If you are a WordPress fanboy or simply want to learn more about the software that powers nearly one-half of the world’s websites, then attending WordCamp is a good place to start. The event is online this year and you can attend for free.
To celebrate this wonderful event, I have shared my thoughts on maximizing your online experience, and you can read the article here.
Traditionally, when I think of volunteering, two general themes come to mind. First, I think about opportunities to physically assist someone or some organization, such as volunteering at a homeless shelter, cleaning up a highway, or staffing an event at your child’s school. Second, I think about local opportunities, such as what groups nearby need my help. These two themes are intertwined, of course. Because, when we think about volunteering, we typically think about volunteering locally through a nonprofit, religious organization, or otherwise.
These are all very noble endeavors. There is no doubt in my mind that these organizations need help.
But sometimes we cannot help. Be it because we, ourselves, are limited in some way that precludes us from helping. Perhaps we have a physical, mental, or economic challenge we are dealing with that distracts or even prevents us from lending a hand. Maybe volunteering in person is just not the right fit for who we are as an individual, or our skillset.
Some people have a lot of money and very little time, so they choose to write “checks” to organizations as a show of support. That’s okay too.
I’m here to say that all of this is perfectly okay.
Philanthropy is not about a benchmark – you give what you can – and it doesn’t matter if you cannot give a lot compared to your neighbor.
But, there’s another way to give, and it’s called digital philanthropy. Instead of volunteering on your feet on the side of the highway or along the sandy shores of beach doing cleanup, you can contribute to something that is also impactful – open source software.
Now you might be thinking that contributing to software is not volunteering and should not be equated to volunteering at a hospital visiting sick children. I’m not here to opine on what is equivalent to what. Draw your own conclusions, if you must and I will not judge you. But open source software, like WordPress, can empower individuals through the freedom and democracy of publishing. That’s a fairly noble cause (I have bias, of course, because that’s where I contribute some of my time.)
The foundation of open source software is the idea that it “belongs to the community” and that the power of community produces something better (when compared to a closed and proprietary system). By drawing on a global community of volunteers to create a software product, it benefits from broader perspectives and skillsets.
If you want to learn more about what open source software is and why it is so important, here are some great introductions, both using Legos (I have two kids who are into Legos, so this is very relevant to me right now.) If Legos are not your thing, go to YouTube and type “open source software” and you’ll find more than a dozen great primers on open source software.
Here’s an article by Google entitled, “Why Open Source” which goes a bit deeper.
And finally, here’s a verbatim excerpt from my employer, Automattic, that sponsors my time spent contributing to the WordPress open source project and community:
We believe in democratizing publishing and the freedoms that come with open source. Supporting this idea is a large community of people collaborating on and contributing to this project. The WordPress community is welcoming and inclusive. Our contributors’ passion drives the success of WordPress which, in turn, helps you reach your goals.
WordPress.org
But now to my actual point (sorry it took so long to get there – but I wanted to catch you up.) Anyone can contribute to open source software, especially WordPress. You do not need to be a software developer! You can be a designer, a user experience expert, an accessibility specialist, a writer, a site creator, a publisher, or a translator. Certainly I’m missing something here, but you get the idea – you don’t need to be a programmer and you don’t need to know programming languages. If you do, good for you! If not, you can still volunteer your time in other ways.
For example, in the WordPress project, we power more than 40-percent of the world’s websites (as of 2021). That’s a lot of websites. To get there, WordPress has been translated into more than 70 languages (90% or more) and another 40+ languages have been completed at least 50-percent or more. Many of the contributors that work on translating WordPress are not programmers, they just happen to know more than one language (usually English plus another language).
So, if you want to become part of one of the largest open source software projects in history, even if you do not have programming skills, you can.
And, if you happen to speak more than one language, there’s a great opportunity awaiting you with WordPress. If you are interested in learning more, check out WordPress.org or send me a message. If you would like to help translate WordPress, there’s a call for contributors right now.
I’ll start out by saying that I’m currently wearing a J.Crew camp shirt and linen shorts. I love much of what I find at J.Crew when it comes to building my work-at-home Florida wardrobe.
