Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic hit and lockdowns became the “new normal,” many companies and organizations quickly moved to accommodate their employees who weren’t let go so business could continue from remote locations.
Note that we’re saying “accommodate”, not “adjust” or “relocate”.
Surprisingly enough, over the past year, more and more companies and organizations are actually embracing remote work instead of looking forward to getting everyone back into the office. Why? Because, most have come to a common realization — it’s less expensive to run a business with everyone on staff working from home.
When big-tech companies like Intel make it no secret that they’re going to remain remote once COVID is vanquished, you know building your team to be fully remote can be done, and can be a fiscally wise decision.
The question then becomes, how do you build a healthy remote marketing team? Well, we’re here to break that down into 10 sections which should be a great launching point for you moving forward.
Let’s dive in.
Building a Remote Marketing Team for the Future
1. Access to Global Talent
The most obvious first step to take is to hire talented people to work on your staff. But that process isn’t as simple as you might think. When building a remote marketing team, you need to ensure you’re hiring people who are focused, reliable, and disciplined.
Building a remote team opens up possibilities to hire people from all walks of life around the world, but finding the best fit challenging.
You see, an office environment provides employees with a space to coordinate and encourages those within to stay concentrated. When those same employees are working from home, all sorts of distractions can cause a lapse in work output because the environment is no longer as concentrated. Kids, pets, deliveries, spills, and all kinds of other worldly mishaps and unknowns can and will disrupt the work your people are doing.
There’s no shortage of talented and skilled people out there willing to work for you. With the right motivation and incentives, you can fill roles with the right people.
Where you’ll truly get results is in vetting those same people to ensure they’re willing to do the job from home despite potential interruptions. We can’t tell you how to definitively conduct your interviews, but from experience, when building FMDM’s remote marketing team, we look for more than just “paper qualifications.”
2. Structure Is Important for Remote Employees
Another foundational need for building a healthy remote marketing team is structure. This particular topic covers everything from project management to time tracking. As soon as you’ve hired talent, those talented people should be receiving information about structure.
At FMDM, we know how important structure is — but we’re still far from where we need to be. Establishing a structure for remote teams is a work in progress and needs to evolve and adapt as the team adds new members. From our experience a stagnant structure that is rigid causes teams to deteriorate over time.
Goals need to be met and employees need to stay focused, especially when they’re working from home. In an office, this is accomplished by having managerial staff keep tabs on everyone around them. When that same staff is at home with no leadership occasionally passing by and looking over their shoulder, this can be managed virtually.
We’re not talking about micro-managing. No sirree!
Rather, pointing out the polar opposite of how teams are managed in-house versus remotely.
There are a myriad of ways of making sure timelines are met, work is tracked, and hours are logged (for contractors). We could spend hours listing how many online/cloud-based resources there are, but you’re likely going to want to find what suits your business and employees best.
Remember to think about stability while considering structure for your remote marketing team.
3. Keeping Communications Alive
Now we step into a bit more complex recommendation. Communication goes beyond just providing your employees with voice, it’s also about ensuring they know the brand, how work gets done, who’s who, the chain of command, and everything else in between.
You start with the basics. Fullmoon Digital, for instance, uses Slack to engage with every employee from all over the U.S. and the world in light-hearted or non-business-related conversation. Other times, we’ll take advantage of Zoom in order to foster a more personalized discussion, especially when it’s actually about business-related stuff. Point being, getting everyone to feel like a valued member of the team means that team needs to be able to freely, quickly, and efficiently communicate with each other.
Going a bit deeper, though, is the level of communication that also informs, provides extra stability to your structure (see above), and hopefully sets a regimen that keeps everyone working together while also encouraging discipline for those days when they’re feeling separated.
4. Engagement Goes A Long Way
This is another big one and it purposefully comes on the heels of communication. It’s also more so advice for management and leadership because where you come in and help foster a healthy remote marketing team is by engaging with your team.
Proactively making connections with your team, offering assistance, or just checking in to see how they’re coming along with their work goes a long way.
Think about a time when someone random reached out to you via text message or even call just to see how you were doing? That same feeling of knowing someone cares carries over into the business environment as well. And it takes little effort.
Using your communications platforms and applications, make it a priority and set daily goals to touch base with random coworkers. This is especially important, too, if they’re under your leadership. Encouraging engagement encourages engagement.
Bottom line, there’s no excuse not to engage with your team!
5. The Right Incentives
Companies that adopt remote structures give up office perks. Say goodbye to free lunches, ping-pong tables, fancy office space…the list goes on and on. Those are not incentives that promote productivity. I’ve worked in companies that offer those office perks — looking back at those early days, these “incentives” were nothing but well-crafted traps to lure talent – duh!
One of the more subtle ways of building a health remote marketing team is to ensure they’re provided with meaningful incentives that motivates and make people better. Finding a variety of ways to incentivize your employees isn’t difficult, and they shouldn’t cost you an arm and a leg.
Incentives go beyond just the basics of a salary, insurance, overtime, and all of the other regular perks of employment. Incentives also include extra benefits such as gym memberships, compensation for furthering an education, bonuses, allowances, childcare, philanthropic incentives, and much, much more.
