Within a large organization, structure silos different functional areas making it harder for them to communicate or work together. Internal communication and teamwork are pivotal assets in your ambitions for your business – and the more your teams work in harmony, the more impressive the resulting efforts. In this article, we examine how marketing and HR teams work together more effectively and why that’s especially critical for your organization. We build the post using tips from the business world to ensure the advice offered is in harmony throughout the workweek.
Remote work
In today’s business era, remote working is a huge and sweeping change in the way you did business in 2019. Even though we see the restrictions enforced by the pandemic easing, with some businesses reopening their offices, the trend for remote working, or working from home, may continue far into the future. Several tech companies recently announced a permanent move to remote work as they found changes wrought by the pandemic improved both efficiency and employee satisfaction. As such, this is a moment of profound change in how your teams interact on a daily basis for at least the near future.
To coordinate these changes, and to make sure staff is on board with your plans for remote work, your HR team must ensure effective and open communication through your other departments to avoid uncertainty, ease concerns that might arise, and answer questions.
The marketing department is perhaps one of the most likely teams to perform remote work effectively — after all, your writers, designers, and SEO professionals know their jobs and require little direct oversight to perform their jobs well. Plus, project management tools offer a means to coordinate projects across different employees without requiring face-to-face meetings. In 2020, HR should work to coordinate remote work efforts, offer solutions to manage teams working remotely, and research tools to make remote work effective.
Pay and flexibility
As you know, payroll and associated tasks such as leave and hours are managed by your HR team. At the end of each pay period, your HR team must calculate payments to individual employees based on hours worked during the pay period, reduced by taxes, contributions to health insurance or retirement, or other deductions specific to the individual company. Making these calculations accurately and quickly strains your HR staff, but, If your team employs high-quality HR software, automation makes this task much easier, so everyone gets a paycheck on time without errors that might result in poor employee relations or, in some cases, government penalties.
In today’s world, the marketing department represents an especially challenging issue related to payments since it’s common to use sub-contractors and freelancers to achieve marketing ambitions.
But the impact of payment and flexible work hours goes well beyond just ensuring employees receive proper compensation for their efforts because compensation acts as a motivator for high performance or, contrarily, to generate poor performance. Hence, the relationship between HR and marketing goes a long way toward achieving marketing goals.
With this in mind, the free flow of communication in both directions is the best way to get your marketing and HR teams working in harmony regarding payments. If your marketing team uses sub-contractors for a particular project, they must coordinate with HR to ensure prompt payment for these temporary employees as well as appropriate governmental accounting.
Effective communication
With both of the above tips, effective communication acts as the necessary glue to bind your teams together. While the whole of your HR team is unlikely to speak on a regular basis with your marketing team, having some overlap between your departments is important for communication purposes. Managers take the initiative or organize the HR department to assign a specific HR employee to the marketing department to ensure the two teams speak frequently, perhaps even every day, with one another, highlighting and resolving issues as they arise.
Meanwhile, getting both your marketing team and your HR team together on a night out or a teambuilding escapade is a great way to solidify team bonds and to encourage both of these teams to work in greater harmony into the future. Give your teams a reason to socialize and meet up, and they’ll naturally communicate with one another at work in a natural and effective way.
Hiring and staff management processes
Occasionally, your marketing team needs a new hire or to help with personnel issues for existing employees.
Regardless of the specific skills needed in your new employees, when you want to hire a new team member, HR is often the first step in the process, crafting a job description, getting it out to hiring sites, screening candidates, and making the offer once the marketing team selects a candidate. The closer the relationship between marketing and HR when it comes to hiring a new worker, the better. Why? Because HR develops a better understanding of what the department does and the specifications necessary for your new worker.
When it comes to handling problems with existing employees, HR has the training and responsibility to deal with the problem. Whether the problem involves an issue of harassment or inequity or simply poor performance, HR is your first stop in solving the problem.
Internal culture
In many ways, the HR and marketing teams in a business support the ongoing culture of an organization – even if it’s scaling rapidly, and onboarding many new employees as it grows. These two teams act as a liaison between the department and other departments within the organization to act as an example of how you’d like your entire business run – and other departments should use these teams as a model as you expand. Since HR enforces the company culture in the hiring process and marketing shares that culture in the messages sent to those outside the organization, these two departments are linked in defining the corporate culture to a large degree.
Look at it this way; HR often produces the internal documents which circulate to give staff an understanding of what’s happening in the business. Meanwhile, marketing teams produce content that’s shared externally in order to show off your brand and the ethos in your company. These actions are two sides of the same coin, and in a very real sense, HR and marketing create and disseminate the type of company ethos you want to embody your enterprise. With that in mind, further great communication and understanding, between HR and your marketing team, help build team cohesion throughout your business.
When it comes to fusing two teams together and giving employees a reason to mix outside of their siloed-off team, these tips encourage you to join HR and marketing professionals in working friendships for the good of your business.
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