire team:
Profitability report: Are we earning a good profit margin?
Account efficiency: Do we allocate the right number of hours for each client?
Staff utilization: Are employees' available time being used optimally?
This data feeds directly into operational decisions — from capacity planning to performance management to pricing strategy. For example, Hannah recently did a deep dive analysis comparing profitability across 20 client accounts with Toggl Track.
She looked at billable hours, labor costs, and actual project outcomes using different pricing models (fixed retainer vs. time-based vs. value billing). “We compared and contrasted those three, and it was really interesting that what we thought was gonna be the case was not really the case”, she shares.
“The only reason we can optimize decisions is because we have Toggl Track that allows us to manipulate factual data like labor costs and billable rates to model different outcomes.”
Beyond financial performance, Talk Shop monitors metrics that speak to culture and team health: Employee turnover rates, especially at leadership and partnership levels, and employee satisfaction through regular eNPS surveys.
Why? Because they understand the link between internal satisfaction and external performance. When employees feel heard, supported, and resourced correctly, they’re more likely to deliver high-impact work, stay engaged, and stick around. She explains,
“We look for trends and correlations between current workloads and employee satisfaction. For example, if I see someone had a really heavy few months, I ask if this warrants some time off in lieu of.”
A strong focus on employee engagement pays off with higher revenue and client retention. Happy, well-supported employees are more creative, more proactive, and more committed to delivering results, which leads to better outcomes for clients and stronger long-term relationships.
No metrics should be set in stone. Those ultra-important tasks from today might be tomorrow’s outdated briefs. As Hannah puts it, "Things change so quickly at agencies that it’s easy to lose sight of what we originally set out to do.”
Use real-time workload management tools to stay agile and keep your team focused on what matters most, even as plans evolve. Toggl Track makes it easy to monitor project timelines to avoid unrealistic expectations.
5. Match your workload management strategies to your culture
Agency life has no shortage of curveballs — last-moment, complex projects, multiple deliverables, scorching hot deadlines! But for many, this intensity factor makes agency work thrilling. Hannah explains,
“There’s a lot going on and a lot of balls in the air. But we also have such a dynamic mix of clients and interesting new projects. It’s fun, and it works for people who thrive in a fast-paced environment.”
But a fast pace can take a toll. According to Marketing Week’s 2025 Career & Salary Survey, over half of marketers report feeling overwhelmed, undervalued, or emotionally exhausted.
The high agency staff burnout levels are often a structural failing. Some team leaders operate under the outdated belief that profitability and employee well-being are mutually exclusive.
But in reality, they go hand in hand. Companies that promote greater work-life balance have:
Individual‑level productivity thanks to better work management
Lower labor costs due to less turnover and lower overall hiring costs
Higher revenue as happy workers are ready to go the extra mile for clients
Talk Shop Media is a case in point. Its workload management strategies are cultural rather than just operational. One of the core company values, “care wildly,” is baked into everything it does.
“We’re a women-owned and founded business, and we lead with empathy. That shows up in how we support each other, how we communicate, and how we structure our work.”
And it’s not just lip service. These values are reinforced through tangible policies prioritizing staff well-being and balanced workload distribution without compromising business performance.
Talk Shop offers:
"Flex Fridays" — an all-agency mental wellness day off
Paid time off for birthdays and two-year anniversaries
A generous vacation policy with three weeks standard, plus five extra days
A family-friendly culture that offers greater flexibility
Additionally, they encourage leaders to regularly check in with their teams.
“It’s always on our team’s radar if someone’s overworking, and there will always be a conversation on whether they’d want some extra time off.”— Hannah McClenaghan
The bottom line? Proper workload management is more than just a way to balance capacity — it’s a tool to protect and nurture a healthy agency culture that people want to be part of. And it’s key for talent attraction, effective teamwork, and ongoing employee retention.
6. Make burnout everyone’s business
Even the smartest team workload management system in the world won’t protect your people if they don’t feel safe speaking up.
