Signs your team is stagnating
One of the many exciting things about digital is how it has changed the face of marketing, creating new opportunities and challenges across people, process, strategy and technology.
The result: the digital marketing department is often a hub of cross-talent activity, with a remit which stretches from community management and customer experience to leads generation and sales growth.
This is no mean feat and helping marketing teams deliver and stay motivated requires its own sub skills set. So, what happens when a team lacks the motivation to succeed? The result can range from an unpleasant working atmosphere to catastrophic dents in revenue streams. Scary stuff.
So, without further ado, here are the signs your marketing team may be stagnating…
Complacency: Possibly the most obvious sign of stagnation but also one of the hardest to fix. Complacent employees may stop seeking new projects to get involved in and have a lackadaisical attitude to everyday tasks. This lack of engagement could be for any number of reasons and so step one is figuring out the cause.
Lack of drive: When employees stop pushing for or even cease to show interest in their next step, they are no longer thinking about what the future looks like with their employee. Those not thinking about their future at your organisation are also unlikely to think about the future of that organisation.
Diminished competition: When a once competitive employee stops demonstrating that competitive streak, it could be a sign that they are stagnating. While an overtly competitive environment is unhealthy, a little bit of healthy competition – with other colleagues, departments or competitor businesses – keeps pace, challenge and standards high.
And how to fix it? Bored and unmotivated employees, or those that stop developing their career paths, can pose a risk to productivity and growth. The good news is that most employees want to be motivated.
To do so, they need to feel both challenged and competent. Here are some of the most common ways which managers can keep their digital marketing teams from stagnating.
Training: Continual learning is one of the most powerful and rewarding ways to avoid stagnation. It can boost motivation, job satisfaction and productivity. In marketing, the Digital Skills Gap provides another impotence to provide internal or external training. Investing in the right training is equally important to ensure that it is adding value, as opposed to merely box ticking.
Career planning: A well thought out, internal career plan helps employees envisage a place for themselves within an organisation. A good career plan will address training needs and may include other ways of closing skills gaps, like providing a mentor: not only does mentorship help grow the experience of junior members of a team, it also motivates the more senior mentors.
Leadership: Sometimes, the reason for stagnation is lack of leadership. It is a particular problem for SME’s where often, for cost reasons, there is a reliance on a junior digital marketing team. Lack of experience can mean that teams and projects stagnate when there is a focus on tactics, rather than a wider strategy. A good consultant can act as an interim CMO, providing more cost effective leadership than a full time equivalent.
New opportunities & challenges: It may sound obvious, but a common cause of employee or team stagnation is the job itself. Providing new challenges can make a job more interesting and ultimately, lead to a more fulfilling career plan – this is often quite achievable in the world of digital, where the ever-shifting landscape naturally lead to new challenges. Opportunities might include adding more duties at a similar level of skill, creating more autonomy or expanding skillsets with, you guessed it, more training.
Process and technology: There is nothing quite so frustrating in a job as outdated or even superfluous technology. In the world of digital marketing, technology moves quickly. Investing wisely in the right tools and technology can support the team, help keep them motivated and drive performance. Leveraging technologies like automation to do some of the heavy lifting, allows the team to focus on delivering insights into the business which also brings greater job satisfaction. Just remember, when it comes to reporting technologies, it's the actionable insights from the report that will have an impact on the performance, not the report itself.
Concerned about stagnation in your team? Get in touch. We can help transform business performance from within; people, process, tools and technology with a digital focus.