The Work Life Balance issue

• Marketers in Finance most likely to suffer from stress
• Help for students balancing work, life and study
• On Your Soapbox... Have your say on Work Life Balance
• Will multi-tasking get you home early tonight?
• A Day in the Life…
• How did I get here?
• Get your life back in style... win a Spa Break for 2
• Get seriously sorted... win a Professional Organiser System
• GLR event review: Marketing to Minorities
• GLR event review: Women in Marketing
• GLR Research Prize Draw winner

Did you know that people working in the finance industry are more likely to suffer from clinical depression and poor mental health than those in any other sector?

Recent research conducted by Kathy Lewis, Chair of the CIM’s Finance Group as part of her MSc shows that finance sector employees suffer from higher levels of poor mental health than nurses, teachers and even the police.

Kathy who is a Consultant with Lynk Management Consultants, is concerned about the research findings but not totally surprised. “The finance industry undoubtedly has an ingrained culture of long, hard hours, high workloads, low perceived control and a lack of support. Couple this with a relentless pace of organisational change in the finance industry at the moment and you have a recipe for stress”.

97% of senior finance managers interviewed by Kathy had been involved in major changes in their companies. More worryingly however is the 35% who had experienced some form of major organisational change every six months over the past two or three years. “Changes such as company mergers and outsourcing arrangements are common as companies strive to get leaner. These arrangements typically involve a lot of restructuring” continues Kathy “and that usually means redundancies and higher workloads for those remaining. Job insecurity also has a huge adverse effect on work stress levels.”

Coping behaviours: nine of the best

• The only way to truly get rid of stress is to remove the source of your stress. Take one workplace stress factor at a time (from the above tick list or from your own list) and try to resolve it with your line manager.
• Ultimately remind yourself that you chose your job and you choose to stay. Often just the knowledge that you are still in control of that decision can be enough to help you manage better.
• Don’t do ‘invisible’ overtime; make sure your managers have a realistic view of the time you are investing. Keep a note of your hours in your diary to maintain your own awareness.
• During times of change, be clear and assertive about how much extra work you can take on. Negotiate extra benefits or flexible hours if you are being tasked with new responsibilities.
• Update your job description. Get clarification on any responsibilities you don’t quite understand. Put your job spec on your wall or pin board and don’t let it be expanded without your explicit agreement.
• Take regular breaks: do something that moves you away from your work for 15 minutes, take mornings off, days off, long weekends and longer holidays. Turn your phone off, do something physical to relax your body and distract your mind.
• If work is a persistent source of unavoidable stress, be aware of your physical and emotional health and take steps to manage these. Enlist the support of family and friends if possible.
• Get enough sleep. Especially when you’re under deadline pressure – good sleep will help you maximise your performance when at work.
• Eat regular nutrient-dense meals and healthy snacks. Moderate your alcohol consumption. Experts say drinking too much to unwind at the end of the day is an ill-advised way to cope as it can lead to other long term problems.

Join your fellow finance marketers at The CIM Finance special interest group

• Relax and unwind at our fun networking events.
• Update and expand your marketing knowledge through case studies and web-based seminars on our website www.cimfinancegroup.co.uk
• Network with those working in the finance industry at high quality, targeted events
• Earn vital CPD hours through masterclasses, evening seminars and other events on key topics
• Get discounts on partnership organisation, events and publications.
• Participate in the Awards for Marketing Excellence in Finance

The Finance Group is a forum for marketing professionals in the finance industry and includes members from banks, building societies, insurance companies, credit card companies, fund managers, investment banks, market traders, accountants and management consultants.

To join please email Kathy Lewis.

