Marketing teams constantly struggle with the daily challenges of getting work done. In the new world scenario of remote working, teams may need to re-examine their ways of working to maximize productivity and deliver high-quality output.
Covered Topics
Top Productivity Killers
Here are some of the leading factors that can dampen your team’s productivity:
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Disorganization
Without a defined workflow, projects can take longer to finish, as the process needed to complete them may vary with each case. A project can also be stalled when your review and approval system is unclear and involves too many people. As a result, your team may fail to deliver on their commitments and deadlines.
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Distractions
28% of working hours are lost to distraction annually. Emergency work requests and requests for status updates are just some interruptions that keep people from completing their work.
Nearly 70 of employees say meetings can waste their time, especially when they’re not scheduled ahead and if they don’t have a clear agenda.
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Disengagement
Poor communication or the lack of it can result in confusion, cliques, gossip, and even exclusion and workplace bullying. Communication channels are necessary to clarify issues and resolve conflicts.
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Unclear roles
Although collaboration calls for openness and flexibility, people can become saddled with too much work without clear role assignments. The lack of clarity can also create tension. It may prevent the right people from embracing their responsibilities amid aggressive teammates who want to call the shots over a task.
Misunderstood expectations can be costly, as errors might only be detected when a project is nearly done or ready for delivery.
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Poor technology management
Marketing teams can accumulate hundreds of documents, images, and videos as they take on projects. Developing content and executing strategies become problematic when there isn’t a singular place to store and retrieve these files on demand.
Teams can also lose time when they have to switch between or among many digital tools to get work done, from task scheduling and brainstorming to customer communication and prototyping.
How to Use Digital Tools to Make Your Team More Productive
In today’s digital environment, marketing teams rely on automated tools to operate collaboratively. Collaboration software lets marketers control, monitor, and change their work duties and efficiently manage spending to meet deliverables on time and to the highest standard. They’re multi-functional, easy to use, and accessible anytime, anywhere, as they’re based in the cloud. Due to their reliability, the demand for these solutions is forecast to grow by 17% in 2021.
How can you harness technology to collaborate within your teams more productively? Here are five ways you can get the most out of these types of software:
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Map out and optimize your workflow.
Workflows outline the series of steps to complete a task skillfully. They cover the scope of a project, the timeline, the delineation of roles, and the review and approval process. With a procedure in place, everyone in the team knows how they fit in the big picture and how to accomplish the project. You can adjust or add techniques and strategies along the way to improve output quality and to do more in less time.
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Use task management to assign and monitor tasks
The task management feature of collaboration and productivity platforms helps marketing heads prioritize tasks, set deadlines, assign the right people, and track progress.
Task management also promotes accountability because members would know what’s expected of them, and it would be easy to provide stakeholders with an accurate status of work.
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Open communication lines with messaging and content-sharing tools
Multi-purpose collaboration apps allow members to easily communicate with each other, whether through one-on-one or group messaging. Access to real-time communication is vital when you need to get answers quickly no matter where you are. Meanwhile, employees can use asynchronous communication when they wish to discuss topics that colleagues can refer to at a more convenient time. File and screen sharing capabilities are also common among today’s team software.
Usual features also include the capability to set meetings, particularly for urgent and time-sensitive issues that need thorough discussion.
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Minimize manual inputs with automated scheduling and reporting
You can use the calendar feature of productivity software to set notifications for recurring tasks and appointments (daily, weekly, or monthly). Alerts can also be created to remind you of commitments on a set date and hour. This saves you time and puts a reliable mechanism in place for ensuring things are running according to your timeline.
Some programs allow you to automatically send customized emails and get text summaries of your meetings. Collaboration tools can also collect business data from various platforms for analytics on marketing, sales, social media, and finance metrics. Automating status reports means data is up-to-date and error-free.
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Integrate the software with your existing tools.
The best digital solutions can easily integrate them with your current or other third-party apps, whether on desktop PC, laptop, or mobile. This connectivity can make consolidating information faster and also gives teams a chance to build an internal knowledge base.
As many as 81% of knowledge workers can get frustrated over difficulties finding and getting the internal information they need to do their job. This percentage of employees can spend over five hours a week on research. A centralized knowledge center can provide your team with the resources and references they need to move to the next stage of their task.
Collaborate Productively with Kissflow
Teams have more time for higher-value tasks, like developing new ideas and finding solutions when automation can take care of 45% of repetitive work. Thus, web collaboration tools like Kissflow will continue to drive productivity in the coming years.
