How to Effectively Manage a Fully Remote Marketing Team

Love it or hate it, working from home is here to stay. 

A recent study by data scientists at The Ladders found that 25% of professional jobs in North America will be fully remote by the end of 2022 – and that percentage is only expected to grow. 

In other words, remote team management will probably be an essential skill to add to your LinkedIn profile.

But how does one successfully manage a marketing team while online? Keep reading to learn some of our agency’s top 4 tips and tricks.

PSM’s 4 Tips to Effectively Manage a Fully Remote Marketing Team

Perfect Search Media has been fully remote since 2020, and we’ve learned a few things along the way. Get familiar with our most important insights from the last two years down below. 

1. Make Working from Home Work

If you’re going to manage a fully remote team, you need to ensure that working from home is going to, well, work. 

For starters, you need to hire the right people. WFH isn’t for everybody, and that’s 100% okay. But if it is the modality you’re going to roll with, be sure to ask candidates specific questions about how they feel about remote work during their interviews. 

Next, make sure you have the right tools and technological literacy to pull off a remote workplace. We’re not saying you have to be so well-versed that you end up pontificating about all the wonderful uses of Slack channels – but we are saying you should know your software enough to make remote work as uncomplicated of an experience as possible.

2. Trust Your Team Members

This one may be a bit of a hot take, but we see it as an essential part of remote team management. 

It’s so easy as a manager of a WFH team to worry about things like productivity and quality control. All the yellow lighting, snack availability, and sweatpant opportunities an abode provides just can’t be good for your co-workers, can it?

Think again. Several studies over the course of the last decade have shown that teleworking actually increases productivity, boosts happiness, and decreases stress.  

Provided that you did your due diligence by hiring the right people and checking in with them every now and again, you can trust that your team members truly want to work from home and work from home well. So let them! 

3. Stick to a Structure

Let’s be honest: working remotely gives team members a lot more freedom than working in an office ever will. 

That doesn’t mean you should give up on having any sense of structure to your workday, though. In our opinion, successful WFH models find a balance between structured and unstructured time. 

Maybe you schedule a routine morning meeting to go over the day’s agenda. Maybe you have a weekly team meeting to catch up on the highs and lows of the week. Maybe you have monthly 1:1s to keep your co-workers on track. Whatever you decide to do, just make sure it doesn’t block your team’s teleworking flow. 

4. Check Your Culture

Working remotely doesn’t have to feel so remote, y’know?

Just because you only ever see teammates through a screen doesn’t mean it’s against the rules to see them in real life. In fact, hanging out offline can be a great way to reinforce online connections. Ergo, schedule those candle-making classes, wine tastings, and trust-building adventures with abandon.

If a significant portion of your team works in the same city, dedicate a small fund to use on regular happy hours or other get-togethers so those team members can bond in person. But be sure to set aside something for those on your team in different locations – you don’t want anyone feeling left out or unappreciated. 

It’s also still completely within the realm of possibility to cultivate strong team bonds without ever actually meeting co-workers in person. Something as simple as a Zoom trivia night or a live-streamed team dinner can bring your team closer together while still far away. 

Whatever you decide to do, just don’t forget about your culture – even if it’s digitally transmogrified. 

Some marketing leaders will struggle to adjust to the new normal of online work. Perfect Search Media knows how to help bridge the gap between the old and the new. Contact us today to learn how our digital marketing experts can help your team thrive.