Virtual and In-House Marketing Team Productivity Tips to Improve Performance

marketing team productivity

Whether you work in-house or at an agency, it’s essential to ensure your team members are empowered to be more productive and efficient.

Marketing teams that work well together in a productive and efficient manner tend to deliver the best results. In this article, we will look at some productivity tips that can improve your team’s performance. This will include compiling and using valuable data about how your team works, ensuring team members know how they are performing, and helping your team adhere to good time management practices.

Track Team Activity

Empowering your team to be more productive begins by understanding current activity levels. As a team leader, you need insight into how your team works, what they accomplish, and how efficient they are in doing what they do. Tracking team activity on a daily and weekly basis is a good way to do this.

One suggestion is to utilize Google forms to track each team member’s activity. Instruct members to submit a form specifying which projects they are working on, what they have done thus far, and how long it has taken to complete each task they have been assigned. Simple time and task tracking goes a long way toward measuring productivity. If you are not a big fan of Google apps, the Toggl time tracker is an excellent alternative.

Collecting the data is a good start, but you must do something with it if the data is to be valuable to you and your team. The productivity data that your team members submit via Google forms can be automatically collected in a spreadsheet, helping you track activity by day, week, and month. Similarly, Toggl automatically collects data about your team’s work, allowing you to examine what they’ve done afterwards with customisable graphs and reporting.

Tracking team activity is not just an exercise in collecting data and dumping it into spreadsheets, it can really help to improve the performance of your team. Tracking is important because it identifies when team members are struggling, identifies when team members are spending too much time on insignificant things, and identifies each team member’s strengths and weaknesses based on productivity.

This is data you can use to create a more efficient and productive workplace. So start tracking activity right away.

Make Performance Data Accessible

Teamwork is all about working together to achieve specific goals. Your company has certain KPIs (key performance indicators), so make sure every member of your team has access to them. This is important as it allows a team member to assess how they are doing individually, in relation to KPIs. It also enables them to see and understand how their work affects the productivity of the entire organisation.

Dashboards are great tools for compiling performance data and making it visible to your entire team. Google Analytics and Cyfe are good products for this purpose. Trello is another excellent dashboard product that lets team members know exactly what’s going on in terms of workloads and assignments.

You can also use a team dashboard to coordinate tasks and keep every team member in the loop. If you manage an in-house team, consider maximising performance data transparency and accessibility by displaying it on a flat-panel screen in the office. This makes it easy for team members to be up to speed with the current performance of the team, or to be alerted to issues they need to address.

Implement and Teach Good Time Management Practices

One of the chief performance killers in any office is poor time management. Not managing time properly robs your team of productivity by making it impossible to get tasks done within the desired amount of time. The good news is that simple things can be game changers in time management. When team leaders implement good time management practices and teach them to others, productivity soars.

For example, are your team members constantly interrupted by phone calls, e-mail messages, and workers from other departments paying a visit to ask questions? Unfortunately, the era of connectivity has made us all believe that a lack of constant communication means nothing is getting done. In reality, it is the other way around.

There are several ways to eliminate distractions and better manage time. First, team members can use their calendars to block off specific time to work on tasks. Those calendars can be shared with other team members so that everyone knows when not to interrupt their co-workers.

Second, teach your team members to work in blocks of time rather than starting a project and working on nothing else until it is completed. Working in blocks of time, with other things being done in between, helps team members to better focus by giving them specific start and end times throughout the progress of a project. This practice also helps to eliminate tedium while also encouraging creativity.

And third, consider replacing internal phone calls with an IM application such as Slack. Phone calls require immediate attention to get the phone to stop ringing. Instant messages can be left until later. As an added benefit, workers who are prone to unnecessary communications will soon discover that not everything is so important. When messages are not answered immediately, they will find other ways to get the information they want.

Activity tracking, performance data accessibility, and good time management skills can help your virtual or in-house team be more productive. We encourage you to try these things for yourself. You will be amazed at how much better your team does without you having to demand more. Simply by empowering them to work more efficiently, you will boost productivity.

Over to You

How do you empower your marketing team to stay productive? Let us know in the comments below!

The following two tabs change content below.

Editorial Staff

This article was written by SBMarketingTools.com editorial staff.