Did you know, 69% of job candidates will reconsider a job offer “if a company has a high turnover rate or if current employees seem burnt out?” (Hibob HR study, Aug 2019)
Work/life balance has long been a concern for employees. Despite a high salary offer, today’s job seekers are increasingly making decisions about which companies to work for and which jobs to accept based on the potential for a healthy work / life balance. In other words, it’s already hard to find qualified marketing operations talent— and it could be even harder if your company’s work / life balance isn’t quite what it should be.
Work / Life Balance Influencers for Marketing Operations
Work / life balance today is impacted in three key ways:
- The volume of work
- The pressure to get more done, faster
- The growing sense of needing to be “always on” and always accessible.
All factors combined, more and more workers are working later, or, accessing workspaces after hours, over the weekend or when on vacation. In fact, according to a study by Randstad, 42% of employees feel an obligation to check in to the workplace while on vacation.
When it comes to addressing the needs of your marketing operations team, you’re in a good position to have a positive impact. After all, you’re the conduit to both workflow and the removal of barriers.
The Manager’s Role in Achieving Work / Life Balance
As Marcelo Russo and Gabriele Morandin write in an article for Harvard Business Review: “We all want to live rich and meaningful lives — at work and at home — without sacrificing aspects of either. Around the world, more and more employees are seeking flexible work arrangements as a result, and companies looking to meet these expectations are increasingly offering a variety of family-friendly policies.” While employees have a certain amount of control over and hold responsibility for their work / life balance, managers also play an important role. In fact, the processes you have in place can help — or hurt — your team’s productivity. Where should you focus your efforts?
Marketo “mise en place.” A chef’s term meaning “everything in place” applies to marketing operations as well. A Marketo instance that is well organized, structured, and governed enables your staff to work more efficiently, as users know where things are and how to work within the environment. Every aspect — from naming conventions to descriptions to tokenization — considers the user’s convenience and need for speed. As a result, campaign production is streamlined. Imagine creating webinar, email, and event promotions in minutes instead of hours!
Implement internal SLAs. Establishing— and communicating— deadlines of when materials are due to marketing operations in order to hit a target campaign date is essential. Without SLAs, the burden can fall on the MOPS team to “do it now” or make up the time for late materials, AKA working nights and weekends.
Establish a marketing calendar. Not only will you avoid excessive list churn by implementing a company-wide marketing calendar, but having a schedule enables your team to prioritize their time. Additionally, you’ll have a better view of what’s coming and can plan proactively.
Examine your workflows. Everything changes in marketing, all the time. Rigid flows with cumbersome logic inevitably become obsolete, and excessive complexity makes managing change a time-consuming nightmare. Your Marketo structure should be designed for the needs of the future, not just for today. For every feature, it can be useful to ask: “What if I need to update this? What if this needs to change tomorrow?”
Be the visionary. Brilliant MOPS teams can anticipate where marketing might want to go and take campaigns to the next level. For example, enabling smarter personalization, more thoughtful targeting, and more accurate logic at every stage of the funnel — this makes communications more relevant, impactful and produces higher conversion rates. By thinking forward, you’ll keep your team feeling ahead of the curve, and, with the right structure to easily execute.
Providing a Supportive Marketing Operations Culture
Marketing operations is the backbone of marketing. To avoid excessive stress, there are additional things you can — and should — be doing to help build a culture that is supportive of work / life balance.
- Encourage employees to separate their work from their personal lives as much as possible. You can help here by not emailing them after hours or on the weekends.
- Encourage employees to really take a vacation when they’re on vacation and not connect with the office.
- Set an example yourself by demonstrating how you can be “off the grid” after hours, on weekends, holidays and vacations.
- Reward output, not time investment. It’s easy for employees to feel that the amount of time spent working is more important than the outcomes they achieve. Work hard to correct that misconception.
You can have a big impact on your employees’ job satisfaction, work / life balance and, ultimately, loyalty to your department and the company. It doesn’t take a lot of effort — an internal examination of workflows and processes plus some simple personal adjustments can make a big difference.
Are you and your staff struggling to attain a comfortable work / life balance? From redesigning workflows to improving the performance of your Marketo instance to handling high campaign volume, we can help— we support a healthy work / life balance so you can do the same. Contact us to discuss your needs.
