Christopher is the co-founder, head strategist and CEO of The Go! Agency, a full-service digital marketing agency.
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What do you do when the old way of doing business isn’t working anymore? How do you know when small adjustments to the way you and your team work will suffice or when sweeping changes are needed? Every situation is different, so I can only speak from my point of view, but when I recently realized the way my agency worked needed a shake-up, I went big.
I restructured processes for myself, my team and even my clients. Here’s why: Previously, everybody had a segmented role — one account manager handled their assigned clients, the other account managers handled their’s and the creative department was on a different track entirely. This worked fine in our previous environment in a physical office space, but due to the pandemic, the agency went fully remote in March of 2020 (and will continue to be for the foreseeable future). The separation was dividing more than our tasks. It was tearing the team apart.
For reasons yet to be determined, sending an instant message or requesting a few minutes for a video call seems like claiming a major portion of your co-workers’ time. In reality, it’s probably more efficient than physically walking over to somebody’s office, but for a team used to working in the same space, communicating digitally was a major adjustment that never successfully happened. There needed to be a push, a restructuring of protocol, to get the team working as fluidly together as they used to.
This is why I decided to shift to a pod structure, something that by design would increase the team’s communication and allow us to tackle problems rather than getting halted by them.
The Restructuring Process
Previously, each account manager had their own separate clients to work on. They would strategize, assign tasks to creative and handle all aspects of the campaign. Instead of streamlining things, this just put stress on the team and resulted in a severe lack of communication.
Because everyone had individual tasks, they all retreated to their individual bubbles, and processes became more laborious than they needed to be. The answer was to turn the campaigns into projects and create pods that would force collaboration.
Each member of the team has their own strengths. One is a guru when it comes to email marketing, another knows Facebook advertising like the back of their hand, while others really love working on Instagram, Twitter or TikTok. Instead of treating the campaigns like assignments for the team to figure out, I’ve turned them into group projects where each campaign requires each member to form a part of the pod that works on it.
If a campaign needs blog posts, an email newsletter and Facebook advertising, I call in the members of my staff who are the content, design and digital ad experts.
What Problem Does The Pod Structure Solve?
Bottlenecks, especially on the part of the client, were a significant impediment to our campaigns. All work on a campaign essentially came to a dead halt when the client didn’t respond with the immediacy we hoped for, leaving the team stressing. But why should they? The client clearly didn’t view it with a sense of urgency, so why should we? As specialists, we now have the ability to no-sweat navigate around bottlenecks — we don’t freak out, we work it out.
We can’t make clients respond any faster, but by shifting to a pod structure where everybody on the team is familiar with the client and has a stake in the campaign’s success, we have the ability to anticipate the client’s future needs.
Time has been the greatest gift that the pod structure has given us. Now that members of the team are specialists in specific areas, they can focus on what they enjoy and do well, and reduce the amount of bandwidth they spend on tasks they don’t excel at. Because of this, we’ve been granted time to work ahead and start planning campaigns again, rather than feeling crushed by them.
How To Approach Restructuring
One critical piece of advice I’d impart to anyone looking to transition to the pod structure for their own company is this: commit. In the beginning, it won’t feel like you’re increasing productivity at all. Part of my team’s transition was holding individual strategy meetings to map out the future of our clients, and though the meetings were valuable, an additional one- to two-hour meeting every day made us all feel like we were under more pressure and lower on time. But we stuck it out and ripped off the bandage. It’s a drag, but committing to gritting your teeth and getting through the bumpy start will likely be worth it once the pod structure hits its stride.
How can you kick off your pod structure? Here are the first three steps I recommend:
1. Conduct a thorough analysis of your team’s skill sets, especially if there are multiple people who share the same role.
2. Get your clients on board. As most agency owners probably know, clients are often the largest boulder in front of any sweeping changes we try to make to our agencies. But their hesitations about your process aren’t necessarily your problem. As long as the quality of your work doesn’t change, they’ll likely get over any communication changes.
3. Segment your team from your clients. Your team answers to you, not the client. If you’ve been having your staff interface with clients regularly, try and pare that down. Client woes are often the number one reason that employees start to get emotional about their work when, in reality, a client’s temper or bad attitude usually has nothing to do with them.
Restructuring can feel like a hassle — and that’s because it is. But what’s more of a hassle is the grind, day in and day out, of pushing through a system that just isn’t working for you anymore. As the adage goes, nothing worth doing ever comes easy, and I’ve found that true for most things. The process of restructuring may feel like hard work, but the result will pay off.
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