31 - Pharma Future: Do we focus enough on the well-being of members of promotional review teams?

Anyone who has worked in or around commercial teams in the life sciences industry will have seen the ups and downs of team members involved in promotional review.

My own ten+ years in the pharmaceutical industry, working as a reviewer, approver and content creator, has led me to believe that it is one of the most emotionally challenging roles in the industry. It’s this experience working in the promotional review teams that made one result from our annual Pepper Flow benchmarks report stand out from the others: users satisfaction correlates with faster and fewer review cycles. But is this a correlation or a causation?

Firstly, a little more about the report; it provides the life sciences industry with an overview of promotional material review metrics from different sectors. The data is based on anonymised records from users of Pepper Flow – Vodori’s material review software for promotional and non-promotional content.

It represents life sciences industries of all sizes, from emerging companies all the way to household-name multinationals. It also covers the following life sciences industries – diagnostics, medical devices, nutrition, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals.

The headline numbers show some interesting trends: small to medium companies (100-500 employees) perform the best, taking just under 7 days to review and approve material, while large companies (>500 employees) take 7.5 days on average, and also require more circulations before jobs are approved. Medical reviewers have the fastest average review time at 2 days, similar to marketing, but significantly faster than legal, who typically take 4.1 days per cycle.

The most thought-provoking area of the data though comes from the user satisfaction statistics. Companies with the highest degree of user satisfaction took 5.7 days to review and approve materials, vs nearly 8 days for companies with the lowest satisfaction.

User satisfaction is dependent on many things: how easy the software is to use; how closely the software configuration matches the business needs; effectiveness of the overall business review process. For me, having worked for my whole career in review teams, the data made me question whether life sciences companies spend enough time focused on the well-being of members of the review teams.

The data is not strong enough yet to demonstrate a causation, but for me, it probably doesn’t matter. Whether a focus on reviewer well-being leads to improved satisfaction, and then faster review times, or a focus on review processes leads to faster review times and better satisfaction, I know they are an interlinked network of relationships.

At Vodori, as a software provider, it is our responsibility to make sure that the tool (in this case Pepper Flow) is easy to use, intuitive and configured to your business needs. The user well-being, however, is definitely much more of a shared responsibility; we will continue to explore the relationship between user satisfaction and faster review. The more we can demonstrate the link to hard business metrics (i.e. faster release of materials), the easier it will be for team leaders to dedicate time to improving well-being of teams performing the difficult task of material review.

Ultimately though, does a focus on well-being have to be proven to improve hard business metrics before we give it the importance it deserves? I know my view on this but encourage you all to discover your own answer.