But this article is not about my fashionable self. It’s about why J.Crew filed for bankruptcy. How does a popular, storied brand end up in financial distress?
Sure, a pandemic doesn’t help.
Also, the brand had about $1.65 billion dollars in debt. Servicing this level of debt requires a significant amount of positive cash flow – and profits.
But, what I’m about to share is the real driver behind J.Crew’s demise – it’s failed e-commerce logistics.
That’s right, J.Crew failed at e-commerce, and that’s why it had to file for bankruptcy to cancel the debt it could no longer afford to service.
However, if J.Crew doesn’t change it’s e-commerce and logistics strategy, it will simply fail again, post re-organization.
Here’s why:
I placed an order at J.Crew.com for 8 items. The list price J.Crew advertised for the items was $340. After their promotions and discounts, the price was reduced to $54.30. Yes, that’s a discount of 84% or $286. Okay, so things were on clearance and they need to move out last season’s stuff. This makes perfect sense in the fashion world. You sell a percentage of items at full-price, then you start discounting. At the end of the season, you just basically dump what’s left to free up that cash. Even if it is at a loss compared to what the production cost of the merchandise was, that can be okay. E.g., if you spent $10 to manufacture and land in the U.S. for a shirt, but need to clear it out at $6 at the end of the season, in some cases this is okay. $6 is better than no dollars, right?
Here’s where it gets worse… and I’m not even talking about how I qualified for no tax, free shipping, and had a $5 rewards coupon, lowering my purchase price to $49.30 for these 8 items.
And even worse…
J.Crew then canceled an item that was $14.10 because it was determined to be out of stock after I made the purchase. That lowers my amount I paid to $35.20.
J.Crew shipped these 7 items in 6 different UPS packages from all over the country. Yes, that’s right, they sent me six packages for 7 items. All the packages had either one kid’s tank top, or one adult shirt. One package had two items. The sunglasses came in a box (see below) whereas everything else came in a poly envelope. What you’ll see in the photo below are 5 packages. When I took the photo, I had thought that this was everything. A week later, the 6th package arrived (unphotographed).
This type of fulfillment process enables companies that have many stores, to use its stores as fulfillment for online purchases. Essentially, the stores are fulfilling your purchase. So, if you purchase multiple items, but the items are not all available at a single store, multiple stores will ship your products.
This benefits companies that want to sell online that already have stores, by enabling them to avoid keeping a separate physical inventory to fulfill orders. The downside is obviously illustrated by my experience in that I received six packages for seven items.
How much did J.Crew have to pay for shipping six different packages to me? That’s difficult to know for sure because J.Crew likely has negotiated a bulk discount with UPS. Let’s say they paid $2, which is probably low. That would mean they spent $12 in shipping. We’ll need to add in the cost of packaging, though minimal, and the cost of the fulfillment (labor to pull the item, verify, pack and ship). Let’s say that’s 0.25 per package for packaging, plus 0.50 per item for fulfillment. That adds $5.00, so now we are at $17.
Somewhere along the line, J.Crew felt it would be more profitable to go this route versus carrying a separate physical inventory and fulfilling it out of one or more centralized locations.
In my case, J.Crew brought in $35.20 in revenue. What it paid for the items, I don’t know. And what it paid to ship them to me in six packages, I also don’t know… but it was probably at least $17, but possibly much more, perhaps close to mid-20s.
Would it have been better if J.Crew shipped all the clearance items to Amazon to use Amazon fulfillment and have a cool discount J.Crew site on Amazon that uses their fulfillment? Should J.Crew ship all the leftovers to a central place and sell just those online? I think there are many options that would have been better than the logistics it went through to deliver my particular order.
Don’t get me wrong… I love getting seven items from J.Crew for $35. That’s a bargain… but offering those bargains doesn’t see like a good cash flow proposition for the company.
UPDATE:
It’s been about two months since this order and I have placed two additional orders and I am pleased to say that both orders contained at least five items were received in a single package within a week of ordering. This is a massive improvement and I hope that J.Crew has fixed their fulfillment logistics, as I wish that the company succeeds in the long the run!
