Collaboration between your team members is essential to attain success. With remote and telecommute workers becoming the new normal due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, remote marketing teams need to improve collaboration to achieve sales and marketing objectives.
But how do you go about it? Read some helpful remote team collaboration tips below.
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1. End User Experience Monitoring
End user experience monitoring (EUEM) is a great way to improve collaboration in remote marketing teams. EUEM enables your team to monitor the application’s impact on device performance from the user’s point of view, which ultimately helps the enterprise’s IT.
EUEM is equipped with business activity analytics, allowing you to monitor your marketing team’s response time as they interact with the apps used in a remote business workflow. Also, EUEM promotes secure data transmission, supporting a Privacy Mode. In this way, hostnames and user names are masked in compliance with privacy considerations. If you want to learn more, click here for additional information.
2. Set Clear Team Schedules
Working from home comes with perks, such as having a flexible schedule. However, freely working on just whatever schedule you feel like might not work for the rest of your marketing team. Ensure smooth and efficient remote team collaboration by setting clearly defined individual and team schedules.
You can create daily or weekly team schedules for one-on-one discussions and collaborative meetings based on relevant information. Here are the sample questions you can ask yourself when setting schedules:
- What are your remote employees’ time zones?
- Do the time zones overlap in working hours?
- What should be a reasonable response time?
3. Encourage Real-Time Communication
You can improve your collaboration with your remote marketing team by encouraging real-time communication through video chat or video conferencing. With video chatting, you can convey body language and easily remember your teammates. Also, you will have more effective discussions and fewer misunderstandings.
The following tips can help improve team collaboration through real-time communication:
- Use the Right Communication Tools: There are many communication apps you can choose from to encourage real-time communication, such as Skype and Slack.
- Engage in Small Talk: People tend to feel stressed working online all day. So, it would help to engage your remote employees in small talk, releasing their tension and improving their mood.
4. Keep Track of Your Team’s Progress
While micromanagement can hurt your efforts, it’s still best to track your team’s development progress by yourself. It’s one way to promote a communicative and collaborative work environment to empower your team.
Check out these effective ways in tracking your remote employee’s performance:
- Use the Right Software: One way to keep track of your remote employees’ performance is by choosing the right software. Some examples of software programs to help track remote employee performance and empower your team include Time Doctor, ActivTrak, Asana, and Trello.
- Help Employees Using Self-Monitoring Tools: Encourage your remote employees to track their progress using self-monitoring tools, such as checklists, project plans, and activity logs. In this way, they can monitor whether they’re meeting deadlines and goals.
5. Conduct Online Coaching and Gather Feedback
As a marketing manager, you know that coaching shouldn’t be overlooked. Even if you have remote employees, it’s a good idea to conduct online coaching to gather feedback from them and let them understand their progress and your expectations. You can coach your team members at least once a week to reap the benefits of this activity.
Your employees can determine their strengths and weaknesses and can take the online coaching session as an opportunity to express themselves or provide general feedback about:
- Standard Operating Procedure Set in Place: Your employees can provide feedback to the SOPs when completing tasks or facing marketing struggles. Aso, it will help you modify some guidelines set in place to accomplish your sales and marketing goals.
- New Marketing Strategies: If you have just implemented new marketing techniques, you can gather employee feedback during coaching.
- Timelines or Deadlines: Work-from-home setting may have flexible hours, but you may choose to enforce strict shifting or work schedules. Inquire about the opinions of your employees about your scheduling techniques, like their shifting schedules and workload.
- Remote Setup: Ask your remote employees for some suggestions on how to improve your remote work setup. It’s a fantastic way to encourage collaboration and enhance productivity.
6. Conduct Continuous Online Training
Remote marketing is rapidly increasing in popularity. More and more brick-and-mortar businesses are being forced to embrace digital marketing strategies to attract more prospects and increase sales.
For this reason, it’s imperative to conduct continuous training to keep your remote marketing team abreast with the latest marketing trends. You want your remote employees to be up-to-date with the current marketing news, new techniques, and concepts that affect your business niche or industry.
These training tips can help you in continuously training your remote team members for collaboration and productivity:
- Live Streaming: This training technique is useful because you can obtain real-time feedback from your remote employees, improving collaboration.
- E-Learning: You can create online modules through electronic or e-learning, wherein your remote marketing team members can take them in their free time or any time of the day for self-paced online learning. At the end of the online module, you can test your employees’ knowledge on the discussed topic via an online quiz or questionnaire.
- Video Tutorials: You can create tutorial videos that you can share with your employees, allowing them to play the video repeatedly if they haven’t understood the topic the first time. Video tutorials are perfect in demonstrating how to apply new marketing concepts such as affiliate marketing and influencer marketing.
Conclusion
You’ve learned the different ways to improve remote marketing team collaboration and productivity. Using end user experience monitoring and performance tracking tools, you can determine your team’s progress and monitor the impacts of remote apps and devices on your business processes.
Setting a clear team schedule and encouraging clear communication promotes improved collaboration, even if your team members are in different time zones. It’s also vital to conduct continuous online training to keep your remote marketing team highly knowledgeable and skilled in emerging marketing trends.