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10 Ways Project Management is Frustrating Your Team (and how to fix it)

We all want to feel capable and proud of how we spend our days in the office—both remotely and in person! But unclear and always-changing task management systems—or lack thereof—can leave employees feeling frustrated, burned out, and maybe even ready to search for greener pastures where their work will be valued more. 


These frustrations can affect your bottom line in very real ways. In fact, in a survey of office workers, 57% of respondents claimed that outdated technology—including software—had a moderate or major impact on their job satisfaction. That’s not all though; 92% also reported that it had an effect on their productivity! If you hear any or all of the frustrations listed below, the first thing you should do is investigate the tools being used to manage your projects.

1. Employees feeling invisible

In a recent survey, as much as 62% of workers aged 22 to 65 claim to work remotely at least occasionally. With less face time with your employees, it’s easy to let appreciation slip through the cracks. With RoboHead, you can seamlessly integrate employee appreciation into your workflow using the Kudos feature! After a leader or teammate submits feedback on a design, they can go out of their way to send “kudos,” which an employee can collect and look back on when they are doubting their significance to the team.

2. Too Much Time in Meetings

We spoke with one RoboHead user who shared that before RoboHead, she would have to schedule 3 meetings for every request that came in to make sure that the scope of the project was understood, all the resources were in place, and deadlines were agreed upon. Now that she uses RoboHead, outside departments submit a project request form that she created with rules and parameters to make sure everything is tracked correctly. She took her project management from six hours/day to under two hours and you can too.

3. Procrastination or Being Overwhelmed

A long, loose list of items that need to be handled can have a counter-intuitive effect on productivity: procrastination. When team members see a seemingly impossible task list, they can feel overwhelmed and revert to wasting time, putting it off, or checking out completely. Tools like Kanban, Gantt, and integrated calendars help you and your team break your projects into digestible chunks and make big progress almost effortlessly.

4. Wasted time on Mundane Tasks

Repetitive, mundane tasks can have an incredibly negative effect on your day. You know they’re important, but they take away from time being creative or doing tasks you care more about. Automations can help eliminate certain repetitive tasks, like updating the status of every project in process! RoboHead offers countless ways to customize and automate your work with Roboscripts, which will run in the background and complete certain tasks for you. When employees get out of doing “grunt work” and into doing meaningful, life-giving work, it can make a big difference in how they see their future within your company.

5. Vague or Unhelpful Feedback

If you shadow a creative worker for a day, you will observe that they spend hours of their day deciphering vague or unhelpful feedback. Things like “I just don’t like it,” or “make it more upbeat!” leave team members stuck taking action based on a best guess at what the reviewer means. With RoboHead’s review tools, this problem practically disappears. You’ll be able to leave specific feedback through comments, and review projects with different parameters, “like approved with changes,” or request an additional mockup without having to break off into yet another email chain.

6. Individuals Feeling Overworked

Individual workers have different capacities and one type of work can take more time than another. It can be tricky to obtain tangible information on who may be doing more than their fair share (and who might be doing less!). Integrated reporting tools allow you to get more visibility into your team members’ workloads and give you tangible data to advocate for your team to hire another employee.

7. Tedious Ways of Tracking Time

There are many reasons you may need to ask your employees to track how much time they spend on individual projects. Whether you need it to properly bill a client or are just trying to streamline what your team works on, there is incredible value in keeping record of time tracking. But, so many apps and ways of time tracking feel like a chore and can even make employees feel like they are being micromanaged.

With time tracking integrated alongside your project management, it is easy for employees to stay up to date on time tracking. While they decide what to work on next, they’ll have an option to track time. They can simply go back and update the tracking while they are marking an individual task complete.

8. Important Information Getting Lost in Emails

The average person sends and receives 121 emails/day for work. With so much information being passed back and forth, it’s easy to lose track of specific information, notes for projects, and planned time off. RoboHead can significantly decrease the number of emails you need to send with detailed notification preferences, as well as keep all the communication, feedback, and notes needed for a project right alongside the project itself.

9. Multiple Versions of Files Creating Confusion

Multiple versions of a file can create a lot of confusion and lead to mistakes being published on your website, sent to clients, or printed. RoboHead eliminates confusion with native file storage so you don’t have to decipher file versions to know which one is right.

10. Missed Deadlines

When one person misses a deadline, it affects the whole team — especially with complex creative projects. With RoboHead, everyone will have visibility into their piece of the project and deadlines will be clear. When a deadline does slip behind schedule, everyone will be able to adjust and plan ahead as well. 

Don’t Go Another Day Frustrating Your Team

Employee satisfaction is more important now than ever before and taking any step that you can to improve the relationship that you have with your employees is a positive one. Keeping your software and workflow practices well planned and friendly for your team will have a lasting impact not only on retention but also on productivity and profitability. To us, one thing is clear: you can’t afford not to invest in your team and the project management tools they use every day.