Recently, I was the benefactor of a handsome NFLShop.com gift card, courtesy of a promotional credit card offer. So while this post may seem a nit-picky, I am using it to illustrate how a powerful brand has decided to go against established e-commerce practices. Is it paying off? We’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, here’s the back story so you can decide whether this is a smart move.
Historically, handling fees have not been charged by e-commerce vendors. One has to look no further than the “big guys” – Amazon, Walmart, Target – to see that these e-commerce stalwarts do not charge a handling fee. In fact, the big guys seldom charge shipping fees, provided you make a minimum purchase amount, typically somewhere between $25 and $50 dollars.
Sure, the big guys can absorb the costs. Making it up by volume, as they say. They have enormous buying power and therefore can offer very low prices. Even on items that have extremely low margins or high shipping costs (due to weight and/or size).
In fact, the only vendors left that charge handling or processing fees tend to be the ticket sales vendors such as StubHub and Ticketmaster. Consumers have no choice but to purchase tickets from these platforms, so they are forced to pay these extra fees.
But let’s get back to NFL jerseys for now. The actual cost of manufacturing a jersey is under $20, typically done overseas in a place like China. The vendor then has to pay expensive licensing fees to the league which are eye-popping on a per unit basis – several dozen dollars. From there, they then wholesale the jerseys to vendors (at a 100% markup) and then the vendors sell them to the consumer at 100% markup. That’s how a $20 jersey becomes $350. Don’t forget tax, too.
Start eliminating steps along the way by manufacturing jerseys and selling directly to consumers, and the vendors can keep the prices the same, but double profits.
Simply put, the jersey market is extremely profitable. There are downsides too, such as manufacturing too many jerseys of a player who then retires, gets injured, is traded, etc… those jerseys become difficult to sell. Manufacturers have become very smart though, printing jerseys on-demand or “shells” where they can then apply the name and number locally once ordered. This costs a bit more to do, but limits production waste.
So, needless to say, when I recently went to NFLshop.com use my gift cards, I was surprised that after purchasing two jerseys for about $250 (these were not the game jerseys, but a cheap quality version), I was not only charged $4.99 for standard shipping, but also $1.99 for “handling”. Now, again, I’m not going to complain. Not only did I have gift cards, but I also had a coupon code. So I’m quite happy with my purchase, and the price I paid compared to the Buccaneer’s stadium shop (which I get a 15% discount at as a season ticket holder), was still better. I’m simply perplexed that these were two line items on such a high-margin sale. I probably would not even be here writing this article had the e-commerce site simply rolled the handling charge into the shipping charge and just charged me more for shipping. Charge me $6.99 and make an extra penny while you’re at it. I would not have known the difference.
So I decided to tweet the NFLshop.com to see what would happen.
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsOf course @OfficialNFLShop charges a $1.99 processing fee on top of tax and shipping and high margin jerseys. LOL. Had a gift card, so I cannot really complain. Just a poor e-commerce practice that is at the bottom of the customer-friendly list.
— Dan Soschin (@Dan_Soschin) August 12, 2020
And I got a good, prompt response:
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsWe are sorry about that. We ask that you please DM us your order number.
— Official NFL Shop (@OfficialNFLShop) August 12, 2020
So I DM’d them my order number and got this response very quickly:
Thank you for that. Our apologies. Upon review of your order we see you weren’t charged the processing fee. Can we assist you with anything else?
This surprised me, so I took a look at my order confirmation email which shows the fee:
And then logged into my account on the NFLshop.com to review the order invoice (yes, I told you I had a lot of gift cards and a coupon – I’m not complaining about the price, just the practice and customer experience):
And viola, interestingly they combined the charge post-haste. That’s extremely odd. I cannot recall ever seeing a vendor do that.
So for fun, I’ve loaded up my cart with two more jerseys, and here’s a screenshot of my cart. Notice the $1.99 handling charge. The “i” icon, when clicked, shows this text: “Handling Fee is applied to your order to help cover the fulfillment costs of storage and packaging.” in a pop-up bubble. Also note, that the site is running a free shipping promotion, but in fine print excludes the jerseys.