Get a free study tips factsheet!
The CIM’s Study with Success event in Hammersmith on 17 March was a huge success with attendees picking up tips and techniques for smart study in the run-up to exam and assignment deadlines. “Delegate feedback was hugely positive” says organiser and CIM GLR Board member Ann Prayle. Three lucky attendees won a CIM Prize Draw at the event:

• Ahmed Gawad (Certificate)
• Kirsty Inman (Postgraduate Diploma)
• Maxine Field (Professional Postgraduate Diploma)

You can still get a free copy of the SSG Study Tips Factsheet that accompanies the March event by emailing Student Support Group. Here are a few highlights:

Free Study Tips Factsheet Sneak preview…

Don’t mess up your work life balance! Get ready for June exams
CIM students still have plenty of time to brush up on both CIM syllabus content and CIM exam technique before the dreaded Exam week arrives on June 4th. Here’s an at-a-glance guide to the main differences between the main two types of revision workshop offered by the Student Support Group.

Syllabus Workshops – to improve your subject knowledge
Students who have missed classes, misunderstood certain topics, or been unable to read as many textbooks as they’d like, will benefit from a Syllabus workshop. These sessions:

• are run per each CIM subject and are led by CIM subject specialist marketers
• cover all the syllabus highlights in one day, fast but not furious!
• show how all the main syllabus areas fit together
• are full-day, (usually Saturdays) intensive, lecture-based events
• provide a summary of key, need-to-know information (theory, models, examples)
• include a comprehensive handout pack for personalising your revision notes
• give lots of examples illustrating best and worst practice

Exam Prep Workshops – to enhance your exam performance
For those who feel concerned about their ability to satisfy the CIM Examiner should consider an Exam Preparation workshop to improve their CIM exam technique. These are delivered by the Student Support Group in London over the next few weeks and:

• are run per each CIM subject and are led by CIM subject specialist marketers
• explain what the CIM Examiner wants and how to satisfy him/her
• identify particular topics and techniques favoured by the subject Examiner
• are full-day, (usually Sundays) structured, tutor-led, group work based events – fun and very practical
• deliver top tips on managing exam time and improving exam technique
• provide the chance to tackle exam questions and mini-cases together
• give you practice in applying CIM theory in context, with evaluation and examples

Workshops run in Hammersmith, London on Saturdays and Sundays throughout May. For more information go to www.studentsupportgroup.co.uk or call Caroline on 01784 463057 for advice & bookings.

There’s also help available for SMIP (Strategic Marketing in Practice) the mega Case Study at Professional Postgraduate Diploma level. SMIP Critical Steps document is available free from SSG.

This is the feature where we ask GLR members get on their Soapbox and vent their views on a topic close to CIM members’ hearts. This issue we gather opinions on Work Life Balance. What do you think?

Mark Duke, Freelance Marketing Consultant, Borehamwood “Ten years ago I probably would have said ‘stop whingeing and knuckle down’ but now with a young family, I think I sit somewhere in between these two viewpoints. As a young marketer I ‘did my time’ in the office to learn my trade and earn my stripes. I think there is definitely too much pressure in some environments – particularly agency-side – to work long hours and be desk-bound at all costs. But in fact many aspects of marketing communications lend themselves well to flexible working hours and location. I think the barriers are set by employer culture and control-freakery. It’s a case of slowly reassuring your boss that you can still deliver wherever and whenever you are working. Just be responsive, get the job done and you’ll have a strong case. My tip would be to set up access to your office emails from your PC at home, which means you can be available just as if you were in the office.”

Alta Keyter, Senior Account Manager, Farringdon “We do push ourselves more and desire greater success for various personal reasons. But work pressure is also extremely high. I work for a very small company and to get buy-in on new ideas, I have to demonstrate their value. No-one else is going to do that for me. Perhaps in bigger companies the structure for success is more defined and supportive. I think technology is more of a barrier to a good Work Life Balance. Being able to log onto work emails from home via blackberries or whatever doesn't really help with Work Life Balance; it just means you are always reachable and never get time to totally switch off.

Steve Revill, GLR Board Member, Central London I have a company Blackberry, mobile phone and laptop. All three have an ‘off’ button, which many people forget. These business tools all make it easier for me to make choices on how to balance my work with my life. It always strikes me as weird that these are seen to be different, somehow mutually-exclusive ‘pastimes’. Work is a huge part of my life, not just because of the percentage of my week I spend working. It allows me to pay my mortgage, go on nice holidays, and pay for those little extras in life like theatre or concert tickets. We Marketers are used to long hours and weekend working when a big campaign or event deadline is due – isn't it that buzz that drew us to a career in marketing in the first place?

