Your creative department is one of the most essential assets your business has. Creative work has the power to help your company stand out from the crowd, communicate value and help align customers to your brand. But harnessing a group of people to create the right work is a challenge made even more complicated by vague assignments, processes that are too general, and the subjective nature of creative work. The best way to counteract this complexity is to create systems that honor the creative process and limit distractions and draining workflows.
Make time for passion projects and strategic assignments
Time off, healthy workloads and a focus on your corporate culture can help you get there, but one of the biggest indicators for employee satisfaction is actually getting to do work that is meaningful to you. Your creatives want to take on meaningful projects that have significant value, creatively challenging projects, and would like the chance to learn something new. Instead, they may be spending up to a third of their time answering emails and “managing” their work rather than doing their work.
The Solution: By reducing the number of hours your team has to spend answering emails and navigating complex revisions, you create new capacity to take on better projects that will leave your team feeling challenged and fulfilled in the best way possible. By adopting RoboHead, most teams report a 30% reduction in time spent managing their emails, requests and revisions.
Create balanced workloads
Making sure your team members have a good balance of work on their plate is essential. But, measuring capacity is inherently more difficult for marketing and creative teams because of the nature of the work. It’s hard to say exactly how long it will take a graphic designer to complete a new product brochure, and a 600-word blog post can take one hour or eight depending on the subject matter and the writer’s productivity on a given day. The point is, the time needed for creative work isn’t as easily quantifiable as it might be for something like data entry, and every project is unique. While experience may have taught you roughly how long your team needs to complete certain project types, to accurately measure capacity and understand your team’s workload, you need real-time insights into everyone’s current and upcoming projects.
The Solution: The best way to get the insight you need is to add new project management software to your technology stack, ideally, one that provides workforce planning and management functionality. RoboHead is a project management solution designed exclusively for marketing and creative teams and comes with powerful reporting and visualization tools to make workload management and forecasting easier and more accurate. Time tracking, scheduling, project status, and other valuable insights are all displayed using highly visual and intuitive dashboards so you can measure capacity at a glance. You can then quickly assign projects — or reassign them — to manage your entire team’s workload for maximum efficiency.
Add headcount when the time is right
Understanding your Marketing team’s workload capacity is one thing, but if you’re consistently struggling to get all your projects completed on time, you may not have adequate staffing. If that’s the case, you’ll need to request more resources for your team. Although making the case to increase your team’s budget is never easy, the right project management tool can help you get it done.
The Solution: With RoboHead, you get outstanding reporting features that allow you to build comprehensive accounts of your team’s productivity. You’ll have KPIs on the number of projects completed in a month, the average time from initiation to completion, and other insightful metrics. You can then use those reports to show leadership that your team is already performing at or above expected capacity, essentially making your case for you. You can also compare your team’s performance against the projected costs of an outside agency, demonstrating ROI and solidifying your team as a valuable company asset. With such powerful reports, the right project management tool can make it a lot easier to secure the resources you need to keep your team thriving.