So, I replied to the DM tweet thread and explained that I was, in fact, charged the fee and would be happy to show them the screenshots (which I then included.) The next day I received this note:
We see, and we are so sorry about this issue. Normally, there is a flat rate incurred for shipping & handling. We greatly appreciate you bringing this to our attention, and we will escalate this feedback to the appropriate department for further review.
Again, I wasn’t demanding a refund or being unruly, and I give props to their team for timely replies. I think they should have simply refunded the $1.99 fee, plus the shipping and handling since I took the time to point this out. Nonetheless, I’m moving on.
Ultimately, this whole experience seems a bit shady and easily avoidable. If they need this extra $1.99 on top of their high margin items, they should roll it into shipping. But I think you can win a lot of favor among fans and customers by implementing more consumer-friendly e-commerce practices. When the major e-commerce experience is a certain way thanks to the big guys, other vendors need to hop on that bandwagon or risk alienating customers further.
While unrelated to the shipping and handling experience I wrote about above, I’d like to share another experience worthy of a few moments. The jersey I ordered in the above post in August, five months ago, still has not arrived. When ordered, I was told it would be shipping in September. Obviously, COVID messes up things, and their off-shore supply chain was likely affected. A couple of months ago they sent me an email apologizing for the delay assuring me that it would be express shipped to me as soon as it was state-side in December, and that should be no later than 12/17. I was offered the opportunity to cancel, but I did not. Then, two weeks ago, I received a call from them offering me a $50 refund or a gift card. Since I paid via gift card, I simply requested the gift card.
Both of these gestures were nice, given the situation, and I appreciated them. I used the new gift card, and a black Friday sale, to purchase a jersey that was in stock. To my surprise, it arrived two days later. That obviously exceeded my expectations. The quality of the jersey however, did not. I’ll save that for another day.
If you don’t know what a VPN is, then this article is for you. In essence, a VPN makes your web traffic (browsing/surfing) more anonymous than it likely is right now. This can protect your privacy considerably. In fact, most cybersecurity professionals recommend that you browse the internet using a VPN. A VPN will not protect you from phishing or malware, but it is another tool in your chest for being tech-smart.
Why do you need all these things anyway? Like VPNs, firewalls, anti-virus software, etc? Well, they make using a computer safe. Protecting you and your family from privacy violations, financial fraud and identity theft.
Just like buying a car… you can buy a car for $10,000 new. But it might not have sat-nav, lane assist, collision warnings, auto-pilot, roadside assistance, etc. These are all features that make driving your car safer. But you have to pay for them currently. Over time, auto safety features have become standard – airbags, anti-lock brakes, seat belts, etc.
And so too, over time will cyber security features. Until then, you need a VPN.
Bram Jansen, a cybersecurity expert at VPNalert.com, wrote a fantastic and very thorough article on VPNs and state-sponsored data snooping. It’s a great read and my recommended article for the week. It certainly raised my eyebrows and I learned a lot.
Last week I shared an article about deleting the Facebook application from my beloved iPhone 7. I definitely experienced some withdrawal symptoms ranging from FOMO (fear of missing out) to a big empty void of free time. The latter was a boon after the FOMO wore off (took only a few days). Suddenly I felt human again – asking people in person about how their day was, what they did in school… making eye contact with people… Okay, I jest a little, but there’s a lot of reality grounded in that statement. Being on Facebook, as I’ve stated before can be very filtered from reality.
So why am I keeping my account and why am I not part of the #DeleteFacebook movement?
It’s simple.
Facebook is here to stay. It has become a part of our lives. Be it through photo sharing with distant friends and relatives, celebrating achievements like births and new jobs, or sharing in grief when hard times hit. We need Facebook because it has become a part of our vernacular and routine. Maybe it won’t be “Facebook” in the future, but rather, a different service… as Facebook displaced MySpace who displaced Friendster and so on. But we have a need for Facebook-like service in our lives. My overture to deleting the app is a personal one about slowing down and focusing on what I feel is important. I do feel there is value in Facebook; in connecting the world and creating communities, movements and facilitating free speech.
And on a side note, I really do love Facebook. After all, much of my career is based upon helping brands evangelize their value and connect with consumers. I do this really well because I have a great tool in helping these brands, Facebook.
