If you were to survey our company, you would find that 50 percent of our employees work remotely. As the digital workspace continues to become more advanced, and the market for higher-caliber marketers continues to be extremely competitive, many organizations today are enjoying the advantages of recruiting remote marketing talent.
As a marketing recruitment firm, we know that remote work is no longer a trend but an important part of recruitment success. OwlLabs reports that 3.9 million Americans work from home sometimes or work remotely full-time, and these numbers are going to increase in the years to come. According to a CNBC study, more than two-thirds of the global workforce works remotely at least once a week and 53 percent work from home for at least half of the week. For employers, recruiting remote marketing talent contributes numerous advantages to a company’s bottom line, such as lower cost, reduced turnover, higher productivity, less overhead, and most importantly, access to a larger talent pool, especially when it comes to recruiting in challenging locations.
Despite the growing number of remote marketing talent, numerous organizations are only starting to dip their toes in the pool of remote marketers. The lack of daily face to face interaction mixed with the blend of dispersed employees can result in inefficient collaboration between marketing team members and ultimately, a dangerous trip down the road of individual and departmental silos.
To benefit from the significant advantages of remote marketing talent, today’s marketing executives must be able to effectively manage departments of dispersed employees. Keep reading as we share top tips for CMOs to conquer management of dispersed workforce and maximize productivity.
Marketing Recruitment Firm Best Practices to Drive High Efficiency with a Dispersed Marketing Team
1. Calibrate Your Leadership Mindset
Video by HubSpot
For any change to happen from top-down, Chief Marketing Officers must adjust their way of thinking. As a leader, you have to acknowledge and understand that managing remote marketing talent is different from managing your on-site employees. It’s not better or worse, more productive or less productive. It’s just different and requires a different skillset. Thus, the way you lead your team must adapt to the new work styles and workflows.
2. Foster Collaboration and Over-Communicate
To effectively manage a team with both onsite and offsite marketing talent, marketing executives must not only foster collaboration but almost enforce it. As a CMO, you must make more of an effort to over-communicate to your direct reports and engage with those that work onsite and remotely.
How to Ensure Top-Notch Communication Efficiency?
First of all, CMOs need to master the right software that enables easy and efficient virtual communication. Using digital tools like Skype or Zoom for regular virtual meetings and discussions will maximize face-to-face time and build a sense of trust. Secondly, marketing leaders must prioritize strong communication and go above and beyond to provide necessary guidance as it would naturally happen if everyone worked in the same office.
Face to face meetings and conversations (or suitable alternatives) are vital for keeping marketers ingrained in the company culture. Without direct interactions, employees will become disengaged and eventually unproductive. Marketing executives who make communication a priority and focus on enhancing collaboration via various forms of interaction see better results in their teamwork
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3. Architect a Culture of Positivity
It’s human nature to need a sense of belonging. As CMOs, you have an opportunity to create a positive sense of teamwork within your department, even with a dispersed team. Harvard Business Review found that positive team environments increase job satisfaction, decrease stress, motivate loyalty, and bring out the best in peers.
Establishing a culture of positivity in the workplace is even more critical for dispersed teams because virtual miscommunications or lack of in-person collaboration can quickly become frustrating; conflicts can arise faster and propel stress into disengagement.
Develop a space for your team to get to know each other where they can cement their feeling of togetherness. Acknowledging your team’s efforts and celebrating their successes as a team will lead to higher productivity in collaboration.
4. Keep Engagement High Between Onsite and Remote Marketing Talent
While a flexible workplace helps to attract and retain top marketing talent, organizations need to be intentional and diligent to keep engagement high. A 2018 Gallup announcement reported that 34% of U.S. workers are engaged, which means over fifty percent of our workforce is still not fully engaged.
Highly engaged teams, according to Gallup, show 21% greater profitability. To keep both onsite and remote marketing talent connected, informed, and engaged, Forbes suggested to regularly host social events and team activities (among other methods of employee engagement).
5. Recruit the Right Marketing Talent
Think of the people on your team as your order winners as they provide a competitive advantage for your organization. Employees are the ones who create innovation, value, and solutions for your organization.
To maximize productivity and marketing ROI, executives must first know how to hire the right marketers. With the accelerated pace marketing is moving today, the stakes are too high to risk a bad hire or even an average one. Recruiting top marketing talent with the right experience, skill sets, and culture fit to not only succeed but thrive in a digital workplace is critical to your company’s bottom line as a poor hire could cost you up to 5 times the employee’s annual salary!
Working efficiently remotely and offsite is a skill that not everyone has. Equally, it can be a challenge for onsite employees to work with a sizeable remote team. As a marketing recruitment firm, we suggest tailoring your recruiting strategies to find the type of employees you need. For example, work with marketing recruitment experts who can identify the right candidates with experience of efficient remote collaboration to save you time in the recruitment process and long-term cost of a wrong hire.
The Bottom Line
Digital marketing workspaces will continue to grow and transform how and where people work. CMOs now have the advantage of using the new generation of digital workspaces to recruit top marketing talent anywhere, decrease turnover, and positively impact organizations’ ROI. Adapting leadership and recruitment strategies to the new work environments is a must-have for any cutting-edge marketing executive, and relying on the support of experienced marketing recruiters can help you overcome the challenges of remote marketing talent acquisition to create a shorter path to marketing excellence in your organization.