Ashish Jethwa, Senior Sales Consultant, Daryl Willcox Publishing “Out of a typical 24 hours, I work 10, spend 1 travelling and spend 2 studying or attending my CIM course lectures. I spend 1.5 hours on dinner and associated washing-up duties, I maybe grab 1 hour to relax and spend 1 hour on the phone. I sleep for 6.5 hours and spend 1 hour on various essential bathroom activities. This gives me exactly 0 hours to balance my life. Work, I know. Life, I’m not sure. With all the emphasis on getting ahead in career development what chance do we have of enjoying life?

Barbara Hamilton, Associate Director Business Development, Smith and Williamson “My company is great on work life balance. People here make more efficient use of the time they are in the office. Walk round here at 6.30 and most people have gone home - because they've got the job done. One trick I've learned is to have shorter, more productive meetings - otherwise they can be a huge time drain. Meetings are an important social vehicle and help teams form and bond but if you waste 10 minutes with chat every time that's an hour gone easily - would you rather waste that or get home on time with all your work done?"

Paul Gemmell, Brand Manager, Rotary Tools, Bosch UK “As with the daily grind, home life needs to be malleable and adaptable. There is no reason to blame work for never being able to do anything. The onus is on us as individuals to make the balance work. Answering the mobile at the weekend can cause a nuisance or an inconvenience at the time but a quick response can provide an instant resolution. Working in marketing means that we have to be brand ambassadors for our organisations and if we are serious about getting marketing into the boardroom at certain points the business needs to come first and the rest needs to fit.”

Most of us don’t have the luxury of being able to focus wholly on one project or task. In fact we consider ourselves lucky if we can count our projects on one hand.

Many recruiters include ‘an ability to multi-task’ in their job descriptions. What is it they’re actually looking for and can multi-tasking capabilities really help us get ahead? Here is a short experiment that is often put forward to question the effectiveness of multi-tasking.

An experiment
Let’s take 3 projects on a person’s desk A, B and C. Let’s say each will take 4 time units of effort to complete. If we complete one project before moving on to another we get AAAABBBBCCCC. Simple.

When we multi-task, we bounce back and forth between the projects. The work would look something like this AABBCCAABBCC. We can happily report that we are progressing all our projects and indeed all three projects are completed within the 12 time units. But is it actually more effective use of our time?

The multi-tasking myth
Indeed all three tasks were done in the 12 time units, but from the point of view of the individual projects, each task actually took 8 time units instead of 4, resulting in the expansion of the project lead time and delay of downstream dependent tasks. And this is without taking into consideration additional setup and transitioning time we need every time we switch between projects.

Conclusion
So without multi-tasking, not only might we have a greater sense of completion and less project-juggling to do, it seems that the projects themselves would probably be better off. If we didn’t all feel the pressure to work on everything at once we could just focus on the task at hand.

So what is multi-tasking good for?
Bob Hayward of Time Power Associates recently ran a workshop called “Be More Effective” for GLR’s North London team in March. Bob says “Nearly all the research shows multi-tasking is less efficient, it is much more efficient to finish one task at a time. Efficiency is not the same as effectiveness however – effectiveness is making sure you’re focussing on the most important goals and tasks.”

“Sometimes it might not be possible or appropriate to finish A completely before moving onto B then C” continues Bob. “Business projects have degrees of dependence between related tasks. Once you know you’re focused on the right goals and tasks, the answer is "chunking" – divide your time into appropriate chunks so that you can make meaningful progress on that part before moving onto the next goal or task. This is actually putting tasks and events into the best possible sequence and is definitely not attempting to do two things at once.”

“It might be more appropriate” concludes Bob “for recruiters to look for an ability to accomplish multiple objectives. That is a skill we would all benefit from.”

