Running a business means juggling a wide array of responsibilities that will affect the success of your brand. However, no matter how skilled you are, the people you hire and work with will ultimately have an equally profound impact on your team productivity and overall success. That means that even if you manage to attract the best candidates for your marketing department, they can only be as effective as your internal organization and structure allow them to be. So now that you think about it, is the productivity of your marketing team struggling?
Before you start looking for culprits among your team members, you should make sure that your marketing department doesn’t rely on outdated practices, or that you’re not building a needlessly competitive culture. Here are a few tried and tested ideas that will help enhance the productivity of your marketing team and make sure that your employees’ talents are utilized to their full extent.
Use a Project Management Platform
Communication is a key piece of the success puzzle. If your team members waste hours of their time trying to figure out who is supposed to handle a single task within a project, or if they cannot get in touch effectively throughout the day, then you could use some more structure within your communication channels. For starters, there are various digital tools that can simplify the entire conundrum, even if you work with freelancers scattered all over the globe.
As an example, you can rely on project management tools such as Basecamp or Asana to keep track of projects, get notified of any relevant changes, and keep everyone relevant in the loop at all times. Plus, these and other tools give you an insight into how well your teams collaborate, the distribution of workload, and if your teams are managing their milestones well.
Hire People That Will Grow Your Brand
Before you actually bring in any major changes in how your teams operate, this is a good opportunity to take a closer look at your teams and their structure. Perhaps you’ve been hiring people with the right skills, but not the best mindset, or with ample experience, but with little creativity. When you start hiring outside of the proverbial box, you’ll understand the advantages of hiring disabled workers, for example, and the many benefits of diversifying your workplace.
Conduct Reviews and Implement Changes
The productivity of your marketing team heavily depends on workload distribution and having a realistic view of everyone’s efforts. Conducting performance reviews may be an old technique, but when you amplify it with the help of digital tools, you’ll be able to make the most of the data, track progress, and make changes on the go.
Is John’s report late because he is not good at meeting deadlines, or his report depends on five other people in the team, out of whom merely three deliver within the given deadlines? Is Kelly slacking off by handling one task per day, or is she biting off more than she should chew because others are choosing minor tasks while she’s dealing with the most crucial part of the project? Use the data you collect from your PM platforms, collect individual reviews, and you’ll be able to spot productivity gaps that will give you a chance to improve your team.
Empower Employee Feedback
Sometimes, the greatest killers of productivity might be the most well-hidden, and not easy to identify. Once you start talking to each individual team member one-on-one, you’ll understand their individual concerns, setbacks, and ultimately get their suggestions on how they believe their productivity will improve over time. Some employees may not feel comfortable sharing this information in group meetings, hence the need for the face-to-face chat.
Then again, feedback should go both ways, and if you as a leader can do something differently to make the marketing process simpler and more efficient, then listen to the suggestions they have to offer. You’d be surprised how often some of the most creative ideas for boosting productivity come from your least assertive team members when they get the chance to express their thoughts.
Although productivity of your marketing team is not something you can improve overnight, continuously implementing better strategies for your marketing team will ultimately lead to improvements to benefit your entire business. Stay open-minded for new productivity-enhancing tactics, and allow your marketing team members to bring their best game to the table.
The original version of this article was first published on V3Broadsuite.
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