We’re still unpacking the insights from our recent “Working from Home in a Pandemic” survey–and we’re grateful to the many marketers who participated and shared their candor with us. As the survey results made clear, marketers are, by and large, still crushing their productivity goals even while working from home, and that’s truly impressive.
However, as I wrote about in a recent guest blog post, our WFH productivity comes with truths and tradeoffs that are very real. At Demand Spring, our goal is to help marketers stand taller, so when our survey results revealed that our collective global productivity may be at the expense of our collective wellbeing, we wanted to do more than just share the statistics. So with this post we share some real world honesty, insights and ideas to help validate how you’re feeling and help you move forward.
I’ve spoken with many CMO’s and marketing leaders about how they’re doing and what they’re seeing inside their marketing teams these days, and I wanted to share some of the honesty, perspective and learnings they’ve shared with me.
I asked Elle Woulfe, Vice President of Growth Marketing at InVision, what it’s been like to be a marketing leader and a working parent with young kids learning from home these days, and I appreciated her honest take on it all:
As a marketing leader who has worked from home for the past 5 years, not a whole lot changed in terms of my work day when the pandemic started, with the exception of having my two young kids at home all the time. The biggest impact has been a feeling of being fractured and an inability to give anyone or anything my full attention so in essence – no one is really getting the best version of me.
I asked the head of digital marketing for a large global financial services firm for some team leadership observations these days:
“I would say that my global marketing team has increased productivity noticeably, due to less commuting time, more ‘on’ hours and people in general working greater hours–even weekends. But then there are pockets of team members struggling with clearly lower productivity. I have found this due to all sorts of issues–childcare issues, health issues, mental health issues, certain global regions with connection problems and outages when working from home. As a leader, I find it forces us to widen our consideration of our teams in order to ensure we are not making assumptions about people’s situations. Ultimately in order to find out what is going on and help those who need it.
And I asked Pam Boiros, the CMO of meQuilibrium–an HR tech company focused on wellbeing in the workplace–for any tips or learnings she could share: Company-wide, we instituted lunch hour from noon to 1pm where no internal meetings are permitted, and emails and slacks are discouraged. This has really helped people to not sprint through the day with barely a bathroom break. As a company focused on resilience, emotional wellbeing, and anti-burnout we feel like this was a key step, and very much on brand.
As we move deeper into fall, we all know we are better and stronger when we help, and when we share. We invite you to share your candor and insights with us, your learnings from leading in the world we’re in today, and let us know if we can share it more broadly–either anonymously or publicly–so we can be part of how we can all stand taller together. Reach out to me to vent, to chat, or to share.
