Written by Abbie Hatch, Marketing Manager for RoboHead
August 3, 2023
The last three years have been filled with more questions than answers. Leaders have been called to lead through uncertainty, with no roadmap of what is likely to happen next. Between companies going fully remote, distraction, burnout, economic concerns, and a shift in priorities for many workers, productivity took a major hit in 2020 and the years following. But, according to the RoboHead 10000, 2023 has finally brought stability and a boom in marketing activity, with more highly productive days than we have seen since 2019.
Highly Productive Days are Back
In 2019, when we first started recording the activities on the RoboHead 10000, we saw days with major surges in activities across creative and marketing teams before extreme declines in 2020 that continued through 2022. To measure this, we have some essential formulas that combine a range of steps in the creative process across the project lifecycle for more than 10,000 creative and marketing professionals. Values are assigned relative to 100, which is used as a constant benchmark for comparison. Any day with an index score over 110 is highly productive, relative to the benchmark and compared to all days measured in the index.
Highly productive days were steadily declining since March of 2020. In 2019, we saw 37 days with an index score over 110 from June to December (when we began tracking). Then, 2020 hit us hard, and those high-flyer days dropped to 25. Things kept sliding with just 22 days in 2021, and a meager 11 days in 2022.
Now in 2023, we now have days with major productivity highs again. From January to June of 2023, we’ve seen 49 days of index values over 110. Even more impressively, July of 2023 had as many highly productive days as all of 2022!
Creativity is a Leading Indicator
Creative teams are a central part of business operations. Not only do they color the brand, make marketing pop, craft products, and smooth out user experiences, but their activities are a leading indicator of business health. From launching marketing campaigns to assisting in product development, marketing and creative activity should be a leading indicator of business success. So, these highly productive days are a great sign for the days ahead.
Make the Most of Your Team’s Efforts
With productivity picking up, ride your momentum for even great outcomes. Here are some ideas:
✅ Embrace automation: Brave the unknown and automate those repetitive tasks. It frees up our time to tackle the fun creative stuff.
✅ Check your team’s pulse: Keep an eye on workloads and make sure no one’s drowning. Too much work can lead to burnout.
✅ Stick to the process: A well-oiled process means everyone knows what to do and when to do it. A project management platform can help keep your process in line.
✅ Grow your operations alongside your creative team: As our creative output blossoms, we need to make sure our operations team is keeping pace.
Creative and marketing work is an important part of a company’s health and performance. With data from the RoboHead 10000, we can see that the outlook is looking better than ever, with highly productive days finally returning to—or even beating—the status quo.
About RoboHead:
RoboHead is a project management platform built for creative and marketing teams that gets everyone on the same page and allows you to focus on creative work that drives your company’s growth. Learn more at RoboHead.net.
About the Index: RoboHead 10000 tracks marketing activity in real-time across industries, geographies, and company sizes during a given time period. In order to account for continuously adding new users, the raw data is averaged by two ratios, involving users and accounts, in order to normalize the resulting data. At the beginning of the year for each time period (daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly), 100 has been assigned as a constant, so that all future data for that period will be measured against that relative value.
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