Why we bother to be a good best place to work continued.

We’ve previously touched on employee experience, connecting work with company purpose, trusting in leadership, ensuring a positive work environment. 

This article will discuss prioritising health, safety and wellbeing, having the right tools and technology for success and the importance of teamwork and connection, and supporting professional growth.

Part 3 - Prioritising health, safety and wellbeing and having the right tools and technology for success

As a virtual business with a largely remote team, wellbeing is a key tenet of everything we do. Our people primarily work with our clients remotely and only some of our team work from our co-shared workspace in Wellington. Prior to Covid-19, we used internal communication tools like Slack and Google Meet to communicate regularly with our team and clients. Following Covid-19, these tools became commonplace and we've added to them too. 

Trello has allowed us to plan workflows more successfully, Productive allows us to manage capacity for our permanent team and contractors on a daily basis, so that as projects creep or a sick day comes up, we can make the necessary allowances and transfer workload to another resource. 

Health and wellbeing in action

In addition to weekly 1:1s between our team and their Manager, weekly squad calls with their wider squad and at least one of our directors, and monthly All Team meetings, we ensure we connect regularly to share problems and celebrate the wins. Supporting these regular check ins, we use Slack for work based communications and sharing fun (!) in our remote working lives. 

Every 2 months, every employee has a dedicated meeting with our Head of People to specifically discuss their Health and Wellbeing. The focus for these conversations is around how the business can better support our employees, and make small changes or adjustments to relieve roadblocks or issues. It could be that a more ergonomic desk chair is needed, a new online tool is needed to alleviate an ongoing issue, or a discussion around managing workflow or work prioritisation.  

Our directors and senior leadership team lead by example. We're up front and honest about personal situations that are impacting our work life, encouraging each other to take time out of work if we're not well or having a bad day. Our close knit team sees our team rally and support each other during personal crises or difficult to manage work situations. We have a genuine 'pitch in' attitude when it comes to supporting our team and enabling a team member to take some time out of work when they need to.

Right fit tools and systems

Every two months, our employees have a dedicated meeting with our Head of People to specifically discuss their Health and Wellbeing. This conversation often leads on to understanding the support we can provide to our employees in terms of physical hardware or software.

Our team's physical remote workspace is important in that it complies with NZ Health and Safety standards and the individual needs of our team (laptop stands, ergonomic chairs, standing desks and so on). We have an annual Remote Working checklist for our team to complete to ensure their workspace is safe and suitable for their needs.

Our monthly and quarterly team meetings often focus on soft skills like client relationships management techniques, tips for managing workflow and ways to prioritise work. We love to implement new tools and software for our team to trial - such as AI tools for work efficiency, communication tools like Slack, Productive and Trello to manage our client projects , and recording tools like Loom or Supernormal to record meetings or visually present our work. As well as relieving pressure on our team by providing them the best tools to do their work, we love to share our experience with our clients and help their business to perform better too.

Part 4 - Employee connection, professional growth and innovation

Encouraging teamwork and connection 

Our tight knit team communicates regularly on Google Meets and on Slack. Our Wellington based team is lucky enough to meet weekly in our co-shared office space. To support the connection amongst our largely remote team, weekly 1:1s with managers and weekly squad meetings are important for regular face to face contact.

Our two monthly Health and Wellbeing sessions with our Head of People ensure people have a dedicated time to share any personal situations or work issues they're struggling with. Meeting as a full team each month, and in person each quarter certainly helps to maintain connection and build relationships across our wider team. Our clear organisational structure is helpful for people to know who they can talk to about a work or personal issue they have. 

Everyone in our team is encouraged to reach out to our directors at any time, no matter their role in the business, and our directors often call our team members to personally check in on a difficult project, provide mentorship or personally thank a team member for a job well done.

Our Flexible Working policy, regular Health and Wellbeing check ins and open and honest communication all serve to make our team feel supported and safe. Our Directors and Squad Leads lead by example and share when they're finding things tough or something is happening in their personal life that is making it difficult to focus in that particular meeting / that week etc.

Supporting employee growth and performance

Professional growth of our team is important to Virtual Marketers and a key component of our People Strategy. Our People Strategy (updated annually) has a People and Culture Vision to: 

Create a culture that supports our team’s professional development, health and wellbeing:

1. Providing quality work opportunities,
2. Allowing true life/work flexibility,
3. Offering internal career development pathways.