So, you won’t find me deleting my Facebook account any time soon.
I work in marketing. In fact, I’ve made a great career out of it – helping organizations evangelize their products and services in a honest and transparent manner. Part of my success is predicated on social media, and specifically, Facebook. In prior roles, I was a very large Facebook advertiser, spending millions per year on ads and content to reach potential customers.
Don’t get me wrong, I do like Facebook. Love would be too strong of a word. I love my wife and son, not Facebook.
I’ve spent the majority of many speaking engagements and presentations at conferences helping all types of organizations understand how to best use Facebook, engage with their audiences and succeed on the platform.
So why did I delete the Facebook app from my iPhone?
It’s simple… the time I was spending on Facebook was being wasted. Or rather, it was being misdirected. I found that Facebook was entertaining, but when I dug in to it, I was misdirecting my time… I should have been spending that time with my friends, family or personal enrichment.
Facebook provides a filtered view of the universe. I’m not talking about Russian manipulation of your crazy’s uncle’s political views, either. I’m talking about what most people post to their feeds. They post a filtered view of their life – things they want you to see. Mitch Joel wrote one of my favorite articles on the subject, what you see vs. what is happening. You need to read this article because it makes my point – that what people post on Facebook is not reality. It may be true, but it is a filtered view – it’s only the stuff people want you to see – it’s an airbrushed view of themselves. It’s how they want the world to see them.
The end result is that staring at unrealistic filtered views of peoples lives can make you believe they are {insert whatever you want} than you. They are {better, smarter, prettier thinner, richer, cooler, and so on.} That is just not healthy. You are you and you should strive to be the best you you can be each day. (I know I used “you” five times in the prior sentence, but it helped me make a point.) But, you should not fall to false comparisons of filtered lives. Instead of being inspired, you can become envious or jealous.
Then I became somewhat voyeuristic. Not in a creepy way… in a waste-of-time way. I spent time looking at what happened to people I used to be acquainted with… past classmates and co-workers. I spent time looking at other people’s photos and reading their posts. I got angry when I read their opinions if I disagreed with them, I felt myself being judgmental.
So I gave it up. I deleted the Facebook app and I haven’t really looked back. I still log on to Facebook to catch up with family and friends that I don’t normally get to see, but I spend a lot less time going down those destructive rabbit holes of filtered realities. I now spend my time interacting with people, spending time with my family and friends, having real conversations and working on personal enrichment. I have focused my energy on positive things. Not comparisons.
Big data has been around as long as data.
Think about it for a minute.
When man built the first computing machines that produced output, we had to invent some way to store the output. Magnetic tape was an early solution and as our data appetite grew, so did our innovation into to shrinking the footprint of our data hoarding ways. Take this iconic computing image, for example:
Yes, that’s right, 5 MB. As in your Apple Watch has 3,200 times more memory and it fits on your wrist. But this is not my point. My point is that we’ve been collecting a lot of data output over the years. In 2010, Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt stated that earthlings create as much data every two days as we had created cumulatively from the beginning of time up until 2003. And that has only accelerated in the decade since Schmidt made that statement.
And we’re doing some amazing things with that data. Netflix figured out how to produce television that people would watch; Target knows to send you emails and coupons for child berthing before you know you’re pregnant; and Facebook shows your mom ads for products they know she’ll buy.
However, for every great big data success story, there is a heaping pile of failures. Some failures are projects that cost a lot of time and money and produce no results… let’s set those aside and instead focus on an example of how big data can steer you wrong.
