[author: Emily Watkins]
Good afternoon! Welcome back to Scaling Greatness, a newsletter from Integreon focusing on amplifying business excellence and innovation.
📝 by Emily Watkins , Executive Editor
How to streamline content production and maintain consistency.
Few things matter more to a marketing team than content.
Everybody is accustomed to content; it is everywhere, and almost anything can function as content in the hands of a crafty marketer. But creating content that is effective – that makes content-numbed scrollers and commuters stop and pay attention – is anything but easy.
For a large organization, content pipelines can be sizable. Marketing material must be conceptualized, developed, produced and refined; its viability for audiences must be examined; it must go through numerous layers of review and approval, scrutinized and countersigned by bosses and stakeholders; finally, it must be shared across various platforms and ultimately assessed and analyzed. Hopefully, it makes the intended impact. Regardless of the result, the marketing team is back at it, coming up with and developing the next piece of content.
Often there are many cooks in the kitchen and working on content can feel somewhat dizzying; at worst, strong ideas become diluted across round after round of stakeholder feedback and reworks. To help avoid this, marketing managers need to have a sophisticated understanding of the entirety of the content-production process – from ideation to revisions to delivery. That includes potential bottlenecks.
Take a good look at your pipeline.
Streamlining content production starts with examining how your content pipeline functions. Which teams or individuals are primarily responsible for ideas and production? If they are in separate teams, how well do they communicate? How many stakeholders should be consulted throughout the process, and how many edits and revisions are feasible? Who gets a say, and how much influence should that input exert on the final shape of the content produced?
By analyzing each aspect of the pipeline, marketing managers can identify how an “ideal” content-production journey would look – where a good idea is efficiently executed with minimal slowdown. This can help you to understand which aspects of the content-production process are currently functioning smoothly, as well as areas for improvement.
Identify your bottlenecks.
Your teams could potentially be getting bogged down anywhere in the pipeline – from stakeholder edits to initial ideation. Map your current process against your “ideal” process and identify which areas of the pipeline need optimizing.
Make an action plan.
Once you’ve pinpointed where your process needs improvement, create a plan of action to resolve the sticking point. Is it a challenge to find fresh ideas and concepts? Do you get slowed down with multiple rounds of revisions? Or perhaps you have more than enough content, but not enough time/people/resources to get it out the door?
Consider the steps, processes, and technology you can take to address these challenges. For example, establishing a content Editorial Board with subject matter experts from within your organization to increase the flow of new content ideas. Setting clear guidelines and revision parameters for your team to speed the approval process. Or working with an experienced service provider (like Integreon) to enable your resources to streamline and accelerate content production.
⧉ The Great Return-to-Office Debate
Hybrid-work endorsers, office maximalists, home-office crusaders – where do you sit in the surprisingly long-running post-Covid debate?
Where should work happen?
It’s the disagreement that splits the white-collar world – literally. It’s not hard to see why the debate has inflamed passions; WFH vs RTO may have significant economic implications for sectors and companies, and flexible working is a major focus for the latest generation to join the global workforce. And all that’s before you get into the underlying sour grapes about who has the longest commute, the loudest office environment or the worst coffee selection.
The latest phase of the discussion spotlights the return-to-office (RTO) mandates enacted by some companies – a hot topic for both current employees and people invested in the broader debate. Is the RTO drive causing organizations to lose capable staff, as one MIT Sloan Management Review commentator recently suggested? Are the mandates simply mass layoffs in disguise? Or are remote workers spending all their time goofing off, as charged by notorious RTO promoter Elon Musk?
Of course, no company is the same; the RTO approaches taken by some of the world’s most lucrative companies have shifted substantially over time. JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, for example, is a self-proclaimed office maxi – JP Morgan itself, however, has so far taken a mixed approach to RTO, with full-time office attendance mandated for around half of the company (including managers) and hybrid working for around 40%. Amazon has taken a stricter line, recently mandating full-time onsite attendance for all office employees. Then there’s Spotify, which uses a “work from anywhere” policy for its office staff.
Source: Build Remote
How your company approaches RTO (or DNRTO) will depend on a number of factors – including the ideological viewpoint of your CEO. Using a data-centric approach, including the use of employee surveys and consultations, can help you understand what sorts of impacts different policies could create for your team members, infrastructure and productivity. What works for Amazon, Spotify or JP Morgan may not be the right fit for your firm or team – intense as the debate is, try to block out some of the noise and focus on what’s best for your business.
