Burnout is common across many professions, but it’s especially prevalent in the marketing field, so much so that it’s reported that burnout is 30% higher amongst marketing professionals than in other fields. The reasons for this are manyfold, and include the always-on culture, the need to continually be creative, and increasingly being tasked with doing more, with less.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that organizations can go a long way towards helping their marketing team avoid burnout by implementing a few tried and tested strategies, and that’ll do more than help the employees. It’ll also help the organization improve employee retention rate, productivity, and outcomes.
Avoid Prioritizing Everything
In marketing, everything can appear to deserve priority status, but in reality, some things can be downgraded to simply ‘nice to haves.’ The problem is that busy marketing teams can only do what they’re told, and if managers are treating a task as a priority — or at least not expressing that it’s not urgent — then that’s how it’ll be treated by the team.
Putting together a system for managing task importance really can go a long way towards helping marketing teams cope. In an ever-competitive world, many marketers will go above and beyond to do what they think they should be doing until they’re explicitly told that it’s not vital.
Automate Where Possible
Marketers like working on creative work and strategy. They don’t like taking care of admin duties.
Yet it’s those duties that can take up a reasonably large amount of time during the workweek. Aside from occupying time and headspace, they can also be a major energy drain, especially if errors are made that create further work/issues down the line. Automating wherever possible takes work off the employees’ plates without compromising quality — and in many cases, improving it.
Assign Tasks Based On Capacity
Having too much work on one’s plate is a common cause of burnout. All too often, marketing employees are still trying to complete one task when they’re given another by their manager.
That doesn’t just lead to long hours, but also creates a mental strain in which the employee continually feels as if they’re racing a never-ending to-do list. At the same time, another employee might be in a position where they genuinely can take on another task. Tools like marketing resource management software allow managers to assign, reassign, and adjust work based on capacity, ensuring that work gets done without spreading anyone too thin. Taking this approach doesn’t just make things easier for employees, but also leads to enhanced quality of work. It’s much easier for a worker to deliver their best when they don’t feel snowed under.
Define Roles In Every Project
Burnout doesn’t impact all members of a marketing team equally. Usually, it’s the ones that end up doing more work within a project that get hit the hardest — and the reason that they end up doing more work is that the roles of what everyone should do within that project were not clearly defined.
With deadlines approaching, some employees naturally take it upon themselves to do extra work to ensure that the project is completed on time, even if it wasn’t assigned to them. That creates the dual problem of piling additional — and unnecessary — pressure onto a particular worker, while also potentially creating duplicate or inaccurate work. Ensuring that all team members know exactly what aspect of the project they’re responsible for can help to avoid this issue.
Review Your Tools
There are tools that help to make marketing teams’ lives easier, but that doesn’t mean that all tools are valuable. Some, like the aforementioned marketing resource management software, CRM tools, and analytics tools, hold genuine value. Others cause a distraction. Reviewing all the tools that your marketing team uses and refining the list so that only the truly valuable ones remain can help to make the team’s lives easier because of the often underrated impact that switching between too many tools can have on energy levels and productivity.
Your team won’t complain if they only have to learn and use a few all-powerful tools, rather than having to use a dozen less-powerful tools.
Allow For Buffer Time
If there’s one thing that can push burnout over the edge, it’s having to act in crisis mode because a deadline is fast approaching and the job isn’t yet complete. And that “over the edge” feeling becomes even more likely when it happens again, and again, and again, as it often does in the world of marketing projects.
One simple way to avoid this all too frequent occurrence is to build in buffer time to the timeline, so that you have some time to play with when you hit delays due to revisions, last-minute changes, and whatever else can make delivering to a strict deadline more challenging. Think of it in the same terms as having a buffer in the budget when doing home renovations; you hope you’ll never need it, but you’ll be happy you have it when you do — and in reality, you’ll need it more than you might expect.
Enforce Work-Life Balance
Managers have gotten pretty good at encouraging employees to manage work-life balance in the past few years, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that encouragement isn’t quite enough. Unless it’s enforced, teams tend to develop the same bad habits that lead to burnout in the first place.
Making it a policy to protect work-life balance, such as avoiding contact outside of work hours and mandating that employees take paid time off, can give teams the break they need, as well as provide a reminder that the organization actually cares about their well-being.
Conclusion
Burnout among marketing professionals has been a well-documented issue, but it doesn’t have to be. While the above points won’t prevent burnout on their own, put together, they can provide a powerful tonic that removes many of the pain points that lead to burnout, makes employees’ lives easier, and gives them space to rest and recuperate.
