THE HIGHLIGHTS
Focus on tasks that fulfil your objectives, drop the ones
that don’t
Endless tasks drag marketers away from achieving business goals, leaving many repeating work and missing deadlines. It’s time to prioritise the things that matter
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It has been a tough year for marketers, who have often been forced to work in isolation without the support of colleagues. That has probably only worsened the sense many have that their work lacks efficiency and effectiveness.
UK knowledge workers admit to missing one in five deadlines each week, according to research by work management platform Asana. It’s also estimated that more than 200 hours is spent on duplicated work per year, with not enough time being put into planning properly. Overall, many feel disconnected from their company’s objectives, as Asana’s head of marketing operations, Alicia Bruckman, told Festival of Marketing attendees.
“People know what their company is trying to do,” she said. “They don't know how to connect their day-to-day work to those goals. And when that happens, they feel demotivated because they don't know how they're contributing to a larger vision. We also hear plans can be too rigid and inflexible… Teams don't feel like they have the ability to react quickly when things change in the environment. People say that they feel like plans happen in silos.”
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These are common issues marketers are feeling, Bruckman reassured the audience, and they have been exacerbated by the pressure of working through a pandemic. Her advice is to follow three steps to ensure projects are begun on solid planning foundations.
“The biggest thing that you can do is make sure you know what the outcome you're driving towards is,” she explained.
“Number two is you want to make sure you're translating the outcome into a set of objectives and initiatives. You want to take a look at how you're measuring progress towards the outcome, and then what are the big bets that you're going to make to be able to achieve your goals.
“And then third, you want to make sure you have the right team before you start executing. You want to know who your stakeholders are, who's going to be working on it on a daily basis, roles or responsibilities, who's accountable for what and make sure that you have the right people.”
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A trick Asana uses to get minds focused on the end goal, so plans can be executed with clarity, is to question team members at the very start of a project about what they are doing that is different from before. To help this process, the company has found it pays to think backwards, and there is a trick used to focus minds: it asks a team to decide how they would report on their campaign the day it launches if they were a newspaper. “We get the group together and ask… what does the headline say?” she reveals.
“And what in the body of the article is pointed out as to why we were successful? What did we do as a group to make sure that we achieved that headline? So, [it’s about] really thinking through what that end state looks like, and thinking through ideas on how you got there.”
Another tip she had to offer was that Asana approaches planning and execution through what it calls the ‘pyramid of clarity’. At the top is the mission; below that are goals, portfolios, projects and processes; and at its base are tasks. A further method the company uses to prioritise work is the practice of sticking to the ‘big rock’ goals of the year ahead, and ditching the ‘big not’ ideas that will crop up in the meantime and detract attention from what needs to be achieved.
“People have this anxiety and feel like they have to solve every problem that comes up,” Bruckman said. “So getting together and identifying what are all the things that we're being asked to do that don't ladder up to [a key objective is important]. Let's sit down, let's make that list. And let's just agree we're not going to do it. And let's let all of our stakeholders know that we're not going to do it.
“When you do that, it gives people the permission to just focus on those top three big rocks. And it also helps create more work-life balance, because now they're not stuck feeling like they have to fix every problem.”
Bruckman pointed out that this focus on what truly matters is the key to creating a strategy with clarity, where everyone knows what the vision is and how their work is aligned to it. ■
Asana's Alicia Bruckman on 'writing the headline' of what your work is achieving
THE HIGHLIGHTS