How can you support your teams over periods of disruption

Every year the festive season sneaks up on even the most prepared of teams, and there’s always something that slips through the cracks, be that a social post, a text change or a new feature needing to be added to a sales brochure, yesterday. Marketing, creative, and design teams often find themselves navigating unique challenges with more roadblocks than usual: team members taking extended paid time off (PTO), varying schedules impacting workflow and approvals, and the heightened need for seamless project continuity to ensure the show goes on.

Enter the brand asset management platform (BAM) —a powerful solution to keep your business running smoothly when holiday disruptions peak.

The Holiday Challenge: Why Projects Stall

The festive season can significantly disrupt operations globally for several reasons, the most common being:

Many employees take well-deserved leave, leaving teams understaffed and approvals delayed. When working on skeleton staff, team responsibilities are often bundled together, meaning certain skill sets or levels are missing completely making some requests tricky or impossible to fulfil traditionally.

If your business operates across multiple regions, countries, or even continents, the holidays celebrated and when can vastly vary. Some teams may be on break while others are working business as usual, leading to misaligned workflows and the potential for bottlenecks to form and cause stress for those working or through.

Key stakeholders being unavailable can slow down the approval process, or the lack of checks in the process allows for freestyled content to slip through and cause confusion and damage to brand reputation. (Going viral for the wrong reasons isn’t on anyone’s Christmas list!)

Without visibility into how assets are being used or accessed, you may not realize just how active your team remains during the holiday season. When teams are reduced to essential staff, those remaining often take on time-sensitive or urgent tasks originally assigned to others. The assumption that covering the holiday season leaves extra time can lead to overburdened team members.

A comprehensive MarTech stack is designed to support the whole marketing ecosystem, to cover from comms to creative. Although many organizations tend to have the big tech sorted often the smaller but equally impactful tools get left behind. Lesser adopted tools such as BAM’s and Brand Centers are often unknowingly left off the list when they’d make jobs easier and provide great returns on investment for organizations.

A self-service collateral portal or a BAM offers your team, wherever they are at whatever time they need to, access to pre-approved assets, templates, and resources, directly eliminating delays and maintaining productivity. Here’s how:

When decision-makers, team leaders, or creative heads are out of the office, a BAM portal ensures that team members can move forward independently with complete confidence that they can’t break or ruin assets. Instead of waiting for approvals, users can access pre-approved assets or no-code smart templates, significantly reducing delays and ensuring deadlines are always met.

Different holiday schedules can lead to frustration when one team’s availability doesn’t align with another’s. A centralized, always-accessible cloud-based platform like a BAM bridges this gap. With all assets in one place, teams working in different time zones or under different cultural calendars can retrieve what they need without waiting for responses from unavailable colleagues.

Many BAM platforms come equipped with integrated approval workflows as standard should you require a chain of review and approval. Stakeholders can review and approve materials in advance or even remotely, another way in which many teams find beneficial is to create workflows that can be set to auto-approve based on predefined rules. This eliminates dependency on specific individuals during the holiday season.

One of the often-overlooked benefits of a self-service portal is its reporting capability. You can track which assets are being downloaded, shared, or used—providing insights into team activity. Surprisingly, these insights may reveal that more work is happening during the holiday season than anticipated, allowing managers to allocate resources more effectively.

During a busy period, the risk of inconsistency increases. A self-service collateral portal or brand asset management (BAM) tool ensures that users can only access on-brand, up-to-date assets wherever they are and whenever they need them. This regulated and continual access provides a single source of truth, maintaining your brand’s integrity even when regular oversight is reduced. By minimizing the chance of outdated or incorrect materials being used, these tools uphold consistency and protect your brand’s reputation.

Imagine a marketing team preparing a campaign while half the team or more is on PTO. Without a BAM, they’d rely on emails or Slack messages to request assets from the design team or approvals from managers—a process that could drag on and be incredibly confusing with versions, inconsistent naming conventions and errors in copy, imagery or even protected brand elements. With a BAM platform, they can:

• Download pre-approved campaign asset templates- from a centralized digital asset library.

• Customize editable materials within brand guidelines.

• Launch the campaign without waiting for additional approvals.

Meanwhile, the integrated reporting and analytics in-platform provide managers and business leaders with a snapshot of campaign progress and asset usage allowing for data to play an influential position in ongoing strategy too. These reporting features also prove that even during the holidays, productivity doesn’t stall.

To get the most out of a Brand Asset Management platform, consider the following steps:

1. Pre-Load Key Assets:

   Upload all essential assets and templates ahead of time, ensuring they’re easily accessible, using a naming convention helps distributed teams to understand who created what and when too.

2. Set Up Approval Rules:

   Configure automated approvals or ensure key stakeholders review critical items before going on leave.

3. Communicate Availability:

   Ensure your team knows how to use the portal and has clear guidelines on accessing resources.

4. Monitor Usage:

   Use reporting tools to track activity and identify any bottlenecks or resource gaps.

The festive season doesn’t have to mean stalled projects or lost productivity. A brand asset management (BAM) tool empowers teams to work autonomously, streamlines workflows, and provides valuable visibility into team activity. By investing in this tool, your business can maintain momentum and navigate holiday challenges with ease—proving that productivity and PTO can coexist.

Brandgility is a prime example of such a solution, offering comprehensive solutions for customizing, managing, and distributing brand assets efficiently. With Brandgility, your team can stay productive and on-brand, always.

Equip your team with the tools they need to thrive, no matter the season or reason, every marketing teams should feel empowered to take brand management into their own hands. Especially over the festive season, which may be chaotic, but with the right support systems in place, your business won’t miss a beat.