In this feature, GLR News finds out what “I work in marketing” actually means. This issue we follow Helen Lewis – GLR member from North West London – around for a day. She shares the highs and lows of a typical day in her life as a marketing consultant and gives us her perspective on time management.

08:15 I’m usually at my desk by now. Even though I’m working from home today, I make sure I’m in ‘work zone’ at least physically even if my head’s not quite there yet. Because I often work in different locations, it’s important to have a separate dedicated area for work wherever I am: home, hotel, client’s office. It really helps focus my mind.

The first thing I do is make a plan for the day using Outlook. I break the day up into chunks of time and dedicate them to individual projects or clients. This plan then becomes a sacrosanct structure for my day – my Bible!

08:30 Having planned the day, I allow myself a ‘mind-clearing’ contingency half hour to go through emails. I deal with anything urgent straight away but otherwise, I leave responding to emails until the allocated time for the project/client they relate to. This takes a certain amount of discipline but once it’s embedded as a habit it becomes second nature.

09:00 I specialise in marketing for professional services with clients in HR, Training & Development and business psychology. First this morning I put a call in to the editor of People Management magazine about a PR article I’m trying to get placed on behalf of a Business Psychologist client.

09:45 Now I’ve got a clear idea of the topic the magazine wants to focus on I get to work on the article. Marketing for Professional Services is quite unique – selling a service that is often intangible as opposed to a product that you can touch and feel. You still need to know your audience’s needs and wants intimately, but in professional services you often need a high level of specific, technical knowledge about the profession you’re involved with. My degree in Management Sciences really helps me understand both the psychology and marketing aspects of my work.

11:30 I finish the first draft of the PR article and send it off for my client to review. I take the chance to make myself a cup of tea and take a 15 minute break.

11:45 I check my Day Plan and move onto the next piece of work – still for my business psychology client. I’m conducting some customer satisfaction research on her behalf. She’s issued her clients with a scorecard so they can rate her performance and has asked me to be the impartial collector of the feedback. Once I’ve done this, I’ll collate it into a report for her. So it’s back onto the phone. It can be tricky reporting on negative feedback but as long as the feedback from each conversation is constructive, I’m pleased.

13:30 Lunchtime. I always take a lunch break away from my desk if I’m working from home. It re-energises me for the afternoon.

14:15 I manage to get six successful customer satisfaction phone calls done. I then take the time to enter the scorecard results into a spreadsheet for my report. Then I phone another client about our impending trip to Dubai to promote training courses. Finally I call my Coaching client to give her an update on some new business calls I’d made yesterday.

16:30 I review my achievements today and add them to my ‘Done’ list. It’s a positive twist on the ‘To do’ list. A life coach recently gave me the idea of recording my daily achievements and giving myself rewards, rather than the sinking feeling you get from an ever-growing ‘To do’ list. It’s given me a new way of looking at my working day – as an opportunity rather than an obligation.

17:00 Another quick email check. I’ve received the GLR events bulletin. I like attending professional events as it can get lonely working alone. The networking and social contact is great. Meet with Drinks looks good – I might give that a try. I was one of the first CIM members to become Chartered when their CPD scheme started up in 1998 and I’ve kept it up ever since. It can be hard to find the time but it’s important for me not to lose touch with other marketers from other sectors.

17:30 Time to go to the gym. Not having a regular daily commute I find that a ritual like going to the gym helps me make a transition from work to home and switch my work thoughts off and fun thoughts on. It’s surprising how much fun you can have on a treadmill…!

In this new feature GLR News follows one of the region’s more ‘seasoned’ marketers on a career retrospective. This issue, we talk to Sophie He, CIM GLR member and UK Marketing Executive for Funai, Osaka-based DVD hardware manufacturer. Sophie has followed her marketing career from China to Denmark to her current role here in the UK. She reviews her globe-trotting career path with us and traces back her passions for travel, change and challenges!

When I was little I wanted to be…
...a dancer! In fact I studied 4 years for my dance teacher qualification and started out teaching dance to primary school children. It was great to follow my dream and I still love dancing today.

