How To Adopt Remote Work In A Marketing Team
In these extraordinary times, organizations are adapting so they can continue moving forward with business. One way to adapt quickly is to look for inspiration from those who have accomplished what you are trying to do. These lessons learned can serve as a starting point for creating a playbook for your organization.
Setting up remote work processes for your marketing isn’t something you can do with your eyes shut. Marketing operations require making constant updates, syncing specialists from multiple teams, and working with tight deadlines. As hard as it is to do this when all of you are in the same room, imagine doing it with the team spread across multiple cities or even countries.
However this is something Peter Lang, the CEO of Uhuru Network, a remote marketing agency, has succeeded in. Peter leads a team of almost 50 distributed team members and is an advocate for remote work. Sharing his experience at Running Remote Online, an event dedicated to scaling remote teams, he advised to “…offer a remote infrastructure for your employees, for your team as we say — the onus is on the company to invest in productive infrastructure that makes them successful.”
Are you a leader who would like to help your marketing team work remotely more effectively? This article will explore what it means to invest in productive infrastructure and how it can help a marketing team transition to remote work.
What is agile marketing, and how does it relate to scrum?
The remote marketing agency Uhuru Network describes agile marketing as “an approach in which teams identify and focus their collective efforts on high-value activities and projects, complete those tasks collaboratively, measure their impact, and then continuously and incrementally improve the results over time.”
Agile marketing encompasses four components:
1) Define the most important task, which helps your team focus.
2) Develop procedures to handle tasks and delegate ownership to specific team members.
3) Measure accomplishments regularly and review your approach to strive for better results in the future.
4) Learn from setbacks and challenges.
In other words, agile marketing is a tool to help your team identify what’s essential and execute on it. This focus is key to getting results.
In the book, Extreme Ownership, the author’s Jocko Willink, and Leif Babin discuss the importance of focus on a team: “…with so much going on in the chaos and mayhem, they would try to take on too many tasks at once. It never worked. I taught them to Prioritize and Execute. Prioritize your problems and take care of them one at a time, the highest priority first. Don’t try to do everything at once or you won’t be successful.”
Uhuru Network defines scrum as “a framework that boosts transparency and adaptability.” Scrum proves a path for a team member to deliver results consistently. This framework has four parts:
1) Sprint: a period to complete specific tasks. For instance, one week, a month, etc.
2) Daily Team Huddles: provides status check-ins, coordinates collaboration, identity and eliminates roadblocks.
3) Sprint Retrospective: have a conversation about what went well in a sprint and how the team can improve.
4) Scrum Planning: set priorities, delegate ownership of tasks, discuss how you’ll collaborate with clients, and attempt to identify possible challenges ahead of time.
Peter Lang, CEO at Uhuru Network, discusses why the scrum framework is essential for distributed teams:
“In a remote environment, you have the potential to lose people. By building, by being responsible as an organization, by creating an environment where you care about them being successful…you’re empowering them to complete the work that they need to get done on behalf of the company. You’re putting the effort to create an environment that supports that. They get to realize the benefits. They get to progress better and more effectively no matter where they are in the world or whether or not there is a global pandemic.”
Agile marketing and scrum go hand in hand to empower your team to know what’s working and what’s not working so you can ultimately do more of what is working.
Next, we’ll explore specific tactics in Uhuru Network’s remote marketing playbook to understand how they get things done. (These tactics have been developed from years of experience with clients like global enterprises, Fortune 500 companies, and even smaller clients in countries worldwide.)
Discipline & desire
Think about how you learned how to swim. Did you dive right into the deepest end of the pool?
Probably not.
I imagine that you nervously dipped your toes in at the edge of the shallowest part of the pool. Then as you became comfortable with the water and gained a little confidence, you took a baby step onto the stairs leading into the pool and one more. And then, over time, you got better and better until swimming came naturally to you.
This approach can also carry over to other skills. First, you lay a foundation for the basics. Then you build upon that solid foundation.
Discipline and desire are the foundation of Uhuru Network’s playbook for remote marketing teams. Each team member needs to be open to the idea of collaborating and communicating remotely. You can’t move forward together without this commitment. No systems, processes, or tools will help your team stay productive if they have no desire to be remote.
Resistance may sometimes appear in times of change.
Explore the resistance by ensuring that everyone on your team understands the “why” behind a change like adopting remote work. In doing so, you can often change the hearts and minds of those previously not onboard. Offer them clarity by addressing each of their concerns and remind them that remote work is a skill. And like other skills such as swimming or riding a bicycle, you can get better over time with enough practice.
Next up, we’ll explore the first of the five pillars in Uhuru Network’s marketing playbook for remote teams.
Work decomposition
Work decomposition is the first pillar that builds on the foundation of discipline and desire. It taps into scrum by exploring mechanisms that have different levels and horizons. For example, you may have a sprint that is an epic (a mechanism) that is tactical (a level) with a short to medium timeframe (a horizon). You could also have tasks (a mechanism) that are operational (a level) and are very short (a horizon).
