Make & Manage A Marketing Team for High Performance

High Performance Work Practices, Indicators, and Organization Effectiveness

Traditional sources of competitive advantage have been eroded by our vigorous diffusion of technological innovation and increased competition, leaders have sought out new sources of competitive advantage.  One area of competitive advantage is the high performance work practices of a marketing team (or department).  In other words, a competitive advantage is the manner in which a marketing team leader manages its team members and structures its work.  It is an important source of sustained competitive advantage in the high-speed and turbulent times we now live in.

There are three dominating types of measures of high performance: Work Practices, Indicators, and Organization Effectiveness.

Below is a table of these measures.

High Performance Work Practices

High performance work practices (sometimes abbreviated to HPWP) are practices engaged in by high performance marketing teams. Researching high performance teams has revealed that a variety of different practice positively relates to marketing teams or any organizations outcome.  These practices can be grouped into the following blocks.

◘ Using marketing and other information to make decisions and involving employees in decisions
◘ Having advanced technical systems and processes in place
◘ Design work to motivate and empower employees
◘ Develop and train employees
◘ Engage in rigorous recruitment & selection of team members
◘ Having an up to date compensation program or system

Many businesses mistakenly assume that all of the practices are expensive and/ or difficult to establish. While some of these high performance work practices will help you maximize your potential and profit more quickly depending on your operating context, they are all High Performance Work Practices and many of them can be effectively designed and implemented within your business’ budget.

Some examples of High Performance Work Practices:

• Realistic Job Previews (RJPs).
• Using psychometric and validated employee selection tools.
• An employee onboarding strategy.
• A continuous mentoring and leadership development strategy.
• Regular performance appraisals.
• In-house Knowledge Management Systems.
• Calibrated job classification and compensation systems.
• In-house problem-solving and work-improvement groups/ teams.
• Employee Suggestion or Innovation Programs.
• Flexible job assignments.
• Current and flexible job descriptions and job specifications.
• Structured team briefings and debriefings at every level within the marketing department.
• Employee Reward and Award Programs.
• Competence or performance-based pay.
• Open communication.

Garman and colleagues (2011) identified the following HPWPs, organized into subsystems.  This was not a marketing team, but the result can be applied to any marketing team or department.

Subsystem #1: Engaging Staff. The four practices in this organizational engagement subsystem share a common theme of ensuring employees’ awareness of and personal stake in the organization’s vision and its current level of success in pursuing that vision.

Subsystem #2: Acquiring and Developing Talent. The four practices in this subsystem focus on building the quality of the organization’s workforce through attention to attracting, selecting, and developing staff.

Subsystem #3: Empowering the Frontline. These practices most directly affect the ability and motivation of frontline staff, team members in particular, to influence the quality their team provides.

Subsystem #4: Aligning Leaders. These practices influence the capabilities of the organization’s leadership in running and evolving the organization as a whole.

Garman AN, McAlearney AS, Harrison MI, et al. High-performance work systems in health care management, part 1: development of an evidence-informed model. Health Care Manage Rev 2011 Jul-Sep;36(3):201-13. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21646880.

Major U.S. Federal Laws and Regulations

It is important to consider Federal Laws and Regulations when developing a marketing team or marketing department. The United States has mandates and regulations for many workplace activities. They do this for about 10 million employers and 125 million workers. (https://www.dol.gov/general/aboutdol/majorlaws)

Here is a quick list of them:1963 Equal Pay Act
1964 Civil Rights Act, Title VII (amended in 1972)
1967 Age Discrimination in Employment Act
1973 Vocational Rehabilitation Act
1974 Privacy Act
1978 Mandatory Retirement Act
1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act
1988 Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act
1990 Americans with Disabilities Act
1991 Civil Rights Act of 1991
1993 Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993
1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996
2004 FairPay Overtime Initiative

High Performance Indicators

High Performance Work Practices influence a marketing team’s effectiveness by promoting positive affective, cognitive, and behavioral states in team members. Stated differently, the work practices are transformed into effectiveness through these intermediate process. An example, a team leader can assess these high performance indicators to determine whether the work practices are having their wanted result. Plus occasionally, these indicators may be increased directly to improve effectiveness, without changing the work practice,

Here are high performance indicators (sometimes abbreviated to HPI) including the following:

• Affective indicators are such things as positive climate and culture, commitment, motivation, and trust.
• Cognitive indicators may include clear expectations, empowerment, feelings of accountability and involvement, and increased learning.
• Behavioral indicators may include clear communication, flexibility, high effort and skill level, innovative behavior, and, of course, teamwork.

High performance indicators may seem intangible and there is a constant pressure to achieve performance targets, to reach higher performance levels, and to ensure that individual’s work supports and furthers the marketing teams goals. The key question to ask is, “How well is each team member applying his or her current skills, and to what extent is he or she achieving the outcomes desired?” The answer has traditionally been found in the performance evaluation process, where team leaders (managers) look for hard data to tell how well an employee has performed his or her job.

What is often missing from this evaluation is the part about making sure that the individual is doing the right thing. A team may have dedicated team members. If they are not working on objectives that advance the marketing team’s goal(s), you have wasted time and usually money. In short, Affective, Cognitive, and Behavioral are important in any examination of a marketing team, but they still fall second to working toward the marketing team’s goal.

Organization Effectiveness

Operational effectiveness is one of the building blocks of high performance in any marketing team or marketing department. Measures of the team’s effectiveness represent the final (or bottom line) indicators of high performance. Effectiveness can be assessed in three metrics.

• Financial metrics may include, return on investment, market share, stock prices, profit, and sales after the project is completed.
• Reputation metrics may include, polls and other public judgments about which companies are the best to work for, which companies are the best investors, and which companies are the most admired.
• Team member or Personnel metrics may include, job satisfaction and turnover levels.

The financial metric is perhaps the most obvious of the three metrics. Personnel metrics may be put together with the Reputation metrics because they are linked in how they affect the public view of a company. With today’s massive communication outpour, executives know the importance of their companies’ reputations. Firms with strong positive reputations attract better people. They are perceived as providing more value. The market believes that such companies will deliver sustained earnings and future growth. They have higher price-earnings multiples and market values and lower costs of capital. Moreover, in an economy where most of the market value comes from hard-to-assess intangible assets such as brand equity, intellectual capital, and goodwill, organizations are especially vulnerable to anything that damages their reputations.

Three things determine the extent to which a company is exposed to reputational risk. The first is whether its reputation surpasses its true character. The second is how much external beliefs and expectations change, which can widen or narrow this gap. The third is the quality of internal coordination, which also can affect the gap.  Because of this, executives are examining the effectiveness of their marketing team or department in the parameters set forth in a reputation and personnel metric.

Make & Manage A Marketing Team for High Performance

To make and manage a marketing team for high-performance High Performance Work Practices, Indicators, and Organization Effectiveness must be the controlling factors in developing a strategy. The current national and international scene is facing hard and even immoral forms of competition. The one that stands out and greatly affects any company is of economic nature. Given this national and international situation, we are now living in a time of “rationalization of costs.” Organizations still continue to nobly and effectively perform their missions, in spite of budget cuts. To accomplish this without an error, marketing teams must have the ability to adapt to reality and create mechanisms that help give a competitive edge. One of those mechanisms can be finding indicators that can assess the organization’s effectiveness in a strategic way. By planning in the areas of High Performance Work Practices, Indicators, and Organization Effectiveness, and to verify if the proposed objectives of the organization are being met, a marketing team can increase performance while increasing effectiveness and self-awareness.

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