Professional development opportunities and clear internal career development pathways ensures that new team members can see the opportunities offered by Virtual Marketers and have clear direction on how they can progress to the next role that they aspire to. We track and measure job performance through clear KPIs that roll up to the business objectives of Virtual Marketers.

Professional development at Virtual Marketers is varied. We have a budget and time set aside each month for our team members to learn, grow and continue to be inspired by the work they do. PD can be internal mentorship with a senior team member, attending an event or conference or updating professional certifications with the tools and platforms we work on for our clients. We are also members of the NZ Marketing Association so that our team can benefit from industry best practice courses and events.  

Weekly 1:1s and weekly squad meetings ensure our team has the ability to ask questions and get regular feedback on their performance. Each month we have a more formal 1:1 with each of our team that ensures we check in on how annual KPIs are tracking. That way, everyone is clear on the expectations of their role and there are no surprises at end of year performance review meetings.

To support professional growth and development, we believe in promoting internally where we can. We find this helps us to retain great people, and drive team morale when others can see that great people are rewarded with promotions.

Our Gratitude channel on Slack helps us shout out the great work our team is doing and celebrate the small and big successes. We also believe in sending unexpected thank you gifts when our team does great work or solves challenging issues.

Celebrating learning and creative thinking

Our weekly 1:1s and weekly squad meetings encourage innovative thinking and provide our team with permission to explore new ways of doing things. Marketing managers are often problem solvers and need a wide range of approaches and tools at their disposal to solve tricky client issues, or adapt to a client's preferred way of working. Our time together is often spent nutting out a particular problem, or a new way to work with a client.

We are often asked by our clients to support them with wider business problems outside the traditional marketing framework. Our team love using their skills and expertise, and working knowledge from experience with other clients to continually strive to be more efficient and effective in the new marketing projects.

Our monthly team meetings and quarterly in person team days are very focused on sharing project wins, what we've learnt from a particular project or client and new technology we've been trying with clients. Sharing new thinking serves to generate new ideas and innovation across our team.

We often trial new tools and technology internally before sharing with our clients. We treat these as internal projects and share these amongst our team so they can be internal leaders to share their experience and recommendations as to how we might roll out a new tool to our client.

Our leadership team ensures we share the wins and challenges of our day to day work. Leading by example, it is important to our team culture that we acknowledge mistakes when they happen, but more importantly how we communicate them and what we've learned from them. By senior team members normalising this, it allows our more junior team to try new things, experience failure and learn from it quickly. We welcome the team trialling new ways of doing things, even knowing that they may not work.

Part 5 - How employee satisfaction contributes to client experience

Our business is built on relationships - those we have with our clients, and those we have internally between our core team. A stable team is also good for client continuity, so staff retention and attracting the best marketers is key to business growth and ongoing business health.

Every quarter we conduct an eNPS survey for our permanent employees, and separately for our contracting team. This allows us to measure and report back on how we're tracking on key metrics of our People Strategy. We aim for a 8+ score on all eNPS questions. Lesser scores and anonymous feedback allow us to better understand and respond to issues or frustrations quickly and course correct as needed.

We've recently introduced the BPTW survey as we were keen to use an external People Experience survey to sense check the internal quarterly pulse check we do already with our team. This was a useful exercise to benchmark our people experience performance, and highlight gaps we had - such as needing to introduce some new policies we were missing.

We also provide quarterly NPS surveys to our clients to understand how they're enjoying their service with us. This allows us to ensure our team are delivering great work to our clients and provides them the opportunity to provide constructive feedback we can pass onto our team.

We believe client retention, referrals and client growth are directly related to a happy, healthy team. Being a great employer and delivering exceptional work helps us achieve supreme employee and client experience.

People matter even more if you’re a small business

We believe we have an exceptional team delivering exceptional work to our valued clients. This is not by accident, but by design.

Our team are well supported, listened to, valued and really feel that their role makes a difference in our company's success. Each member of our team completes a Clifton Strengths analysis which ensures our entire team understands their mindset and values right from the beginning of our working relationship. Our team appreciates the thoughtful gestures our company provides. Whether that's a shout out for great work on our Slack gratitude channel, a thoughtful gift box delivered to their home to thank them for stepping up, or a generous voucher of their choice on their birthday.

Our business can't compete with larger corporates when it comes to salary and benefits. We can over deliver on employee experience though - additional parental leave, client referral incentives, an extra Leave Day of Significance are all part of our package, along with genuine flexible working policies, and a phone / laptop / wifi package.

We look after our team with heart and compassion, and in return they form lasting partnerships with our clients. We're a tight knit team that genuinely enjoy spending time together.

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