Are you prepared to handle your remote marketing team? You may have the plan to take your current team out for remote activities or hire a fully distributed team. All sound exciting, but are you ready to face all the challenges that come with it?

Remote work has seen a growth of 140% since 2005- it’s nearly ten times faster than any other part of the workforce. So take a look at the ten best practices maximizing your remote marketing teams’ collaboration capability, productivity, and performance.

1. Give your team a sense of psychological safety

Research supports that psychological safety is a key component of team collaborations. Teams with a higher safety rate are highly likely to collaborate effectively, and it is especially true for remote marketing teams. Face-to-face communication is rare in remote work environments, and text-based communication often carries the risk of misinterpretation. So learning the psychological safety measurements is utmost for remotes. 

In a work environment where face-to-face interactions are seldom, and text-based communications can often be misinterpreted, establishing psychological safety is paramount. For example:

  • Arrange regular meetings with the team to examine risks and mistakes.
  • Create an environment where anyone can admit their faults and get a chance to learn from them.
  • Positively respond to questions, doubts, or failed-attempts made by employees.
  • Go through remote team-building exercises.
  • Allow your team members to be creative in their workspace.

2. Create a culture deck

The subsequent actions of remote team members and their combined values are what create the team culture. Distance between companies and employees is bad for team members and especially for newcomers- as it makes a barrier in understanding team culture. For this reason, you need to create a culture deck:

  • It provides an outline for organizational documents like a mission statement, cultural idea, core values of the brand, and operating principles. 
  • It works as a roadmap of team culture and helps with key information like employee standard behavior and expectations.
  • You can also work with your remote marketing team to build the perfect culture deck. Get their insights to figure out the culture that fits.

3. Deploy tools for monitoring of employees

Keeping track of the remote marketing team can be tricky. Giving them guidelines is not enough, you also have to ensure each remote marketing member is doing their part in the right manner. Remote members can be involved in any type of work. At one time, they can work in the field to meet different people, and at other times, they may do paperwork on the computer. 

Either way, they will be using different tools to process their jobs, which makes the monitoring part easy. Monitoring of employees with devices makes the remote team management simple and accurate. You will know if the employees are doing work productivity and getting more efficient. Device-base monitoring will help you to define each remote marketing members’ future in the team as it uses software to keep a pinpoint record of activity and accuracy.

4. Inspire teams for face-to-face conversations

There is a famous saying, “It is nice to put a face to a name.”

In today’s’ online world, this line more related than ever. We all those friends whom we met online and then became the real-life besties. We also have those friends whom we have only seen on virtual photos, but never heard the voice of.

Your remote marketing team may have similar colleagues. It’s the reason why you should promote face-to-face interactions, because: 

  • It builds stronger and more meaningful relationships among employees.
  • It allows doing more complex and strategic thinking.
  • It turns interpreting team member’s emotions and intentions into an easier thing.

These factors highly influence collaboration positively. Video call is the next best thing after in-person interactions.

5. Create A Written Record Of Conversations

Your remote team can suffer from an information imbalance. It is because traditional on-site employees get information by being physically present at work, whereas remote employees have to gather information via phone calls, meetings, or other types of discussions. Unfortunately, the distributed data can’t reach all remote members, and often leave some of them clueless.

For this reason, you have to maintain a written record of every data and ensure everyone has enough access to this information. The written record could include:

  • Total meeting time.
  • Summary of important phone calls.
  • List of important weekly and monthly events.

The documents should then By sharing the record inaccessible places, you can secure transparency, offer peace of mind, and provide evidence for the decision-making process in the future.

6. Keep Teams Small And Diverse

What makes employees happy in the remote workplace? A survey found that most of them like to work in small teams, because:

  • It makes the communication part easier.
  • It helps to develop a closer bond between colleagues.
  • It reduces roadblock at work.
  • It promotes risk-taking in a high manner.
  • Allows to hear more ideas and act upon them.
  • Smaller teams have the advantage of getting major benefits that larger teams lack.

Supercharge this effect by making a diverse team. It will allow you to bring in people from different experiences, cultures, insights, and perspectives, which will provide benefits in the long run.

So in short, a) make your remote marketing team realize that they can contribute even with the embarrassment and fear of fails. b) Publish documents that outline the organizations’ desired culture and help your remote team to understand faster. c) Ensure monitoring of employees via digital devices and employee monitoring software for better work efficiency and higher productivity, and d) Maintain a written record of all conversation so your remote marketing team can access information when needed.