Let’s look at Busch Gardens in Tampa, Florida. My family has season passes to the park as it’s only 20 minutes from our home in Tampa and we have a four-year-old boy. We typically go on Sunday mornings for a few hours, especially off peak weekends. We’ve mastered avoiding crowds. But, I’m probably not a good customer and it’s because of big data. Actually, I don’t particularly like Busch Gardens or think they do a good job; but my son has fun for a couple hours, and that’s priceless. I get 10,000 steps by noon, so it works for me. You see, I bring my own food and drink. The only things I buy each visit are a refill of my season pass holder’s Icee cup (99 cents) and a refill of my season pass holder’s popcorn bin (99 cents). I don’t buy souvenirs or play the midway games. That’s it. I bring my own snacks and drinks for two reasons:
But what is missing here is that Busch might be making decisions based on park traffic flow and behavioral data sets. They are not factoring in the human element – customer service and satisfaction. I think the elasticity of a park goer’s return is pretty high – in that it would take a lot for a pass holder to not return again; after all, they’ve already paid the fee. Even the single day goers have paid the fee already. Busch’s customer service is really failing here. To protect margin, they are serving crappy food, if any at all. In the end, they annoy a few customers and lose a few bucks, so it’s no big deal. And the output the analysts see is improved margin. Sure, they can see comments on Facebook, etc… but until there’s really a concerted effort, I don’t see Busch making progress when profits are up. When profits go down, if they rely too heavily on the data, it will compound the decline. So they are damned in both situations until they take a more customer-centric approach.
My solution for Busch is to actually farm out food operations to local eateries that are popular in Tampa, enabling them to open stands at Busch, mark up their food to theme-park levels, and then Busch gets a cut. Busch can eliminate a lot of headcount and operational headaches while support local business. For example, Wrights Gourmet, PDQ, Ichicoro, Holy Hog, etc… I think they’d sell more food with a lot less effort – and make customers much happier.
As a leader of a marketing organization, I am in a constant state of juggling competing priorities. My clients each believe their priorities are the most important, and thus should be completed first. In reality, that is almost never the case. In fact, many times their priorities are the least important. It’s my job as an executive to understand the goals of the organization and then translate those into priorities. I must rank the projects in order of how they will help the organization achieve its goals. At the same time, I have to balance those priorities against team retention and my career. These often do not correlate evenly. In other words, if I have a stakeholder in a department request a project that I know adds little if any, value to the organization, I also have to understand the pros and cons of completing the project. If I complete the project as requested (sooner than it really needs to be completed), I might win favor with that leader and department. Doing so could advance my standing and that of my team. Conversely, delaying the project beyond the leader’s timeline (though it might be justified), could hinder my advancement and that of my team.
Take a team of 30 in an organization of about 2,000. There can be many concurrent projects – well over 100 marketing projects. Each project could have one task or hundreds, but usually somewhere in between. In a large recent project, whereby I wanted to overhaul a web property, my team did our standard research, due diligence, collaboration with stakeholders, and cursory brainstorming, to yield about 25 enhancements. Thus we had our project, “Web Refresh” and about 25 sub-projects or tasks. We needed to figure out how to order the 25 tasks so that we could deliver the most value first. We leveraged the 9-Square Prioritization Matrix. If I wanted to be cute, we could call this the Soschin Priority Matrix and each item in the matrix would be given an SPF (Soschin Priority Factor) to determine its ranking on your to-do list. Here’s how it works:
Your first time running tasks through the matrix, you are going to end up with a lot of sixes. This is a common occurrence. It happens because as project planners and managers, we don’t want to over or underestimate tasks. We’re also not sure about a lot at this point in the planning process.
If you end up with mostly sixes… or put a different way, if more than 20% of your tasks are sixes, you have too many… then here is what you should do. First, stop and spend more time on each task. The importance of accurately planning a project now – before you begin – will greatly impact your ability to deliver timely results. Spend some more time discussing, exploring, and evaluating these “sixes” and endeavor to move them in one direction or the other. Make them higher or lower, but get them out of priority purgatory.
So that’s it… that’s how you translate a complicated set of tasks into an organized and methodical plan of attack. It’s a great way to communicate with your project team as well. Over time, by completing this exercise, your team should get more accurate at agreeing on ROI and LOE. I have found that when I introduce this in projects to new team members, folks tend to group tasks into more narrow scores, such as lots of medium LOEs and ROIs and therefore a lot of SPF 6’s. That’s okay, but over time you should be able to spread the tasks out over the matrix. There’s no formula or bell curve for doing so – it just depends on the project. Not everything can be a high priority – you have to pick. Hopefully, this methodology will empower you to do just that.
