Only a few steps from your current expertise to valuable insights

30th August 2023 - Reading time: 4 min

You are an expert in your role. Through your work, courses, customers and colleagues you accumulate unique insights rarely found outside of your domain. This experience streamlines your daily tasks but doesn't reduce the workload. With seniority you'll encounter more intricate and demanding responsibilities. Thus, it's important to not only simplify repetitive workload but also understand abstract tasks and make them concrete.

Let's explore how you can reduce your workload and amplify the value and comprehension of your work utilizing steps you might already unknowingly implement.

Identify energy drains

Our primary objective is to pinpoint a specific task for the upcoming sections. Take a few minutes to review your calendar from the past week or month. Write down a list of concrete actions you took either individually or in collaboration with your team. For meetings, include preparatory work and follow up actions.

For each action, assess the effort related to its value. This isn't about evaluating your work but zeroing in on what could directly influence and benefit you. Rate the tasks by the following questions and isolate one that you spend time on, perform frequently or that drains your energy:

• Is it a need or nice to have - can it be skipped?
• How much time did I spend on it?
• How often did I do it last week?
• Do I enjoy doing it?

Here are two examples of scenarios we have encountered with our customers that we will refer to in the following sections.

Scenario 1

Working with marketing managers, we've observed a recurring theme. They launch campaigns aiming to amplify engagement and enhance brand visibility. Yet, while they have tools for email marketing, social media, and more, there's a disconnect. They want to know the overall value they're getting from their combined efforts. But with data spread across different platforms, piecing together this holistic understanding becomes a challenge. The main issue isn't the tools but bridging the insights they offer to grasp the full impact of their initiatives. Gathering this information is a costly recurring process.

Scenario 2

With C-executives, we've identified a common obstacle. They aim to craft a unified narrative around business performance through updates received from multiple departments. Often, these updates arrive in various formats, including Excel files. The ambition is clear: take this information, turn it into actionable insights, and present a coherent report to the board. However, with diverse data sources and the time-consuming nature of integration, the primary goal shifts from interpretation to mere organization. The real challenge? Navigating the vast array of updates efficiently and shaping them into a compelling and insightful story for decision-making.

Delivered value and hindsight

In order to streamline or automate our task the first step is to understand why it needs to be done and our expected outcome.

Scenario 1

Starting with the challenge of fragmented insights across multiple platforms, marketing managers often found themselves combing through various tools to gather information on reach, engagement rates, and ad spend. The real value of collating this data wasn't just in the numbers but in understanding the holistic performance of their campaigns. Recognizing this need, we collaborated with them, drawing connections between data points across tools. Our solution streamlined this process, merging data from different sources, allowing the managers to instantly gauge the full picture of their marketing strategies' impact without getting bogged down in manual data compilation.

Scenario 2

Navigating the vast array of departmental updates was no minor feat for C-executives. Their ambition to present a clear, cohesive narrative on business performance to the board often gets mired in the logistics of consolidating diverse datasets, especially those in varying formats like Excel files. Understanding this complexity, we collaborated to simplify the integration of these data sources. Our tailored solution seamlessly synthesized these updates into a clear and compelling report, ensuring that the manager's focus remained on strategic decision-making. As a result, the company saw significant savings in time and resources, directly impacting the bottom line.

Next steps

Evaluating the impact of your work provides invaluable insights. By understanding your current operations in contrast to its outcome, you can refine processes to achieve increased efficiency and effectiveness. Once you've begun this exploration, consider delving into other significant yet infrequent tasks, as highlighted in our blog post about Board Reports. Broadening your scope, you might also analyze team dynamics or organizational structures, pinpointing areas that might benefit from a more streamlined approach.

At STOIX, our focus is on elevating your processes. We've partnered with marketing departments to optimize ad spend across multiple platforms, supported sales managers in fine-tuning their targets, and collaborated with C-executives to transform overwhelming departmental updates into clear, actionable reports. Let's discuss how we can make a difference in your success journey. Reach out to start the conversation.