How to build a better remote team at your digital marketing agency

Many institutions have been operating in fully remote or hybrid environments for over four years, but challenges remain, including:

• There is a lack of face-to-face interaction and an inability to read body language.
• Over-reliance on communication tools like Slack.
• You may not be able to see your boss or team members in person for months, years, or even your whole life.

These and other challenges can lead to poor communication and make it difficult to build team cohesion.

This tendency is even more pronounced in matrixed teams, where the account leader may or may not be an individual’s direct supervisor.

However, tools like CliftonStrengths and the Enneagram can help you build and optimize your remote agency team. Identifying your team's individual strengths can help you:

• Promotes better communication.
• Strengthen team cohesion.
• Build understanding between agency teams and clients.

Simply put, by helping team members understand each other's preferences and strengths, managers and leaders can gain insight into why people behave the way they do. This understanding can also help guide those responsible for delegating projects and tasks.

In addition to improving existing teams, tracking CliftonStrengths results over time allows agency leaders to identify, understand and hire based on the strengths that tend to produce top performance.

What is CliftonStrengths?

CliftonStrengths (formerly Clifton StrengthsFinder) is an assessment tool developed by Gallup that helps people discover their innate strengths.

The assessment also identifies how an individual demonstrates leadership through:

• Impact.
• Strategic thinking.
• execution.
• Relationship building.

Those who lead by influence tend to be successful when working through others, while those who lead by relationship building may excel at fostering deep connections.

Building a balanced team

As part of our interview process, we will ask you to take a CliftonStrengths assessment to:

• Identify the areas they naturally gravitate towards.
• Understand how they fit into our team.
• It will guide you through the final discussion of the interview process.

This information provides an opportunity to learn how individual strengths manifest when working with teams and clients.

There are 34 strengths in total. The assessment identifies each person's top five strengths. (One version of the assessment ranks all 34 strengths, but by default only shows the top five. We use the version that ranks all 34 strengths.)

Each strength has a color associated with it (blue for the relationship theme, purple for the execution theme, green for the strategic thinking theme, and orange for the influence theme).

Having a well-balanced team is important, especially when working with individuals on a client basis. That said, there are notable differences in the makeup of our leadership, SEO, and PPC teams.

Our SEO team is a blend of achievers and strategic thinkers. Our PPC team is a blend of arrangers, strategic thinkers and relationships.

Leadership positions call for a blend of the top five colors, ideally at least three, four being very rare but desirable. Orange is often found in those who appear to be natural leaders and have the confidence to lead a group.

Control is the rarest strength, but we were fortunate to have three people in the top five who had it.

Our leadership team is a great model of diversity: we have all the colors, two of us leading on the theme of impact, one on execution, and one on relationship building.

We balance each other out: we all tend to see things through different lenses, and diversity of perspectives leads to healthy debate.

While a person's strengths may evolve and new themes may emerge as they progress in their career, I've noticed that two or three of my strengths have remained the same for the past 15 years. The position has changed, but they continue to exist.

Build trust and understanding

When leveraging CliftonStrengths to build a more effective agency team, it's important to openly share each member's accomplishments. Remember, no strength is “better” than another.

Understanding what motivates each member can help managers better manage their teams, whether they are in a matrix organization, pods, or direct reports.

for example:

• Future-oriented thinkers may be constantly coming up with ideas, but they need a manager to ensure clear boundaries are set so that daily tasks are completed.
• People with strong relationship skills may react in a certain way because they are constantly thinking about the human impact.
• High achievers may try to accomplish things on their own without the help of others.

Strengths aren't a bad thing, in and of themselves. But knowing everyone's preferences can help your team succeed. (For example, a relationship-oriented member might excel in a customer-facing role.)

Practical Steps:

• Create a spreadsheet of everyone's strengths. Color-code them according to theme.
• We provide training for HR managers to help them understand how to leverage the strengths of their people.
• Encourage your team leaders to discuss this in team meetings.
• Ask your coworker and direct manager to meet one-on-one to discuss their strengths and discover how you can best partner together.

Why this is especially important for remote agency teams

Statistics show that 93% of communication is non-verbal, and interpreting those non-verbal cues over video is often difficult.

Additionally, tone of voice is lost when communicating via Slack or Teams: comments may be interpreted more harshly or negatively than they would be in person, leading to unnecessary and unintended friction.

Finally, the old days of learning by osmosis, where everyone sat side by side, were forgotten.

This is why Strengthsifinder is perfect for teams.

• Know what your teammates do best so you can delegate work appropriately.
• Help team members see the world from each other's perspective so everyone understands what's important to their colleagues and how they operate.
• It helps build trust faster.
• Reduce misunderstandings.

Building better client communication

When colleagues start to connect behaviors and traits, they can better understand their customers without knowing their specific strengths. This gives customer-facing reps insight into how to effectively shape conversations and meeting agendas.

This leads to deeper relationships and ultimately better service. For example:

• A marketing manager might notice that certain clients like to talk about their weekends or their families at the beginning of a call. These clients may value the strength of relationship building and see it as an important part of the partnership.
• Other clients may not care about the details and want to jump straight to the numbers – this doesn't mean they don't care, it just means they may be more analytically inclined or lean more towards execution themes.
• Some clients might want to brainstorm and hear about your latest great ideas. Those clients might have a more future-oriented mindset. They will measure success based on how often your team brings new ideas to the table.

CliftonStrengths Alternatives

We use CliftonStrengths to identify strengths and trends, but there are a variety of tools to choose from to achieve similar results.

Here are two other popular tools that can help you better understand your team's strengths and foster collaboration:

• Enneagram test. This assessment helps understand the unconscious patterns that underlie a person's motivations, core beliefs, and behaviors. Nine Enneagram types, such as Reformer, Helper, and Challenger, characterize each of us, and one dominant type will emerge.
• Hermann Cerebral Dominance Index (HBDI). This assessment uses cognitive science to identify the type of thinking that shapes a person's personality and behavior. It categorizes people as analytical, structural, relational, or experimental thinkers and assigns a color to each style. Understanding your own style and the styles of others can help you find common ground and language to improve collaboration for better team results.

Conclusion

Building a remote agency team can be challenging. CliftonStrengths or an alternative personality trait assessment can help.

• Understand your strengths better.
• Colleagues and managers will better understand each other's strengths and work together better.
• Strengthen client-agency relationships.