No project management software beats a real conversation when it comes to spotting burnout early. Dashboards can track heavy workloads, but only people can tell you when the pressure's too much. That's why open dialogue is your best defense against overwork and burnout.
“We’ll have the occasional after-hours event or launch, and we always make space to talk about it. Whether that results in time in lieu of or just an informal adjustment, it’s always a conversation. Someone is always there to chat it through”. — Hannah McClenaghan
Burnout prevention isn’t about perfection—it’s about creating a culture where people can speak up, ask for help, and trust that someone will listen. Talk Shop uses employee satisfaction as a core metric in its decision-making process. Hannah says,
“If there’s a better way to do something and someone gives us that feedback, we’ll try it.”— Hannah McClenaghan
The company’s approach is rooted in a servant leadership mindset, where stepping in to support a team member isn’t an exception; it’s the default.
“All of our leaders, myself included, are the first to jump in and say, ‘Let me take that off your plate.’ We haven’t eliminated burnout entirely, but I feel confident saying we’re doing our best.”— Hannah McClenaghan
Pro tip
Use time tracking to protect work-life balance
Hannah set up a Team Health Report in Toggl Track to spot burnout before it spirals.
By tracking who’s logging excessive hours (and what they’re spending time on), team leaders can step in early to help with prioritization and workload rebalancing. As a result, people maintain high performance without pushing past their limits.
Another example? Software agency Xmartlabs team uses Toggl Track to cut down on unproductive activity. Apart from reviewing project schedules and monitoring company OKR, Xmartlabs also uses tags to monitor team meeting durations and frequency to check they’re productive.
7. Put automation to work for your teams
The future of workload management is about working smarter. That means less time on repetitive tasks and more on the strategic thinking clients actually pay for. Hannah says,
“What we want to encourage our team to do is think strategically. That’s very hard to do when you're a task monkey burning out your time.”
That’s why she’s leading a company-wide push toward more integrations and automation. Her personal KPI this year? Identify and connect tools that didn’t previously talk to each other and streamline as many mundane tasks as possible. The aim is for people to spend more time to focus on higher-impact work.
AI plays a natural role in that transformation. One of Hannah’s top priorities is streamlining PR workflows like media list building, pitching, and tracking, which she calls the biggest time suck for associates and managers alike. With a new Gmail-integrated PR software in place, the team expects to shave hours off weekly routines without compromising on quality or client outcomes.
But the plan doesn’t stop there. Hannah also sees opportunities to boost efficiency in how projects are managed and how client coverage is tracked. Currently, project oversight lives across multiple Slack channels — a system that becomes harder to manage as the team scales. A software with better team management features cuts down on status check-ins and replaces the endless string of spreadsheets.
Similarly, smarter media monitoring software could reduce the amount of time spent hunting down confirmed coverage that’s already live — a huge bonus in a business where every minute counts.
And no, automation doesn’t mean robots are taking over anyone’s job. As Hannah explains,
“Automation will shift some of the time from doing to thinking.”
That’s a win for everyone because clients aren’t just buying task execution. They’re buying insight, creativity, and strategic alignment with their goals.
By automating the grind, Talk Shop’s team can zero in on the “why” behind each client's ask (not just the “what”) to deliver even more impressive results.
Design lean, productive workloads with Toggl Track
Effective workload management is the backbone of agency success, not just for hitting revenue goals but for building a culture where people want to stay. When you can see who's at capacity, who's at risk of burnout, and how time is actually spent, you can resource smarter, plan better, and protect your team's well-being without sacrificing business performance.
Toggl Track gives agency leaders like Hannah McClenaghan the real-time insights they need to balance workloads, improve operations, and scale sustainably. Whether optimizing profitability, reducing admin overhead, or simply making sure no one falls through the cracks, Toggl Track helps you keep your commitments to your clients and your team.
Ready to start optimizing your team’s time? Toggl Track delivers the clarity, agility, and control you need to build healthier workloads and stronger teams. Speak to sales to request a demo and see the difference for yourself.
