Why we bother to be a good best place to work

We were recently announced as a finalist for the 2024 Best Places To Work Awards (Micro Workplace - up to 20 employees). This achievement has been the result of many years of hard work - growing our business, defining the company we wanted to be and putting in place the structure to support the company culture we wanted to nurture. There have been a few learnings along the way which we wanted to share. Is it worth the effort? We think so.

We’ve developed a 2 part blog to explain what we’ve learned and how we’re considered a great place to work.

Part 1 - Nurturing Employee Experience and Connecting Work with Company Purpose

Who we are and what we do

We reimagined virtual marketing more than 6 years ago, and have been growing our digital marketing services ever since. Working remotely and flexibly is the future of work and hugely attractive to today's best marketers. Our permanent team love our model as a way to embrace this unique way of using their skills, supported by our remote team and getting inspiration from working across multiple brands and projects at any given time.

We act as an internal marketing team, working to client budgets, delivering to their goals, and helping to drive their success.

The importance of developing an employee experience strategy

Our company's vision is to "To enable every organisation in the world to have access to awesome marketing as and when they need it." To do that, we believe we need to provide the best marketers in the business, and not everyone can work in a city office, 5 days a week - enter our flexible work policy.

Our employee experience strategy centres on "Creating a culture that supports our team’s professional development, health and wellbeing". We do this in three simple ways:

1. Providing quality work opportunities,

2. Allowing true life/work flexibility,

3. Offering internal career development pathways.

We’re a community of innovative marketers, who work with like minded marketers to deliver fantastic client work, in a flexible way that suits our team. 

We offer a range of family-friendly, inclusive employment policies, flexible working arrangements, wellbeing initiatives and services to support the varied needs of our team. We also have clear internal career pathways and company goals. We strongly believe that happy, well supported staff deliver exceptional marketing outcomes to our clients. Our employee experience and business goals are closely intertwined. 

Ensuring a connection between work and our company strategy and purpose

Our company vision is to enable every organisation in the world to have access to awesome marketing as and when they need it. We demonstrate this every day by working with a wide variety of clients, across a range of industries, with a marketing partnership model that makes sense to work with their team and to meet their marketing objectives. We attract a team of capable marketers that love to work in this way. The variety of clients and array of project work keep things interesting and challenging, and allows our team to grow and develop their marketing capability. 

At the beginning of each year, Virtual Marketers’ leadership team presents the business plan for the year ahead. This is strongly focused on celebrating our successes, acknowledging the work and efforts that have delivered company performance, and clearly outlining the business goals, sales and marketing strategy and people strategy for the year ahead. 

As a professional services business, our people are our business. We make every effort to support and grow each and every one of our team to ensure they deliver great client work, and grow and develop as marketers. Our team’s KPIs are directly linked to our business goals for the year. They are focused on client and work delivery, with plenty of scope for each of our team to add their own spin to the role and add value to both clients and our team. 

We support our team with clear professional development (PD) hours and budget. As well as supporting knowledge gaps in the business, our PD programme allows our team to learn from their peers, foster internal collaboration and ‘team building’ opportunities as smaller team groups attend events and conferences together.

Every month we meet online for an All Team meeting to celebrate as a team, share learnings and provide updates on business performance. Every quarter we get together (ideally in person) to reconnect, share knowledge, learn from each other, solve each other’s client problems and brainstorm solutions for sticky issues. Such regular connection helps to build trust and establish better relationships as a team.

Part 2 - Trusting in leadership and ensuring a positive work environment

Our business was founded by Fran Bellingham and is co-led by Martina Saville. Virtual Marketers' female directors are passionate about delivering great marketing, providing quality work opportunities whilst giving the team the  freedom and flexibility to pursue non-work responsibilities, passions and side hustles.

In the early days of Virtual Marketers, Fran and Martina worked with a range of marketing contractors. We particularly looked for marketers and other specialists such as graphic and web designers who were parents but wanted to return to part-time work, and also wanted to work on quality projects. As Mums ourselves, we wanted the freedom to work part-time and flexibly around our young children, and we encouraged our team to work in the same way. This led us to securing work opportunities for many marketers that were unable to go back to their previous roles, or were doing lesser value work than they were qualified to do, all in the name of being able to work part-time.

Fast forward to 2024 and we now have 11 permanent team members, working 30-40 hour work weeks across Aotearoa New Zealand, at times that suit their schedule and outside work commitments. Our 20+ contractors work across the globe, primarily in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and the UK, delivering quality work to our clients when it suits their schedule.

Leading by example

Our internal (team) and external (client) relationships are built on trusted partnerships. We have a flat organisational structure that ensures Fran and Martina are available and accessible for everyone in our tight knit team. Our team of 11 is structured into 3 squads that enable leadership opportunities for 3 of our team, and easy access to senior knowledge for those marketers reporting into them. Our 3 squads work closely with our contracting team of 20+ to deliver outstanding marketing projects and ongoing marketing expertise.

Key to great leadership in our business is: open and honest conversations, regular conversations with everyone in our business at all levels: 1:1s, weekly squad calls, monthly team calls, Health & Wellbeing check ins, quarterly team days and squad based professional development opportunities.

Fostering a positive work environment

We consider ourselves a tight knit team that supports each other - in the work environment and when personal issues arise. Our team sees our Leadership Team lead with heart and compassion and live and breathe our company values every day in the support we give our team, and the way we address company challenges.  

Key to a positive workplace environment and internal culture is open communication, regular interactions, and building trust and relationships internally, so we can safely and confidently deliver great work to our external clients.

At our quarterly team days, we begin the day with team reconnection exercises. We believe in the concept of 'Whakawhanaungatanga', that supportive and positive relationships are built on trust, creating a sense of belonging (to our team), supporting each other and having clear roles in our business.

Our business values are designed to deliver exceptional work to our clients and build a supportive and positive team environment. Not always easy with a remote team!

Our business values include:

1. Collaboration - We’ve reimagined partnerships by listening and always being open to ideas. We’re NOT the cleverest person in the room and are always happy to work as a team.

Collaboration is successful when our relationships are strong and we can have open and honest conversations.

2. Community - We’ve reimagined teams by connecting and knowing our marketers and clients, both online and offline.

We consciously develop authentic partnerships with our clients. Internally, we believe in open and honest conversations and trusting each other.

3. Accountability - We’ve reimagined responsibility by recommending, delivering and owning our clients’ outcomes.

Autonomy is important to our team. We'll provide whatever internal support is required to ensure a team member excels in solving a client issue or tackling a challenging situation.

4. Creative problem solving - We’ve reimagined creativity by being open minded, and constantly innovating, sharing and building our knowledge. We’re constantly curious.

Curiosity and communication go hand in hand. Sharing and collaborating is an important way to achieve the best results for our clients, so this is an important part of how we operate as a team.

Look out for our next blog about prioritising health, safety and wellbeing, having the right tools and technology for success and the importance of teamwork and connection, and supporting professional growth.

Want to learn more? I’d love to chat. Email me at martina@virtualmarketers.co.nz