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Marketing is not the lifeblood of your brand – productive marketing is. Productivity fosters growth and progress in any human endeavor. Every aspect of managing a team of marketers – from the implementation of tools to setting KPIs – boils down to increasing the productivity of your marketing team.
However, many CMOs use methods that do the opposite of what they are trying to achieve. This is because they tend to implement decisions that force productivity through pressure – such as due dates, extended work hours, and others – when they should be focusing more on motivation.
Today, it is all about finding the perfect work-life balance that will help your people survive the daily grind. Here are three practical ways to motivate and encourage your marketing team to work harder without burning them out.
Gamification
How does a person go for hours while playing a video game without losing the motivation to keep going? It’s because games offer opportunities to experience a sense of accomplishment, like reaching a higher level or beating a tough boss. It appeals to the brain’s reward center, whereas working will only offer these opportunities on paydays.
Workplace gamification is the practice of incorporating gameplay elements to motivate the workforce. One good illustration is GamEffective; a platform geared toward improving workplace productivity by increasing motivation. Employees can monitor their performance in real-time through a point system through its narrative structure with quizzes, weekly challenges, and simulations. Users learn and improve to beat their personal benchmarks along with that of their peers. In addition, managers can also better gauge performance and engagement across the organization.
The mechanics of gamification often include scores and a ranking system based on performance. These features offer a sense of progression as well as competition to motivate your people and increase productivity. “If the player’s goals are aligned with the organization’s goals, then the organizational goals will be realized as a consequence of the player achieving her goals,” says Brian Burke, author of Gamify.
Sometimes, these mechanics are facilitated by the management themselves by maintaining a leaderboard, offering game-like rewards, and even role-playing game situations like car racing or team sports. However, there are gamification platforms that can make things a lot easier and much more efficient.
With an efficient gamification platform, you can make it more exciting and engage for team to keep up and maintain their productivity. Playing by oneself is not always the best course of action, however. A gamification platform must also have an integrated social aspect, which is another critical ingredient for workplace motivation.
Social
Apart from increased engagement, gamification offers another reward to your hardworking marketers – bragging rights. This is why the best gamification platforms have social integration, which enables employees to share their accomplishments and earn their well-deserved kudos from workmates.
Additionally, introducing a social aspect in your team fosters motivation through improved communication. Closed groups in social media network such as Facebook is a step in the right direction, but you could do so much more with platforms such as Yammer and Slack.
Yammer is an enterprise social network you can use exclusively for your workplace. This is especially useful for large teams with confined office spaces across different locations.
With Yammer, you are encouraging an almost-casual line of communication between your teams – keeping them connected to client projects. It also comes with a mobile app that enables your team members to stay connected no matter where they are.
OfficeVibe, a survey and feedback tool, uses Yammer for communications among friends. While they use the network to share useful articles and plan team events, they also use Yammer to send funny videos just to make each other smile.
Collaboration
With gamification and social, you are bringing your team members closer together and keeping them more motivated. After all, being part of a team introduces a sense of accountability. It motivates your employees since they do not want to disappoint those who are counting on their work.
To make full use of this motivation, it is important to direct them towards objectives that can further the project as a whole. This is where collaborative tools come in.
First of all, make sure they have a clear grasp on client projects. You can use project management platforms and tools for this. One of your best options would be Trello, which organizes client tasks into cards that contain a description, checklists, comments, due dates, attachments, and the specified team members in charge.
Bonus: Mobility
Earlier this year Forbes contributor Daniel Newman openly asked the question: Is Mobility The Answer To Better Employee Productivity? Based on the results of research he references, I would say the answer is yes. According to Newman, employee mobility leads to 30% better processes and 23% more productivity—and 100% more satisfied employees.
One specific example Newman mentions is performance appraisals. Just the mention of that phrase can cause many to break out in hives. Newman cites performance mobile management tools that are available for companies today that offer regular checkpoints, goal appraisals, and performance objectives.
At the end of the day, we are all incredibly over-inundated with a lot of “stuff.” From emails to projects to conference calls to events to making the time to have a cup of coffee now and then. You know I had to get that in here.
Finding new ways to be productive and increase productivity are absolutely paramount for success – there’s simply not enough hours in a day, right? So every hour, minute and yes second, count.
This article originally appeared on Forbes.
