Manage Your Marketing Team Like a Super Bowl Champ

In the world of professional sports, excellence takes many forms. Athletes, coaches, and the front office might command the attention of the public, but their success is enabled and reinforced by the work of talented business professionals behind the scenes.

The sales and marketing team behind the New England Patriots performs at consistently high levels because they execute their strategy with ruthless consistency, and they have clear visibility into their ticket and merchandise sales pipelines. The food and beverage team are the ultimate game day hospitality stewards serving up a winning experience for Patriots' fans at every home game.

However, it's the Human Resources (HR) staff that really enables everyone's success. Their work tends to play out on laptops rather than on gridirons, and their points are tallied on a different kind of scoreboard. A victory for them is a victory for their football players, the front office and the back office. It's the right HR solution helps that make it all possible.

Game Day: for fans, it's a source of entertainment and excitement. For the Patriots' HR team, it's the stress of mobilizing 2,500 employees on site, managing time and attendance, validating schedules and assuring appropriate security access. The challenge of corralling large numbers of employees into a workable HR system doesn’t end on the football field—or in New England for that matter. This is because the Patriots fall under the umbrella of The Kraft Group, a global holding company composed of more than 20 enterprises in total, ranging from the manufacturing industry to the nonprofit sector. They also include another professional sports team, the New England Revolution soccer club. This kind of diversity poses its own challenges—namely, a need for technologies that can be easily understood and utilized by professionals of multiple backgrounds and skill sets. Uniformity, however, isn’t the only answer. The optimal solution must also be efficient and fully integrated.

Human Resources Software and Success

The Patriots found uniformity and efficiency with an integrated HR workforce management software solution. With added employee self-service functionality, they really changed the game (no pun intended). Now every member of the organization—including the players who take the field—have easy access to his or her own HR information, from time-off requests to benefits enrollment and everything in between.

Furthermore, sophisticated reporting and analytics tools help leaders reveal workplace productivity trends and opportunities for performance improvements.

Just like our athletes take one more rep to be the best on the field, we can deliver for our employees even better each time because we have the metrics and analytics to support it. - Robin Boudreau, SVP of HR, New England Patriots

Now, managing your sales and marketing team may not seem as complicated as running a championship NFL football team, but it is no less an essential task if you're going to win in the markets where you compete.

At big companies and small companies alike, managing dozens of people’s schedules can be a hassle, and a few errors in the process can result in embarrassing mistakes and unsatisfied teammates. Luckily, HR workforce management software digitizes and automates many of these functions, making life easier and worry-free for employees and employers alike. The solution is often an assortment of services and functions that makes matching the right employee with the right task exceptionally seamless. These programs give both employers and employees access to everyday business needs such as payroll, time clocks, scheduling, time management tools, and much more.

• Time Tracking  

Managers need to know whenever an employee is working overtime. Although it’s usually good that workers are getting extra hours in on a project, that time must be accounted for to provide accurate pay and abide by labor laws. This can get convoluted through miscommunication or any employee not properly checking their email.

HR workforce management software can simplify this process by allowing employees to request overtime. Then, their manager will be notified of the request. That way, there are no unnecessary emails, reducing human error and allowing smoother operations.

• Scheduling  

A common error among HR departments is overstaffing on any given day, causing confusion and delaying overall efficiency. With HR workforce management software, employees can input their own schedule as well as their preferred shift slots. The scheduling function allows every member of an organization access to their own HR information, including time-off requests, rest days, benefits, and everything in between.

With the mobile app, logging in and out of work becomes as easy as pressing a button on a device that employees are already using in their everyday life. This means that schedules can be automatically generated to ensure that employees know exactly when they should report to work. Workforce management software can also facilitate whenever a worker needs to swap shifts.

• Payroll

The same software can aggregate data from its scheduling and time tracking functions to automatically calculate paychecks among employees. This erases the need for a single HR worker having to toil away for several days trying to calculate everyone’s respective pay. Not only does this reduce workload and human error, but workforce management software can also calculate taxes and other benefits so that employees are getting compensated fairly for their labor. The system can also ensure compliance with state, local, and federal tax regulations.

• Accessibility

All of these unique functions are available for both desktop and mobile devices, which means that employees and employers can check and change pertinent information at any point in the day. If a worker needs to call out for a shift, another employee can easily pick up their shift and have their managers know about the change.

HR workforce management software not only will make life easier for your head of HR, but also will deliver plenty of helpful and convenient benefits for your sales and marketing team. Find the winning HR solution for your team and your employees will listen, care, engage, and most importantly, stay with you.

If you like the New England Patriots story, you'll find more case studies and best practices like this in our best selling book: Marketing, Interrupted.  If you’re looking for more tips on improving your employee experience to win talent, subscribe to the TopRight blog! Or connect with me on Twitter and on LinkedIn.