In a post-pandemic world filled with economic uncertainty, most organisations are refocusing on ‘doing more with less’ – honing on productivity, efficiency and profits. This has translated into marketing orgs dealing with budget cuts, hiring freezes and ever-growing workloads.
Marketing managers have often defaulted to dealing with high workload in three ways: pushing back, ‘re-prioritising’, or delegating/hiring someone (i.e., most times an intern). But of course, these are imperfect, reactive and unscalable solutions. None of these options effectively reduce workload in the long-run, and sadly very few organisations take the time to understand and combat the culprits of the load.
Many of us know that most marketeers, apart from focusing on the ‘deliverables’, also juggle other time-draining activities, like admin tasks, learning new tools, helping other teams, teaching newcomers, moving assets between databases, etc. Some of these are necessary evils that should be reduced/automated to minimise their impact and others can be categorised as purely non-value-adding (NVA) activities.
Combating NVA activities is an antidote that all managers should first consider. The benefits from reducing NVA activities from your workload have a positive domino effect:
- workload is freed up
- the time dedicated for value-adding activity augments
- team’s output becomes of better quality
- waste is reduced (i.e., profitability increases)
- customers receive better product experiences
- workers feel accountable and proud of their work
- staff turnover reduces
- teams can undertake more innovative projects
- and so on.
But how can you battle your workload?
We can look at big tech for a good answer. They do it in two primary ways: 1) implementing a culture of continuous improvement and 2) creating an Operational team within their marketing orgs to deal with process optimisation and automation (e.g., ‘MarkOps’ / ‘Marketing Excellence’).
The continuous improvement culture is based on principles that originated from manufacturing (read: Kaizen / Lean Management). The culture accepts that waste is a naturally occurring problem which needs to be systematically tackled. It focuses on a bottoms-up approach where individuals are encouraged to identify inefficiencies in their tasks, log them (e.g., time wasted), and come up with improvements to enhance their processes.
Google and Amazon are known to encourage employees to feel accountable towards their process for the benefit of their team and other connected teams. And the results are fantastic! Workers develop initiatives to simplify their workflows such as investigating & solving bottlenecks, automating alerts, offshoring manual tasks, etc.
Conversely, MarkOps teams aim to simplify the org’s workload in a top-down approach. They mostly focus on deploying technical solutions to help marketeers focus on value-adding tasks.
In big tech, these teams perform some of the following: introducing tools (project management, automation, AI), launching training/onboarding portals, implementing digital asset management systems, overseeing data analytics suites and establishing security protocols.
So, which way is best?
It depends on the complexity and resources of your organisation, but you can benefit from employing both. We mainly find MarkOps teams in the big orgs that had no choice but to create specialised teams as their workflows got larger and more complex in scale. On the other hand, a culture of continuous improvement can exist in an org despite its complexity and resources. The only caveat is that the long-term success of the culture is dependent on management.
In big tech, even if workers have the aid of an operational team, they’re still encouraged to embrace small process improvements in their day to day. In these orgs, there are mechanisms that support and elevate the culture of continuous improvement:
- Management allocates resources for improvement initiatives.
- Employees’ contributions are reflected in yearly reviews and promotions.
Start combating NVA activities:
Establish a continuous improvement culture. Upscale yourself and your team with lean management principles: learn frameworks to map your processes, use methodologies for finding and quantifying inefficiencies, deploy tech/non-tech solutions to optimise your workflow, and create governance and controls to ensure the change is sustainable in time.
Establish a MarkOps team to help automate non-value adding tasks. Tailor a team of specialists to the complexity of your current workflows, your org’s resources and your business’ scaling priorities.
I’m here to help! I specialise in freeing-up workloads with upskilling workshops and project-based consulting services. We can help you take the first steps in establishing a continuous improvement culture or we can also help you implement top-down solutions like establishing a MarkOps team. All our services can be tailored to the individual challenges your team is experiencing.
To arrange a free 30 minute call to see how we can collaborate to ensure that your marketing processes are optimised, email me: oliver@shoot4themoon.co.uk
Oliver Ramirez is a brand and marketing operations specialist with extensive marketing experience across FMCG and Tech. At Henkel, Oliver launched award winning products, conducted £MM nationwide campaigns, and strategised expansion plans for Schwarzkopf.
At Amazon, Oliver led marketing operation projects that drove Prime Video’s EU expansion in EMEA, and introduced workstreams that saved hundreds of hours to the organisation. Oliver is a Marketing Week mMBA alumni and also holds 2 MSc from top European business schools in Marketing and in International Management. Oliver is passionate about educating marketers on the ins and outs of operational excellence; a powerful lever that propels marketing teams into driving efficiency, minimising wastage and improving results.
