The percentage of available hours a team member spends on productive, scheduled work.
Utilization rate = (scheduled hours ÷ available hours) × 100. That's it. A designer with 32 scheduled hours out of 40 available sits at 80%. Simple math — but the number tells you more than you'd think.
Under 60% — You've got bench time. Maybe someone just rolled off a project and hasn't been reassigned yet, or your capacity planning is off. Either way, you're paying for hours that aren't generating revenue.
60–80% — Healthy territory for most roles. There's room for internal work, professional development, and the inevitable unplanned stuff that eats into everyone's week.
80–100% — Your team is fully loaded. This works short-term — a busy sprint, a product launch — but sustaining it longer than a few weeks leads to burnout and sloppy output. Watch for overallocation creeping in.
Over 100% — Someone's working overtime. It happens, but if your dashboard consistently shows numbers above 100%, you've got a staffing problem, not a scheduling one. Time to revisit headcount planning.
A single person's utilization doesn't tell the whole story. Compare it against their billable hours ratio — someone at 90% utilization but only 40% billable might be buried in internal meetings. WrkSched's capacity report color-codes utilization (green, yellow, red) so you can spot trouble across the whole team at a glance, rather than digging through spreadsheets person by person.
The goal isn't to maximize the number. It's to keep it in a sustainable range while maintaining strong profit margins.
Put these concepts into practice with WrkSched — drag-and-drop scheduling and capacity planning.
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