A friend is looking for a new role at the moment. He’s lucky enough to be able to pick and choose what he goes for, so I asked “What really attracts you to a job? What puts you off?”. It’s always interesting to know what people are looking for, how to genuinely attract great candidates (or put them off of course).

His response was interesting – “The biggest red flag is when they talk about long hours. Something like ‘This won’t be a 9-5 you know!’. Something like that really worries me”. I pushed a bit further, wondering what it was in particular that worried him.

“It’s a sign that they don’t know what they’re doing. Any manager who know how to do his or her job, should know how to fix processes and automate systems so that the job could be done in normal hours. And I don’t want to work for someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing – it will just frustrate me”.

There’s a lot being written at the moment of how important flexible working is, for work/life balance. And a few companies are even pushing towards 4 days weeks or 4½ day weeks. But that wasn’t the point here – the issue was that, if a manager is consistently asking their team to work 8am-6pm, or longer, it shows that they are winging it – they’re not making the effort to improve productivity, by automating systems and fixing processes, and therefore don’t know how to run a department properly. And who wants to work for somebody like that!?

Of course there are blips – sometimes end-of-quarter can get a bit much. Planning processes often don’t fit into a neat 37 hour week. And if you’re out on the road, you have to do what needs to be done in the time available. But in the general course of things, 37 hours should be enough to do most roles.

Crucially though, if this doesn’t sound like reality for you, remember, it’s not completely up to you to fix it. This is largely the role of a good operational manager – someone who understands the importance of fixing processes so that that painful activity only takes 20 minutes next time, instead of 5 hours. This is a Sisyphean task – hence why it’s called Continuous Improvement – but you need to get started.

I’ve always believed in automating and fixing processes. Sometimes this come from buying tools, sometimes from fixing processes, often a combination of the two. Some of the improvements we’ve made in marketing the last six months include:

1. Using Canva to significantly speed up production of ads. We’ve created core templates so that we’re not asking the design team to repeatedly produce the same thing, and we can create ads quickly in multiple languages.
2. Improve processes around briefs and tickets – like any fast growing company, there’s too much to do. So many great ideas, so little time! For one part of marketing we’ve already moved off JIRA and onto Airtable, fixing lots of associated workflows at the same time, and will likely follow suit for other areas too. It’s improved flow enormously and cut out unnecessary manual steps that caused a lot of pain for various folk.
3. Improve autonomy for regional marketers. This isn’t something a tool can fix – this is about how you collaborate as a team, when you need to ask for permission to do something, when you can approve something yourself and so on. Personally I’ve always believed in “Ask for forgiveness, not permission”, so I strongly encourage everyone to do things, to try things without checking in with five other people first. If, for example, you spot an opportunity to place an ad somewhere, and it’s in budget – go for it!
4. Brand guidelines – again, rather than asking for all work to be checked all the time, by providing the company with brand guidelines, it enables people to create ads and copy themselves – they can do the work themselves to figure out if, for example, they’re using the logo in the right way, without checking in with someone first.
5. WordPress permissions. On the same theme of autonomy and delegation – set permissions for people on your website so that, for different sorts of copy, the right people can make the changes needed as-and-when. NB: these permissions should be very different for the homepage vs. a blog article! But for the latter, any marketer should be able to write, publish and share a blog on their own.

These all sound like quite minor things. But continuous improvement is a long game – lots of small fixes that, one by one, lead to enormous improvements in productivity. We’ve already improved our speed to create agile, relevant ads down from weeks to hours and, hopefully, given the freedom to various marketers to jump on opportunities when they see them. And we’ve certainly made the process of managing expenses much easier – as an employee it’s almost trivial now, and I know there’s far less pain for our finance team too.

So anyway, next time you go for a job and you hear a lighthearted quip like “We like to burn the midnight oil here, that’s alright isn’t it?” – run a mile. It’s not laziness on your part, it’s a sign that your future manager doesn’t quite know how to run a department, and that’s something that will impact your job satisfaction far more than the number of working hours in the day.