Offering enticing incentives can also mean overlapping with some of the previously mentioned sections and include ways in which remote team members feel involved, valued, and connected.
Seriously, when you get to this topic, take some time to hash out any and all ideas and opinions about ways in which you can incentivize your employees. This quiet, often unspoken category can easily and very quickly incentivize a healthy remote working environment.
6. Guidelines Must Exist
Everything so far has been fairly elementary, and could even be categorized as “fun.” But there is an elephant in the room—so to speak—when it comes to the topic of discipline. No company or organization can avoid it.
You need guidelines in order to ensure every employee is on the same page and following best practices in order to maintain discipline. These guidelines or rules don’t have to be too harsh or too dictator-like, they just need to be established, presented immediate, and then enforced.
At FMDM, we have a requirement to be timely with our responses to clients. This guideline, while not written in a handbook, is an understanding within our remote marketing team as part of our customer excellence mindset.
Guidelines can include how working hours are tracked, how often your staff needs to check in, project management, goals, points of contact, how best to communicate with each other, and a whole lot more.
This is likely going to be the most tedious step in ensuring you’re building a healthy remote marketing team, but it will certainly be worth it. Without clearly dictated and enforced guidelines, you’re not likely to inspire your employees with stick-to-itiveness.
7. Invest In Team Development
Most companies and organizations have a structured plan to develop their employees, even including some incentives and/or compensation. The same must also be true for remote marketing teams and even more so than traditional structures. Not only does a steady and sturdy plan for development inspire employees to work harder, it also makes them feel valued, respected, and understood.
The idea here is to have a plan of development in place, and then spring it on your employees when they least expect it. Nothing solidifies loyalty more, to already loyal employees, than helping them develop their career within the organization for which they’re already working.
Development can mean many different things, so be sure to explore all options you can afford. It can mean furthering education, technical advancement, opportunities to lead, encouraging and fostering ideas, and much more. The key here is to make sure every remote marketing team member knows he or she is valued and his or her career is important to everyone from the top down.
8. Monitoring Progress
One of the other big elephants in the room that most don’t like to talk about is monitoring. It’s like the least “fun” topic we’re sharing here, but it’s a necessary one.
Along with guidelines, monitoring is another way in which you enforce discipline with your remote team members. How you go about monitoring is one thing, but how to present your efforts to monitor can be all the difference between a disgruntled workforce and a compliant workforce.
Monitoring, in general, covers all of your efforts to keep tabs on who’s doing what at any given moment of the day. From full-time employees to contractors, tracking projects, time, and all things progression mean you’re absolutely being responsible for organization’s best interests. What’s the point in doing business in an only “fun” environment if you’re not actually getting business done?
The trick with monitoring is that all of your remote team members know what’s happening up front and before they’re even hired. Hints of monitoring efforts should be peppered throughout job listings, and once you begin interviewing, more details should be revealed.
You will find that potential employees are lot more compliant with monitoring efforts when they know they’re happening before they take the job.
Productivity monitoring increases productivity and performance when it’s done in a way that is transparent with buy-in from your remote marketing team. Don’t make “monitoring” a bad word!
9. Good Leadership Is Required
One of the most no-brainer topics we’re covering is leadership. No business can succeed without quality leadership, but we’re not going to just leave it at that. The aspects of having great leadership to ensure you’re building a healthy remote marketing team go beyond mere quality.
“A good shepherd always feeds his sheep first, even when he himself is hungry.” —Matshona Dhiliwayo
This quote sums up our recommendation quite nicely. Leadership means being the first to willingly get your hands dirty. Leadership isn’t about commanding others; it’s all about leading by example.
When you establish your business comprised of remote marketing team members who are lead by leaders who not only know how to lead, but are willing to be the first person to dive into a project, you’re going to experience success.
Leaders of any organization should be wise, experienced, and able to command, and they should also be compassionate, communicative, and inspirational.
Sure, there are lines to be drawn when it comes to leadership to ensure said leaders aren’t being taken for granted or walked upon. But when you put someone in charge of others with our listed qualities, you’re going to see the health of your remote team go up. Leadership is absolutely necessary, and leadership cannot be taken for granted.
10. Celebrate Your Team
Our last tip to building a healthy remote team is to celebrate, and celebrate often. Birthdays, anniversaries, milestones, achievements, successes, lessons learned, and anything else you can think of should be celebrated.
Remote team members are alone and unconnected for the vast majority of time during their regular work days. That otherwise persistent silence, however, is broken up by frequent and repeated celebrations of their existence and the existence of their coworkers. There’s no need to go overboard; it’s all about finding the right balance in what to celebrate and how public to make it.
One example is our mention of lessons learned. No one is perfect, everyone makes mistakes, so when someone screws up and learns from their mistake, it’s a great opportunity to celebrate that person’s chance to learn. Just not publicly.
Finding a reason to pat your remote employees on the back is a great way to keep the health of said remote employees strong. Celebrations reaffirm everyone’s value while also providing them with a sense of reward that honestly doesn’t cost you much more than some spent energy.
If you have an excuse to celebrate, don’t hesitate. Do it.