The gist is that these various mechanisms allow your remote marketing team to have actionable items to complete during their sprints.
Does breaking a project down into a series of actionable items sound familiar?
The author Mark Twain was onto something magical when he said, “the secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret to getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks and then starting on the first one.”
When you use this approach, the impossible that seemed out of reach starts to appear on the horizon.
The CEO of Uhuru Network, Peter Lang, touches on a lesson learned from having clarity on what you plan to accomplish:
“At the end of the day if you do not have a list of items that you’re going to do and especially in marketing when they are consistently the same quarter after quarter year over year even though there is disruption to the mediums, disruption to the channels,” said Lang. “You’re doing yourself a disservice in trying to understand how to productively complete work at a pace that’s going to impact your organization.”
Next, we’ll talk about the second pillar, which is about knowing where your time is going.
Time tracking
The second pillar of Uhuru Network’s playbook for remote marketing teams is time tracking. Time tracking helps each team member paint a vivid picture of where their time is being spent. If the thought of tracking your time makes you uncomfortable, then reframe how you think about time tracking as a positive thing.
Here is a reframe that you can use right now:
Time tracking is a powerful tool because it brings me clarity on how I am actually spending my time vs. how I thought I was spending my time. Knowing how I spend my time can help me increase my impact as a team member.
Peter Lang from Uhuru Network has two recommendations to maximize the benefit: 1) track start and stops and 2) monitor for two weeks and then review. Here are some examples of start and stops that you can adapt to your organization:
- Team huddle
- Meeting with client ABC
- Review candidate profiles for new hires
- Operations meeting for X and Y
- Review new client onboarding procedures
Up next, we’ll explore a way to design your week to be happy and productive.
One calendar
One calendar is the third pillar in Uhuru Network’s marketing playbook for remote teams, and it is based on blocks of time. One of the benefits of being a remote worker is flexibility around getting work done. For some, that can mean choosing their working hours or the location that they work from like a dedicated space in their home, a coworking center, or maybe a local coffee shop.
Lang recommends creating your ideal week on an online calendar. The concept of the ideal week, popularized by Michael Hyatt, helps you maximize your energy throughout the day to get things done that are important to you.
For instance, you may find that you enjoy exercising in the morning to kick off your day, or maybe you want to take your kids to school and pick them up. Add these events that matter to you to your calendar and interchange your work items. Then shuffle things around to create a version of your ideal week so you can be productive while working remotely.
Next, we’ll explore how technology can help you embrace your ideal week.
Activity management software
The fourth pillar in Uhuru Network’s playbook is activity management software. An app that offers a kanban board with swim planes provides your remote marketing team with structure. It helps your team know where you are during a sprint.
Peter Lang talks about the benefit of using technology like a kanban board:
“So again technology — yes, its structure. Yes, it confines you to a degree. It also gives you freedom. It gives you the freedom to then experience the life that the ideal week can give you. A very simple framework is planning, ready, in progress, internal review, and done depending on how you get things completed.”
We’ll take a look at the final pillar of Uhuru Network’s playbook next.
Segmented communications
The fifth pillar of Uhuru Network’s playbook is segmented communications. Segmented communications is about choosing the right channel for collaboration. Here is an overview of the tools that helps Uhuru Network’s team get things done:
- Collaboration suite: tools for teams like email, calendar, and more.
- Team chat: a private space for internal team communication around things that are not task-specific.
- Project management software: holds all work items like kanban boards.
- Client management software: collaborate with clients.
- Virtual phone: make calls through your computer instead of a traditional phone line.
- Video messaging: create a short video for asynchronous communication.
These five pillars are then stacked by daily, weekly, and monthly timeframes, which tie back into scrum depending on your team’s sprints.
We opened this article by exploring the idea of agile marketing and scrum. This duo works together to help your team know what’s working so you can do less of what isn’t working and way more of what is working. Next, we looked at what it means to have a foundation of discipline and desire and to want to work remotely. Then we built on that foundation by stepping through the five pillars:
1) Work decomposition. (Break things down into actionable chunks.)
2) Time tracking. (Know how you are truly spending your time.)
3) One calendar. (Design your ideal week for happiness and productivity.)
4) Activity management software. (Leverage technology to stay on track as a team.)
5) Segmented communications. (Choose the right channel to accomplish tasks.)
The beauty of a playbook like Uhuru Network’s game plan for remote marketing teams is that it gives you a jump start building your systems and processes. Instead of trying to figure out things on your own, you have practical items that you can try out and refine to create a version for your remote marketing team.
Was it helpful for you to learn how Uhuru structures the work of their remote marketing team? Peter Lang shared these best practices at one of the Running Remote Online conferences — the premier event for the founders of the remote-first businesses.
Author Bio: Anna Usova is a Marketing & Partnership Manager at Running Remote conference. She’s been working in the IT industry for over eight years, two of which 100% remotely and is extremely passionate about the movement. The main goal of her work is keeping the remote work international community more connected and help people learn more about the opportunities they have.
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