Employee burnout has always been a serious issue and now with the recent pandemic, it could become more detrimental costing U.S. companies millions of dollars. According to a recent Gallup poll, 23% of workers feel burned out “very often or always,” and 44% say they feel burned out “sometimes.” If your team follows these averages, that means that roughly two-thirds of your team is experiencing burnout on a regular basis. The implications on productivity can be profound. Burned-out employees are significantly more likely to take days off, look for other jobs, and are even 23% more likely to end up in the emergency room, according to Gallup.
Unmanageable workloads were cited as one of the biggest contributors to employee burnout. So, as a marketing director or creative services manager, it’s your job to make sure everyone’s plate stays full, but not too full, so you can produce great projects as efficiently as possible. Unfortunately, that task becomes extremely difficult if you don’t have solid visibility into your team’s workloads or capacity. If you’re having issues managing capacity for your team while working remotely or in the office, here’s why adding new project management software may be the perfect solution.
Now more than ever, measuring capacity and workloads is critical
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 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.
Making the case for more resources
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.
With a solution like 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.
