Plan a balanced workload to avoid overtime
It all starts with planning a balanced working schedule. This is where you can make costly mistakes that will multiply throughout the project. How to avoid them? When possible, try to plan flexibly, allowing for alternative scenarios and time adjustments.
You might also want to analyze the planned workload for all your employees: pay extra attention to people with unique skills, whose tasks can’t be transferred to other team members. If their workload is high, overtime is more likely to happen, as there’s nobody else to help out. One idea to avoid it would be to build a network of freelancers that could be plugged in to the project when needed. Another one is to hire a new person with similar skills who can take on some of the workload.
Increase productivity from 9 to 5
Monitoring the workload, while an essential step, is not always enough to avoid overtime. Project with tight schedules and unmovable deadlines have very little wiggle room when something goes wrong. A sick employee or a technical issue can quickly result in the team having to put in extra hours. To minimize the overtime, you can implement a couple of rules to help people focus on their 9-5 work.
First off, you want to make sure that your team knows what their upcoming assignments are. Obvious as it sounds, it’s not always the case. Team members who don’t know their tasks (or don’t fully understand their scope) are likely to lose a lot of precious time before kicking off work.
The next step would be to cut any meetings that aren’t absolutely essential. If you’re following an agile approach to project management, you can schedule scrum meetings. They are designed to cover the essential points without wasting time and resources.
Another way to increase efficiency is to facilitate communication between team members. There are a lot of collaboration tools on the market: ranging from chat apps (e.g. Slack) to project management software (e.g. JIRA). Once your tools are chosen, try to integrate them with each other to create smooth workflows. One example would be to install JIRA notifications on Slack: this way team members can see the updates in real time and react accordingly.