I did a complete career U-turn…
...when I left dance teaching and went to university to study Public Relations. After 2 years teaching I felt that there was not much challenge in my life and that I was not using all my talents. I was initially attracted to PR for the travel and social contact it seemed to offer. And everyone in PR always seemed so smart and glamorous to me! It took me 4 years to become qualified but it was the start of my marketing career.

I got into marketing...
…via PR. After my degree I started work for a large IT company as a PR assistant. After a while I was promoted to Area Manager where I was tasked with achieving tough growth targets by increasing product distribution across a huge area of China. I soon realized this was a marketing objective and in fact a marketing role, which I loved. We did really well and I learned a lot in five years on the job but I realized my understanding of marketing techniques was not deep enough and I decided to go back to college again and do a marketing major.

I travelled half way round the world to…
…study marketing in Copenhagen! I wanted to learn more about advanced consumer behaviour in marketing and realized I could do this best in the western culture. Marketing in China is exciting because there are so many opportunities and not many precedents but I wanted to learn about a mature market. I’d heard the standard of living in Denmark was high and so off I went for 2 more years study. I worked part-time as a Marketing Assistant for a Danish travel company. After then I came to the UK to complete a marketing degree at Thames Valley University.

My toughest time in marketing…
…was while studying in the UK. I had to hold down 3 different part-time jobs to cover my study fees and living expenses. I didn’t have a weekend off for 3 years. When I wasn’t at college, I was working; when I wasn’t working I was doing my homework. That was really tough.

What keeps me awake at night…
... is the pace of change in the technology industry. It’s about survival. There are fewer and fewer competitors each year and it’s my job to make sure we’re not next. I’ve been at Funai for two and a half years now and it continues to feel like a new job every day. We have to keep one step ahead of the market to ensure our product development is on track. Maintaining good customer relations and customer satisfaction is very important. Research plays a huge part in my job. I have to keep up-to-date with anything and everything new in the world of DVD technology.

The most fun I’ve had in marketing…
…I have travelled all over Asia and Europe during my various jobs. This has given me a fantastic opportunity to see other countries and cultures and meet so many different people. To travel round the world has always been my dream.

Being a CIM member helps me…
...keep learning and meet people. I went to the recent Women in Marketing event and thought it was absolutely fantastic. Really high quality speakers, fascinating topics and a fun evening. I want to be a Marketing Director within 5 years so the CIM has a big part to play for me. I will go back to China one day, once I’ve tackled all the challenges over here!

Win a relaxing Champneys Spa Break for you and a friend – worth over £500!

Enter this GLR News competition and you could win a one -night midweek break at the luxurious Champneys Spa in Henlow Grange. An idyllic haven in the heart of GLR territory, Champneys Henlow Grange offers elegant accommodation, healthy cuisine, the latest fitness regimes, as well as the most indulgent and pampering treatments around.

We’ve also arranged for our lucky GLR winner and his/her guest to each receive a complementary Champneys massage and Champneys facial. The perfect way for you to rejuvenate mind, body and soul.

(More information on treatments and rooms can be found at www.champneys.com or call 08703 300 300)

Win one of 12 high quality Filofax Professional Systems worth over £100 each…

The Filofax Professional System is a substantial organisational tool that will enable smarter working. Designed by Time Management specialists at Filofax, the Professional System gives you an overview of your work at-a-glance and as well as the usual planners, diaries, notes, to-do lists, it includes some great innovations:

• Monthly planning sheets you can fold over your Day or Week page, ensuring your objectives are constantly visible as the month progresses
• ‘Performance areas’ pages divided into 9 sections to allow you to list your key performance targets and measure activity against them
• Gantt chart project plan (folds out to 3 x A5 widths) so you can plan and organise your year’s projects
• Meeting planner to save you time and to encourage the practice of effective and organised meetings

Marketing to Minorities goes down well with overwhelming majority of delegates
Farrukh Raza from the Islamic Bank of Britain spoke to CIM GLR delegates at Queen Mary University on 15 March. GLR News reports back with some points you may not know about the subject…

