On this episode of the Engaging Marketeer, I want to talk about something that, personally, I think is quite boring, but every time I’ve spoken about this on other podcasts I’ve done, everyone I’ve spoken to has been quite excited about.
It’s something that I think is really useful if you run an agency or any business where you want to scale up, where you have other people in your business that you want to be able to do the skills that you have. I spoke about this on a podcast a few weeks ago, and the guy I was talking to was very excited about it because he’d never heard of it, and it’s a really good skill to implement within your business that will make your business more scalable, more robust and it will eventually make your business more valuable. Before I share this with you, I do have a slight confession to make. This wasn’t my idea. I would love to take credit for this, but it wasn’t my idea. I didn’t create it and I didn’t even introduce it into Engage Web, that was Lianne. She did that, not me, so while I am taking the credit now by telling you about it on this podcast, it’s not my idea so please don’t congratulate me for it unless you really want to.
What this is essentially called is a Skills Matrix. Now, it sounds simple when I explain it, but as I said every time I’ve told somebody else about it they’ve never heard of it, so I thought I’d better do a podcast on it just to make sure that anyone listening to this who’s interested in scaling up a business, particularly an agency, is aware of what a Skills Matrix is, how you can use it, what it can do and why it’s important for your business. Say, for example, you’ve got a member of staff who does a particular task within your business and they are unavoidably taken ill. Maybe they’ve come down with COVID, maybe they’ve got the flu, whatever it may be. And they phone in that morning or email in that morning and say I can’t be in work today, I’m going to be off for a few days because I’m really under the weather. If they’re the only person that knows how to do a particular task, you might be in trouble because you’re unable to do that task and nobody else in the office is able to cover that task. Or, say you’ve got a member of staff that goes off on maternity leave or paternity leave or goes on holiday, or you’ve got two people who both know how to do a particular task and they both book holidays at the same time, and you suddenly realise you can’t do this thing because they’re the only two people who know how to do it. Those are the sort of problems that it fixes. But it also does a hell of a lot more than that.
So what is the Skills Matrix? Essentially, it could be as simple as a spreadsheet. Who doesn’t love a spreadsheet? A spreadsheet which has, let’s say, the names of all your team members down the left hand side of the spreadsheet, and then across the top it has all of the different tasks that can be done within your business. These are really broken down, so if you’re a digital marketing agency, for example, you might have setting up a client’s blog, you might have designing a website, doing quality assurance on a website, setting up a hosting account for a website, creating email addresses for clients, scheduling tweets for a client on Twitter, scheduling a Facebook post, creating graphics, creating banners, creating videos, creating animations, every single task that you do as an agency would go across the top. With the people who are in your business that have the ability to do those tasks, you would put an X in in the row so that it corresponds with it. So you can see at a glance how many of your people can do each of the tasks. Now it sounds really simple. You may think, well why is that going to be so useful to me, why is that going to matter? If you’ve got a Skills Matrix, you’re then able to look at right, this person wants to book a holiday, let’s just see what skills do they have in the Skills Matrix – ah, they do this particular task, the only other person in the business that does this particular task is this person, they are also away on holiday at the same time. Therefore, you cannot have a holiday together because you are leaving us unable to do this particular thing that only the two of you can do. That’s one thing that you could do. Or, you could also say to this person: “Right, you want to book this holiday in three months’ time. Unfortunately, the only other person that can do this is John. John is off that that week as well, so if between the two of you, you train up another member of staff so that they can do this task as well and we can update their Skills Matrix, then you would be able to have that holiday”. Thus, allowing you to give your team the holidays they want without you suffering as a business.
Let’s say you’ve got a member of staff that comes to you and says they really want a pay rise, they really feel they deserve and earn have earned a pay rise. Now you can use the Skills Matrix to demonstrate this. You can check where they are compared to the other people within the business that do the same thing that you do, not looking at salary of course because you don’t share that kind of information, I would imagine. You’d look at the Skills Matrix and say you’re like well this person does a similar job to you they’re able to do this and this and this and this and this and this, you’re able only to do this, this and this. Therefore, if you’re thinking you want to have a pay review, if you want to progress within the business then you need to be able to train up on this, this, this and this. It’s quite clear what they need to do because the Skills Matrix tells you about it.
So, as I say, whenever I’ve explained this it’s as though it’s been a complete revelation to people, but for me it seems quite obvious because, well, it was presented to our business by somebody within the business. This is how we can make sure all of the team are up to the skills we want them to have and nobody is lacking. I didn’t really have to come up with this myself, so I kind of take it for granted and realize now when I speak to other people that not everybody is aware of it. So if you are aware of it, I would love to know how you’ve been using a Skills Matrix such as this, how it’s improved your business or how it’s made things easier for you. I’d love to know about that – if you could give me some feedback on that, you can drop me a message through the Engaging Marketeer website if you like, or you can leave me a comment on the YouTube video which this is going out on if you’re watching me on YouTube. I’d love to know if you’ve used the Skills Matrix before, what you’ve thought about it, what sort of experiences you’ve had with it and how it’s improved or benefited your business in any way. If you’ve never used a skills Matrix before and you’ve never heard of such a thing and you think I must be a genius to have come up with this, I didn’t come up with it, it wasn’t me, I am not taking the credit for this, but if you want to credit me, that’s cool. I’d just love to get some feedback from businesses who have either been using it or have never used it before and are considering doing so after listening to my inane ramblings. You’ve been listening to (or reading) the Engaging Marketeer, if you could leave me a review, leave me a comment, leave me a five star rating on iTunes, for example, that would be fantastic, and I will catch you on the next podcast.