How to break up bottlenecks in your marketing team

It’s a scary prospect, losing access to all of your logins and account details, your team’s ways of doing things, and the location of your most important files. However, it’s something that happens far too often. This is usually down to a few reasons: the main one being that one person is left in charge of these things, and if (or when!) they leave the team, you end up scuppered. It can also be because you’re not using secure or backed up storage for them. We’ve unfortunately seen our charity clients experience this many times, so we decided to take a look at some ways you can overcome this very real risk and protect your team from the nightmare of having to get it all back again.

TLDR: To make your life – and that of your team – so much easier, use processes and technologies to ensure your important information and accounts don’t get lost; also, use more than one person as your key knowledge holder!

2 is better than 1 (and the more, the merrier!)

This is one of the most important aspects of not creating blockers within your team. If only one person has access to things such as passwords, account details, processes, files and other important stuff, what happens when they’re no longer there? When that person leaves the team, is off sick, or changes teams/roles, you’ll be left trying to get hold of them (which could be inappropriate, depending on the situation) or frantically resetting everything to be able to gain access to these things.

A few famous people have been quoted about knowledge sharing:

The more people who know about things like log-ins, for example, and where to find them, the easier it’ll be in the long run. It’s the same for important files, such as logos, font files and your brand guidelines document. Having 2-3 people in charge of maintaining and updating this knowledge is paramount to be able to retain it. The ‘one person as a “font of all knowledge”’ approach is not only lazy, it puts a lot of pressure on one person, which isn’t fair to them. It also puts all your precious info at risk.

Keep things central

Rather than filling a text document with all your important information and processes – where no-one will read it and it’ll inevitably get lost within your file system – make sure it’s kept front and centre within some kind of central knowledge software. This could be within the productivity software your team uses (think Teams, Notion, Asana etc). Appoint at least 2 people to maintain and be responsible for this information, so that as stated before, you don’t lose it when someone’s not in the office.

Put a link to this information at a high level of your productivity software (the home page is a good spot), so it’s easily accessible for everyone. We also highly recommend taking new starters through these processes and documents in their induction period, as well as reviewing it with the team on a quarterly basis to ensure everything remains up to date.

Design and maintain a brand guidelines document

Have you got a brand guidelines document in place yet? If not, do so now! This is one of your most important documents, as it should not only describe what the brand is and the ethos of it/your company, it should demonstrate things such as logos, fonts and colours that members of your team may need to use when creating content, and even the brand’s tone of voice. This is the ‘Bible’ for your brand. Keep it up to date and easily available to anyone who might need to use it, or you may find that your content output doesn’t match up.

It’s also a good idea to appoint a brand ambassador or guardian (or two) in each team – that have received some training on how and when to implement it – so they can keep track of what’s being used for anything creative.

Create templates

For things such as creating content, you can not only make people’s lives easier, but maintain continuity and cohesion through designing templates they can use. That way, you know that (as long as they’re being followed correctly), all of your content will keep to a specific look and feel.

It’s a good idea to give anyone that’s likely to be creating content for your team, brand or company some training in how to use these templates and to highlight the importance of why they must do so. If people aren’t aware of templates or don’t know how they should be implemented, they most likely won’t use them. Keeping them in an easy to find place and providing guidance for users will ensure they do.

Use 👏 a 👏 password 👏 manager!

A password manager is like a digital lock box for all of your login details and passwords. Forget having little scraps of paper all over your desk or a very insecure word editor document holding such vital information: these handy apps store your most important details in a secure way that’s accessible from all of your devices and for multiple users.

They’re also good for more than just password storage: password managers can hold onto very valuable stuff, including router and internet information, authorisation keys, software licences and more. You can generate 2-factor authentication codes with them. They’ll also provide secure password suggestions so you’re not just using ‘password1’ and changing the digit all the time. Not to mention, you can share these things with the members of your team, all with levels of necessity, so the right people have access to the correct info at any one time.

Don’t put a process’ responsibility all on one person

In teams, it’s tempting to designate one person as being in charge of a specific task, such as training others to use a piece of software or upload content to the website. However, it’s actually quite short sighted to do so. As we keep mentioning, they could quite possibly leave or not be available due to illness; it’s also a lot of responsibility to leave that person as the only source of truth for that task.

Sure, you can make someone a key person for uploading content to your site, as this will help with continuity of quality when publishing. You should also ensure that others know how to undertake the task, not only to future proof, but to take some pressure off the responsible individual.

Ensure your processes are understood and in use globally

It’s very common to have people say “well, we tried that approach before and it didn’t work.” As a result, nothing changes. This is especially destructive behaviour when it’s coming from a team manager or leader. For new processes to become embedded and take root, it needs promotion from the top down, as well as buy in from below.

Try to engage every member of your team when implementing new processes. If you share how it will benefit them, and the risks and/or damage the current processes are causing, it creates empathy in your team, which will in turn help with engagement. You may still get some push back, in which case, state the risks of not doing the things and that they need to get on board – if the person trying to bring about this change isn’t a manager, try onboarding a team lead first, then they’ll have your back if others aren’t being as helpful as they could be.

Conclusion

If this is something your team has been struggling with for a while, it’s worth running through your current processes and information storage to see where there are any weak points that you can patch up as a quick win. You can then perform a wider overhaul with the team at a later date. Don’t leave it too long, though, as it’s not worth the risk of losing all your important knowledge and info.

We’re going to be continuing along the theme of improving your admin processes over the next few blog posts in a series that’ll go into a bit more depth on password management, who’s responsible for managing your website domain, and other topics. Keep an eye out for the next instalment.