Marketing teams have a lot of plates to spin these days. With marketing at the forefront of most businesses, team members are usually wearing a lot of different hats, running multiple campaigns and doing more than their job description.
As the world becomes increasingly digital, all eyes are on the marketing department to generate results. Truth is, marketers in most workplaces have too much to do in too little time.
In fact, 83.3% of marketing and communication professionals claim to have experienced burnout. This isn’t helped by disorganised workflows, bottleneck decision making processes and remote working making communication more difficult.
As a leader it can also be tough. You’re not only held accountable for generating results and reporting up the chain, you have to make sure your team members are focused, productive, working cohesively and that work is delegated and divided fairly across the department.
The increase of flexible and remote working helps ensure employees have a better work/life balance but it can cause workload issues with tasks unevenly distributed, or so many team meetings that get in the way of actual work. And let’s face it, you also have too much to do to be keeping tabs on every task and team member.
Luckily, with the advance of flexible working also comes the advance of technology to help you balance and manage team workload. We’ve done the hard work for you and broken down how to manage your team workload and what tools you can use to boost your marketing productivity in four easy steps.
How Can You Effectively Manage Workloads and Reduce Stress?
1. Ask Your Team About Their Capacity
You might be thinking, this is ridiculous, if my team felt burnt out they’d tell me. But not everyone will and some people won’t even realise it. The days of measuring who was busiest by who was in the office the most are behind us and with remote working it isn’t so easy to find out. Ask each staff member to list everything they’re working on, if they’re struggling to get things done and how close they are to full capacity.
You might find that they need help prioritising their tasks or managing their time better. Helping them improve their own workload will help the whole team reach their goals and targets.
2. Allocate Resources and Encourage Collaboration
In step one you might find that some team members are pulling their weight more than others and that their colleagues can take some tasks off their hands. If jobs are taking a while, encourage collaboration by asking them to buddy up. This can also fix silo issues, killing two birds with one stone. Collaborative marketing teams create better campaigns. You heard it here first!
Start a daily team stand up to gain sight of how things are going and where resources need to be allocated moving forward. That way, you don’t need to keep coming back to steps one and two and your team feels heard and happier. Win win.
3. Improve Processes to Lighten Workload
As marketers we have a lot of programs and platforms to keep an eye on in order to do our jobs. And that doesn’t include the admin we need to do, in order to do the job. I know, confusing right?
Improving some of these processes and reducing the amount of hoops your team needs to jump through will free up some of their time and yours. Spreadsheets can be great, but not when you have ten of them. Especially not for team productivity and workflow.
Marketing management platforms like Mediatool make it easy to gain visibility on workload. Approve content calendars, review your team’s work and control budgets in one tool. Rather than ten.
By revamping your workflows you increase not only your team’s productivity, but your own. You’ll also improve the chance at reaching those ever-important OKRs. The key is to work smarter, not harder!
4. Onboard a Marketing Management Tool
The best way to manage team workload is to onboard a digital marketing tool that can help you with all of the above.
In Mediatool you can plan your content for multiple campaigns across marketing mediums, communicate with your team and report on results. Track what your team is up to and how your campaigns are performing in real time by integrating with your other platforms.
Truth is, in order to scale your marketing operation and keep your team happy, you need a marketing management tool. By removing time consuming admin tasks, your team gets more time to do their job better, and so you!
Has remote working stifled your team productivity? Is that trickling down and affecting your campaigns? We know the detrimental effect this can have on a team. That’s why we made Mediatool. Made for marketers, by marketers, Mediatool works as an extension of your team to manage workloads and help you create kick-ass campaigns.
Book a free demo today to save yourself time and boost your team’s productivity.
