A positive – Having a smaller team and hierarchy make the business agile: you can quickly and easily change your priorities.
A negative – your marketing team has to act on those changed priorities.
When working in a fast-paced environment, it can be hard to manage the barrage of new projects and priorities, whilst also managing stakeholders that all want to be put first. It can feel impossible to manage them all, so here are a few tips and tricks along the way that have helped my team to manage priorities.
It is easy to assume that everyone has figured out when they are the most productive. However, this is not always the case, especially if you are hiring a young team who might not have worked a 9-5 before. Put in some time with your team members to learn about the environment they are most productive in. Do they work better with time-blocking, could the pomodoro technique work for them or do they need to eat the frog first thing in the morning. Putting some time in to think about this can completely change the way your team works, and their productive outputs.
In an ideal world all teams would talk to each other, in reality this does not always happen. It is worth taking the time each week to create a board that shows the team priorities. When new requests come in, show the board and ask, “Where would you say it fits on this list?” This quickly can turn a high priority into a medium priority and makes sure that the really high priority items are flagged.
Too often in organisations, information can get held up in hierarchical structures, in certain occasions you may be the hold-up. A mistake I made early on in my career was trying to be involved with every discussion and project.. Unfortunately, this approach was actually slowing me and my team down.
When kicking off a project, I’ve found that enabling your designer/copywriter/photographer to speak directly to the client and only checking in occasionally, when things need further explanation or are straying too far off the brief, can really speed up the approvals process. You are far more likely to create something closer to the client’s vision and you give your team members the autonomy to freely communicate with the rest of the organisation. More communication is better for everyone.
Earlier this year, whilst brainstorming ways to make working from home more efficient, our team realised that our own approvals process had really slowed down. Our clients were struggling to prioritise their own sign-offs, and pieces of work weren’t getting approved for days, if not weeks.
A quick and simple fix: we decided to make the information accessible in the subject. For example, “Project name – Input needed by COP 09/12”. This instantly changed the feedback we were getting and made sure our projects stayed on track.
Trust that your team is made up of smart people that can work together to solve problems without your input. Share knowledge and responsibility and you’ll find your own capacity increases. A team that communicates is an empowered team.
Eleanor Bickerton is the Senior Marketing Manager of EnviroBuild.
EnviroBuild is a supplier of sustainable construction materials. Earlier this year EnviroBuild became the first company in the UK to publish the environmental impact of its composite products with an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD); EPDs are reports which follow an international standard for determining Life Cycle Assessments for products.
Through improvements in embodied carbon of products and increasing the value of recycled materials, EnviroBuild are leading the way for ethical products within the construction sector, driving a green shift in societal behaviour and raising awareness around the detrimental carbon impact of building.
