Are you planning a marketer exodus?
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What is the biggest trend marketing leaders should be aware of? Employee mobility.
Years ago a former colleague told me: “Have you noticed when everyone came back to work after Labor Day that suddenly there were only four months left until the end of the year and panic set in?” These are stressful times. Not only are we all scrambling to meet our 2022 goals in the remaining months, but we have the added burden of creating plans and budgets for 2023.
When it comes to planning for next year, I am often asked if there are trends in technology that I should consider when making plans for next year. We don’t see any macro tech trends this year. What I see are companies trying to optimize and consolidate what they already have.
The Next Big Trend: Employee Mobility
The biggest trend and challenge for 2023 is workforce mobility. We have a customer who has replaced her marketing operations team 2-4 times in the last 2 years. On the personnel side of marketing, there’s been a huge shift. Employees are moving in search of jobs that better suit their work/life needs, companies are expanding but cannot find the talent they need, and companies are downsizing as a result of market conditions. You might think that scaling up and scaling down would strike a balance, but so far it hasn’t.
To create an achievable plan for 2023, you need to plan for the impact of employee mobility. What happens if everyone leaves? What if I am forced to downsize? What if I can’t hire the resources I need? You need a plan that can accommodate changes in resource availability. Without an adjustable plan, you will get stuck and unable to reach your goals.
Worst-case scenario planning doesn’t have to be a daunting task. It just requires a little extra effort in your planning cycle.
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Prioritize goals and allocate resources
Use your yearly goal as a starting point. First, prioritize your 2023 goals in order of importance and impact. Then identify and document the resources needed to achieve these objectives.
This could be a combination of current and existing employees, as well as external freelancers, agencies, etc. When identifying existing employees, identify them by name. The more specific, the better.
Identify resource risks
Now, tackle each goal and identify if there are any resource risks that could prevent you from achieving your goal. Are there certain employees whose departure would jeopardize the achievement of the project? Does your objective depend on hiring new employees?
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Define a mitigation plan for critical employees
For employees who are critical to achieving their goals, use this time to assess their satisfaction with their jobs and responsibilities. Don’t forget to check in to make sure they are passionate about the company and their work, and not feeling undue pressure.
It’s also important to look closely at rewards. Where do they fit on internal pay scales and industry compensation? If necessary, adjust compensation in the form of raises or bonus structures to identify goals that need to be achieved and how to achieve those goals. To ensure consistency between employee motivation and necessary. A small increase in compensation has less of an impact on costs than the hiring costs and lost productivity associated with losing and then replacing a key employee.
Determining skill sets and providing training
Even if you do everything you can to keep key employees happy and well-compensated, you can still be lured into another company. To mitigate this, it is important to have a backup plan. Is there someone else who can step in for that role if it becomes vacant? You need a good understanding of the skill profile of each member of your team, and many companies have no means of collecting or managing that information. For many people, this is not an easy question to answer because they do not have
If this applies to your environment, define the skills needed to achieve key goals and profile your team against them to provide a baseline. Get them, look for gaps, and address them through job shadowing and training. Your goal is to have some skill redundancy in key areas. I continue to be amazed at how little attention is paid to training. Not only could this be a result of tighter budgets, but there are also concerns that it may not be a good investment when employees leave. A small investment in training can pay off big, and can actually be the key to retaining a valuable workforce.
If you don’t have the ability to create duplicate skills internally, consider using external resources. For example, if she’s the only individual who can fully use her marketing automation platform (which is more common than you might think), take the time to get acquainted with a consulting firm that specializes in that technology. . Someone happens to call you.
For those objectives that rely on hiring new resources, consider what happens if you can’t source new talent. Will the purpose be abandoned or can it be redeployed to other less-priority purposes? In the meantime, can freelance talent, agencies, or consultants be leveraged?
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prepare for exit
Once your plans for 2023 are as secure as possible, take some time to look broader across your organization so you can react quickly to employee departures. The key to success is documentation.
All jobs require an up-to-date job description that can be used to initiate replacement requests for terminated employees. Additionally, consider adding steps to your offboarding process. This step requires the departing employee to create a “tips and tricks” document containing tips for success at work and “how-to” instructions for things that may not be obvious.
We institutionalized this in our process after we retired an employee who thought of creating this kind of reference document for her successor. It was seamless and gave us a “light of the moment” moment.
Beyond job description
Technology competencies are both a strength and a weakness in today’s marketing landscape. All marketing magic is made possible by technology, and companies are leveraging it to support their marketing campaigns and customer experience. If she’s the only person on the team who has a complete picture of the architecture of the technology and stack they’re using, and that person resides in a spreadsheet that only she can access, it’s Big problem.
In addition, the technology stack contains complex technical components that are carefully integrated, and the operational details associated with the use of that technology and the details of the fields that are mapped to create the integration are shared by a single person. This is another big problem if you only have one. If those people leave, the entire marketing program could be brought down by technology failure. Plus, it’s virtually impossible to take your marketing program to the next level because you don’t know where to start.
When I spoke to marketing leaders, I was left in shock (I mean shock in all caps). They told me, albeit timidly, that they didn’t know the specifics of what technology was being used across the organization. how it is integrated or how it is executed. are you kidding me ! ? ! ? Are they happily ignorant of the potential risks? I can’t sleep at night.
My mad anxiety aside, if the tech resigns and a new tech is hired, even if there’s no imminent catastrophe that something will go wrong, if the first 6 months should be a try , your ability to be productive and serve your organization is severely compromised by revealing what your stack is and how it fits together. If your stack isn’t fully documented, make it a marketing priority for 2023. An easily accessible and well-documented stack mitigates both employee turnover and technology challenges.
effective onboarding
When someone resigns and a replacement is hired, having a well-defined onboarding plan is essential to jumpstarting the new role. In addition to your company’s onboarding procedures, each feature requires its own onboarding process. Consider leveraging departing employees to define function-specific processes.
In addition to the “Tips and Tricks” above, consider a list of helpful resources for that feature, a list of other employees new hires should know, training materials, and external training courses. In remote/hybrid work environments, we also strongly advocate assigning in-house mentors to new hires. In-house mentors help you understand the company culture, processes, and facilitate interaction with other departments.
Employee mobility is something most of us are dealing with, or need to deal with next year, and we need to factor that into our plans for 2023. In the words of Confucius, “Success depends on preparation; without preparation, failure is bound to happen.”
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