7 Guaranteed Ways to Develop a Successful Remote Marketing Team
The core value underlying every member of a small or big corporation should be to thrive better in the company of their team-mates. They should whole-heartedly believe in the effectiveness of team-work.
This value gets inculcated naturally when you are sharing an office space with a number of other people who share a common goal. But, when you are miles apart from your team, evolving values of fellowship doesn’t remain a cake walk anymore.
You will need to get invested into building bonds among your marketers besides focusing on organizational effectiveness, which, in case of remote-working, becomes more important.
According to Tecla, 70% of the people around the globe work remotely at least once a week.
So, we bring you seven effective ways to blossom a booming office culture even when you are overseeing your team from miles away.
#1: Start with some in-house time
Working remotely, one of the many challenges you face is the helplessness from not staying connected with your marketers. Google’s survey says team members who have a good understanding of each others’ feelings make the most productive teams.
While we understand that you’ll have to carry out most communications over a voice or video chat, but no one can deny the effect a face-to-face communication has. According to Forbes, 21% of remote workers felt lonely on their job.
So, we suggest you get your new employees introduced to the remaining marketing team by letting them work in-house for about three months before they start working remotely from wherever they please.
The goal behind this is to make them feel the vibe and hustle of the team besides making them grow sensitivity towards their colleagues. Working in-house would also allow fast, constructive criticism on their job, which will bring the product closer to perfection.
#2: Ask for feedback
Communication is the key!
You might face difficulty in staying connected, but overcoming challenges like these becomes ten-fold easier when the people on your team are willing to communicate.
Be it a minor hitch or a major setback on your path to reach your goal; it is crucial to demand feedback from your employees on their progress or problems they face.
28% of workers admitted poor communication to be the reason behind missing a deadline.
To keep the communication flowing seamlessly, bring together all sorts of media of communication such as video conferencing, our old school telephone calls, and 3D surroundings.
Organize a mandatory, weekly video conferencing and let your team gauge the outcome of their efforts as a whole by discussing their proposals and barriers they have to overcome.
#3: Make the most of technology
You are well aware of the features that remote working lacks in comparison to a real office. So, providing an office-like experience to your employees should be one of your responsibilities.
An office environment helps you stay aware of the smallest happenings in your team. Trust is built almost automatically by merely being there. But virtual marketing teams fall short of this feature.
So, the need to create a virtual office becomes inevitable if you were to avoid any sort of miscommunication.
There is a vast array of applications at your disposal today that will make your job easier. Some of the categories of software that you’ll need are:
- Communication
- File Management
- Time Tracking
- Team Feedback
- Health
- Project Management
You can invest in a knowledge base software that will help you record DIY guides, stack tutorials and answers to questions that you encounter frequently. This way you wouldn’t be wasting time answering the same questions from different people.
Also, set aside a certain amount for SaaS investment fund. Most companies these days are switching to subscription-based, cloud-computing approach instead of installing software on computers.
#4: Manage your time efficiently
While normally a working person has to manage to balance his job and personal life, working remotely has an added bonus of keeping time differences in mind. Time differences have a big impact on the flow of work and the whereabouts of the teams.
Not only are the employees scattered all around the globe, but the ones who share the same time zone wouldn’t be necessarily present at their PC at the same time.
Timeshifting is mandatory if you are aiming at coordinating tasks across your global employees effectively. If you adjust your working hours accordingly to better synchronize with those of your team, you will be able to interact better.
Your marketers can opt for that one time which connects most time zones or split their day and divide time into periods instead of getting the whole job done at a time.
Encouraging working in advance is beneficial too, as it will make keeping track of the work easy.
#5. Employ culture-fit candidates
Now, you can’t hold yourself accountable for everything that happens in your team. So, to be able to trust your employees with responsibilities, you need to hire the right people. We have stressed on the importance of team-work right at the beginning of the article.
Besides a collaborative marketing team, you need to decide on a number of principles to include in your criteria for hiring.
Keeping track of what your employees are doing becomes harder if they are geographically dispersed around the world. So, the things that you can rely on are their nature and attitude towards work.
Precisely speaking, hire driven, independent, and organized people.
#6: Emphasize on productivity
Productivity and collaboration are undoubtedly tightly knit and greatly reliant on each other.
The more positive and uplifting the working atmosphere, the more productive are your employees and vice-versa.
Team-work is the cradle for productivity.
The most successful strategies start off as an “okay” idea, which is made genius when team members improvise on it. Your marketers should actively participate in every weekly discussion or brainstorming session.
Voicing your opinions on increasing the brand’s awareness and presenting the team with ideas that have frequently been visiting your mind will motivate your team and reap positive results.
There are apps made for marketers to brainstorm their ideas, follow up on them, and unanimously chose one of them irrespective of their location.
#7: Stay as transparent as possible
We can’t mention enough how miscommunication can be the death of your remote working agency. The lack of face-to-face communication may frequently lead to misunderstanding and create a major obstacle in your team’s workflow.
To avoid such a situation, keep yourself regularly updated and keep your activities and decisions regarding the team transparent.
Your team needs to have the right and clear understanding of all the hows, whys, whens, and wheres of the activities for them to be able to trust you and work for you dedicatedly.
Organization of frequent video conferences can be accompanied by a project management tool to define the duties of each team member clearly. You can make use of weekly emailing updates techniques.
Wrapping up
Gone are the days when people didn’t dare imagine about conducting businesses without physical meetings. With the technology advancing and making leaps on a daily basis, more and more companies are preferring remote-working, over a walk-in office. Remote businesses grew by about 80% in a span of 8 years from 2005 to 2012.
Let us know the changes you see in your remote working team after implementing the above ideas down in the comments!