Lately, I’ve been working on a number of projects to help a large employer improve their employee engagement and retention. I could likely write a book about such a topic – and of course there are many books, blogs, and companies devoted to the art and science of employee engagement and retention. Earlier this week I was having a conversation with a fellow senior executive on this topic and how I was able to build a team from 12 marketers to 29 in less than four years while keeping voluntary attrition to about 1.5 headcount per year. Voluntary turnover averages between 10 and 15-percent across all industries with nonprofits typically suffering a bit more. Marketers, especially millennials early in their career, have much shorter job tenure, on average. Jerry Bernhart has published some wonderful research on this topic that shows millennial marketers tend to stay at their jobs for less than two years. Based upon that statistic, and considering the demographics of the 29-person team (early 20s to early 60s), I should be seeing 5-10 employees leaving per year, voluntarily. With the job market fairly strong (low unemployment, lots of open positions), employees with strong marketing skills can be easily poached.
So why is my employee retention higher than any other department?
Well, that’s a bit loaded and self-serving. I could could profess that I’m a great leader and well-liked. And while this may very well be the case, there are other factors at play here – many within my control. Let’s look at 12 factors that can influence employee retention (in no particular order):
Sure there are many others, but these 12 stand out to me as significant factors for employee retention.
For the purpose of this discussion, I want to look “work load” and introduce a leadership concept called “The 120 Rule”.
I believe in empowering employees to optimize their workload. To do so, I make it very clear what the priorities are for the organization and how that translates into prioritizing marketing projects. From there, employees should be able to take a high-level view of their projects and then sort them according to these priorities. The result should be a linear list. In a busy in-demand shared services organization, such as the one that I run, there are many competing priorities. I have multiple stakeholder clients that all believe their project is the most important. It is my job as at the head of marketing to interpret and translate these requests based upon research, multiple points of input, and my judgment; and then help stakeholders calibrate their expectations.
Here’s where the 120 Rule comes into play. I coach my team that it is always good to have 120 things to do, but only time for 100. If this is their reality, then essentially, they are always optimizing out 20-percent of the projects that add the least amount of value to the organization. (Okay math nerds, I get it that 20/120 is not 20% but rather 17%, but I don’t want to call this the 17-percent rule.) Giving staff the authority to make those decisions (prioritization of tasks) is important. Marketers really like to own their task list. Providing ownership delegation, so long as it generally aligns with the strategic priorities of the organization, empowers staff to take control of their work. Within a given week, staff can adjust their work-stream to complete the easy projects first, the fun project first, the hard projects first, or any permutation thereof. The point is, so long as deadlines are being met, why should I care as the leader what someone works on first, second, or last? Again, so long as the priorities are being met at the high level, the path that an employee takes to get there doesn’t matter to me. There will be times that as the senior executive, I will have to short circuit the priorities list or require a fire drill. But, if I maintain order and a well-organized strategic plan, then the team will be more receptive and agile for accommodating changes to priorities or fire drills. Good marketers do this well and don’t let these changes interfere with their success.
Additionally, I paint the opposite picture for my staff. What if you only had 80 things to do but time for 100? Being idle for long periods of time shows lack of value/ROI of a marketer. The result is usually a layoff. A marketer should never be idle. And a marketer should always know what they are supposed to be working on and how that adds value to the organization
So, bringing this all together… I can say that one strong factor in the team’s low turnover, is that we have successfully embraced the 120 Rule. Everyone knows what the top priorities are, and the order in which projects should be completed. They know that when they get to a milestone or cross road, to ask for a little bit of additional direction. They also know that they have the authority to set their schedule and task list so long as it meets the clearly identified deliverable dates.
Another by-product of the 120 Rule is that if you consistently see a project sit in the optimized-out 20-percent, and typically that means for longer than a year, then it’s time to reexamine why that project is on the last and whether it should be retired altogether. Clearly it’s not a priority and it won’t add much in the way of value. It it’s valuable, it would be in the bottom 20.
Are you optimizing your work stream? Try the 120 Rule to improve employee satisfaction and retention. It’s okay to ignore 20-percent of your work if you’re always working on the most important stuff.
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