According to a Smartsheet report, Automation in the Workplace, workers spend far too much time doing repetitive manual tasks. The study found that:
Over the past few years, the Great Resignation received a lot of attention. Each month millions of people quit their jobs. Many, of course, were in search of a bigger paycheck. But more than half (52%) who quit did so because they wanted more fulfilling work, even if that meant accepting a lower salary.
If you think our industry is spared this phenomenon, think again. According to research by Central Research Inc, AdOps team members spend seven hours each week doing mind-numbing, highly repetitive tasks. That’s one full day out of every work week.
Take campaign ad screenshots for clients as an example. Brands naturally want to see how their ads appear in the real world, which means someone needs to take ad screenshots of all the ad formats that go live in a campaign and put it into a report that can be sent to a client. This is pretty much the definition of time consuming and tedious work.
“Our team would regularly spend ten to twenty hours a week taking ad screenshots, depending on the season, volume and time of month,” explains Sharon Goldsmith, Manager of Digital Advertising Operations for Tribune Publishing, Inc. Her team hated it, and it’s easy to see why. No one studies communications in college so they can spend 20% or more of their time doing painfully boring tasks.
Like workers everywhere, people who work in publishers and media agencies left in great droves for greener pastures. During the Great Recession, agencies faced hundreds of open positions they struggled to fill. Throughout 2022, financial bonuses and other enticements, such as sabbaticals, became the norm.
Did such incentives help? Perhaps not, as they didn’t address the root causes of attrition. For instance, Digiday interviewed seven people who left their agency jobs without having another one lined up. The reasons given? A desire for a better life/work balance, and too much work without a sense of satisfaction.
In practical terms, how does an AdOps manager elevate the sense of satisfaction of his or her team of traffickers, so they stay at their jobs longer and grow with the agency or publisher?
The key is to eliminate manual tasks, such as taking ad screenshots, so that they can focus on more satisfying work. “Eliminating manual and mundane tasks such as ad screenshots has opened up time for growth opportunities. This has led to higher job satisfaction for employees.”
When employees stay, they enable an agency or publisher to retain the institutional knowledge they’ve gained through the years, along with outside relationships they’ve built up with clients and vendors.
But that’s just the start. Attrition is costly. Replacing an employee can cost up to twice the annual salary with recruitment fees, bonuses, training the new employee on systems, and waiting for them to come up to speed.
Does this sound too good to be true? Reach out and we’ll happily provide you with a demo. See first hand how you can eliminate the time your team spends on ad screenshots and retain talent with Adwallet.io
