Marketing Careers: 3 steps for using testing principles to improve office productivity
Here at MECLABS, we talk a lot about the testing process.
How to optimize and improve emails, landing pages, lead generation forms, shopping carts … all things Web. But, the testing process isn’t just a way to improve website performance. The general principles are transferrable to so much more.
One thing I’ve been particularly interested in recently is how to use testing to improve office and employee productivity.
Consider you’re a manager and have an employee who has been having problems meeting deadlines.
What do you do?
Step #1. Identify the problems with productivity
You’ve already identified the overall problem – missing deadlines.
Most people immediately jump to solutions and try to answer this question: “How do I get this employee to stop missing deadlines?”
Obviously, it’s because they need more resources, right? Maybe it’s because they weren’t clear on the requirements and what was expected of them. Or maybe, they just didn’t see the point and weren’t properly motivated.
That’s the same thing as saying, “My Landing Page isn’t converting,” and immediately jumping to solutions like, “I need to change the offer, add a video, or add more testimonials.”
But, what step did we miss in that jump … Analysis!
Step #2. Dive deeper to identify the elements that impact productivity
You can’t solve a problem unless you have a deeper understanding of the root cause.
For a website, we’ve been trained to ask, “What problems or obstacles are impeding a conversion on this page?”
Thankfully, we have a handy Conversion Sequence heuristic to help us identify the elements that impact conversion by asking the right questions during analysis:
- Is it because there’s a lack of value?
- Is the value clearly communicated?
- Is the process is too confusing?
- Are people concerned about what’s going to happen with their information?
All of these answers could be the possible culprits to your low conversion rate, but you’ll never know without identifying these possible issues and testing possible solutions.
The same thing goes for your people.
For someone missing deadlines, the question isn’t “How do I fix this?” Instead, the first question needs to be “Why are they missing deadlines?” or:
- Are they confused with the exact date/time of the deadline?
- Do they have a clear understanding of all the steps involved in the project?
- Do they know all of the resources they’re going to need?
- Are they able to build a timeline backwards from the deadline with reviews and milestones?
- Do they not understand the impact the missed deadline will have on them personally or the company?
As you can see, the list of questions goes on and on, just like for your website.
