Digital marketing involves a multitude of tasks such as creating ads, newsletter, writing blogs, SEO, email marketing, managing social media profiles and a lot more. Our friends at Creometric specialize in digital marketing and know exactly how to take your online game to the next level. With a variety of clients from the service as well as the product sector, handling workload can sometimes get stressful.
Excess stress can lead to anxiety, depression and long term emotional disorders, definitely, the last thing you or your employees want to experience. That’s why we had Shwetha Pinto, our VP for Human Resources, conduct a training session on time and stress management for the employees at Creometric. Stress, eloquently defined by her, is a person’s response to pressure and ineffective time management creates most of the unnecessary stress at work. This leads to a lot of important work piling up till it becomes urgent leaving us with little time to get it done.
The session started with an interactive game, where employees had to form a circle. The goal was to pass around cups filled with different levels of water as the music played. This easy task became challenging with the condition that the water couldn’t be spilt. When the music stopped, people holding a cup left the circle and his/her cup was added to the mix. More cups and fewer people resulted in people handling around 3 cups at a time, creating chaos with some spilling water. Participants were also pressured into working faster.
Later, Shwetha revealed that the cups represent clients and the water was the amount of work involved. Extra cups represented any extra work sent their way and the constant badgering to do it faster represented the managers. She explained how a lack of planning and work prioritization can lead to a lot of work pending at the eleventh hour. This creates unnecessary stress which results in work that is of 70% quality.
To combat this, she gave us a tool straight out of Stephen Covey’s book ‘7 Habits of Highly Successful People’ designed to help with time management. It involved dividing work into 4 quadrants based on importance and urgency.
The first quadrant is the quadrant of Urgency which consists of tasks that are important and urgent such as projects that have a deadline of today. Spending too much time in this quadrant leads to excess stress and lower quality work. Additionally, the team has to do extra work to get the project done which in turn passes the stress on. Another effect of being in this quadrant is that there could be a need for urgent changes or improvements due to the lower quality of work produced. While it seems important, the work was avoidable and thus falls in the quadrant of Deception. This consists of work that is not important but very urgent. Orbiting between the quadrants of urgency and deception causes a lot of stress and failure to recognize this can make it a repetitive cycle. The best way to manage your time is to spend as much time possible in the quadrant of Quality which includes important tasks that are not urgent. Working here can help avoid mistakes and allows you to create high-quality work that your clients will love. This will leave you satisfied rather than worried over unnecessary stress.
The session ended with Shwetha answering questions and giving tips on time management with real-time issues that would prove to be useful. This session left the ‘Creosters’ with a certain sense of passion to work smarter and not just harder anymore.
If you wish to read more about the work-life of the companies under Nordic Intent, then check out this time when the co-founders along with a few managers actually attacked the HR department!