• Islamic Bank of Britain has 35,000 Muslim and non Muslim customers and currently sees an average of 2,000 new customers per month. Word of mouth has proved the most effective marketing method in acquiring new customers
• One third of the UK’s Muslim community is under 15 years of age
• The self-employment ratio among the Muslim community is 3 times higher than the national average
• IBB is the UK’s first and only stand-alone Sharia’a-compliant retail bank authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority
• Sharia’a law dictates that money itself has no intrinsic value. To make money from money is forbidden – wealth can only be generated through legitimate trade and investment in assets
• According to Sharia’a law, money must be used in a productive way. As a matter of faith, a Muslim cannot lend money to, or receive money from someone and expect to benefit. Interest (known as riba) is not allowed
• The principal means of Islamic finance are based on trading – it is essential that any risk be involved in any trading activity. Any gains relating to the trading are shared between the person providing the capital and the person providing the expertise

Women in Marketing took place on 7 March in Central London

GLR News reflects on the prestigious evening with organiser Ade Onilude. See a great gallery of pictures from this prestigious evening on the GLR website.

Hello Ade. Congratulations to you and the team on a successful GLR event! How did the evening go?
It really was fantastic. It was great to see all our hard work coming together in the end. We had had a few last-minute hitches of course but it was alright on the night, as they say! We got nearly a hundred delegates. Add to this the GLR volunteers on hand and the dozen or so special guests and speakers and you can imagine The Commonwealth Club was really buzzing, especially during the mingle and meet session. It was a great venue – just the right touch of urban glamour for this flagship CIM GLR event. A big thank you goes to Janet Woollett for getting us this venue and to Sue Ash for chairing.

What can you tell us about the presentations?
Where to start?! Polly Cochrane, Head of Marketing at Channel 4 kicked off a really interesting debate when she touched on fragmentation of the media – ‘mass is crass’! She was talking about fragmentation of the media and the fact that there is now such a huge complexity of messages for the consumer. Because of this consumers are beginning to look more and more for recommendations from trusted familiars like friends and family rather than from the marketing messages churned out by the media. People are accepting celebrities into a close circle of trusted ‘friends’ so much so that they are becoming the consumer’s ‘editors of choice’ for brands, products, services, lifestyles, behaviour etc. Like ‘Super-role-models’ or ‘virtual friends’.

Do you think this is good news or bad news for marketers?
Well, the implication is that marketing techniques such as word of mouth, member-get-member and recommend-a-friend are winning out in certain segments over and above other methods. So I think as long as we’re onto the trend we can decide if it’s relevant for our sector and our market.

Did any of the other speakers agree?
Yes. Tamara Gillan from SPF15 shared a superb Superdrug campaign case study with delegates. The campaign last summer got 170,000 new sign-ups, 60% of which came via Recommend-a-friend. 92% of which were also women. There’s a suggestion that these ‘over a coffee’ communications work best among female segments.

What about figleaves.com?
Daniel Nabarro, figleaves.com CEO, said a key PR & marketing focus for them was indeed celebrity stylists. Daniel made a great case study presentation showing how figleaves.com has grown from scratch and created this whole online experience for men and women. It fitted in very well with the theme of female excellence in marketing and creative communications.

What feedback have you had from delegates on the jewellery that was being shown during the mingling session?
Lots! Many thanks to Kirsten Goss for supplying some stunning pieces and to the models for showing them off so well on the evening. I don’t know if any delegates have yet taken up the offer of a discount but I know I’m going to! The fashion element to the evening helped make it a celebration and was a great talking point.

Can you share with us more of the feedback from attendees?
The overwhelming majority really enjoyed it and would like to see more such events on the topic. People greatly appreciated the excellent calibre of speakers we managed to attract and enjoyed the insights in all the presentations.

Congratulations to Barbara Hamilton at Smith & Williamson who has won a Polaroid DVD player in the GLR Research Prize Draw. Thanks to everyone who participated in the research. The GLR Board wants your opinions. If you have any comments on member services in the GLR region, please email GLR Chair, Colin Linton.