161: Empower Your Team: Strategies for a Thriving Remote Workplace

This episode is for those of you who have anyone who's helping you on your team. Maybe you have virtual assistant, maybe you have a contractor helping. Maybe you have a full team of 3, 4, 6, maybe 12 people on your team. This one is for you.

I'm Bonnie Christine and this is where all things creativity, design, business and marketing unite. I'm a mama living in a tiny town tucked right inside the Smoky Mountains, running a multi seven figure business, doing the most creative and impactful work of my life. But when I first set out to become an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer.

Fast forward to today.

I'm not only licensing my artwork all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life and experience the same success. I'm here to help you spend your life doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want, and is wildly profitable. Welcome to the Professional Creative Podcast.

My team is completely virtual and I think that that holds some really unique aspects to it. One of them is that we just don't get to shoot the breeze like we would if we were in person. Now I have dreamed so much about having an in person studio office where we were all working together and what that would look like, how incredible that would be. But I think given that I live in a tiny, tiny town that's fairly hard to get to, that it will never come true. And so virtual it is. And we work really hard to create a virtual team setting that feels really close knit, that feels collaborative, that feels efficient, but also feels fun. And so I think as the boss, the owner, the entrepreneur, the CEO, the founder, the visionary, whatever you call yourself, that it's really easy to think about your employees in a virtual setting as highly efficient, meaning if they're on the clock, they should be getting work done. And so something that I've learned over the years of having a team is how important it is to build in kind of that flex time that you would have if you were in the office, maybe taking lunch or going on a walk with someone during a break, or hanging out by the water cooler. And so I have to work really hard at providing space and giving permission for people to kind of chat and build relationships and talk about non work related things. Of course, this is all within reason, right? But I think it's a really important aspect to building a strong company culture that's A virtual setting. So a couple of ways that we do this right is we have a water cooler Slack channel which literally means like come tell us whatever is on your mind. If we were working in an in person situation, would you tell me about your weekend? Would you tell me about your birthday? Would you tell me about something you're excited about? So the water cooler chat is always really fun. It's never work related. It's just for fun conversation. We have a couple of other Slack channels that are similar, but they're on topic. So we have one called the Watch List. The entire team loves watching really, really good tv. So we'll come talk about a movie that we saw or like a show that we just finished watching or a particular episode that's really amazing. So I love the Watch List Slack channel as well. We also have a Slack channel called side Hustles. Many of my team members have their own business and we want to celebrate that. So we invite them to come talk about what did they do, did they present their work over the weekend, did they sell out of their art prints over the weekend or what kind of wins they're having in their own side Hustle as well. They're of course doing this on the clock and that's so okay. It is so embraced by me. The other thing that we do is spend about the first 20 minutes of our weekly team meeting catching up. And now if you're not careful and you're the boss, you'll be really quick to kind of do the math and figure out how much is this costing me, us just sitting around like shooting the breeze. And what you have to know is that it is so incredibly worth whatever it costs you. So for instance, at the beginning of our team meeting, we do a question of the week. We kind of go around and learn something from someone. Now we have. I've already done a podcast about this about our momentum meeting. It's called and the freebie for that episode is the questions that we have asked our team every week. So if you want to go get that, it's way back. Episode number 21. Episode 21 is where I give you a behind the scenes look at our team meeting meeting and then give you all of the questions that we ask as a freebie if you want it. So it is so incredible to really get to know the people that you work with. You work better together. You enjoy the in person times that you do have more.

Are you tired of spending hours crafting the perfect email only to be met with crickets in your Inbox or worse, having your emails end up in your subscribers spam folders. I know that feeling, which is why I switched to ConvertKit as my email service provider many years ago. ConvertKit is the email marketing platform built by creators for creators. With ConvertKit you can easily create and send beautiful personalized emails that your subscribers are not only going to open, but also love. They have a drag and drop email editor that that makes it easy to design emails that look and feel professional without any coding. Plus their powerful automation tools make it easy to send the right message to the right person at the right time. But that's really not all. ConvertKit's tagging and segmenting tools make it so easy to send targeted messages to your subscribers based on their interests and behaviors. So for example, you can imagine that on my email list I have people who are interested in buying my fabric to use in their projects and then also people who want to learn how to design their own fabric. And so through ConvertKit's tagging system, I can communicate to those two different groups of people so that I don't ever have to worry if I'm bugging the other group with something that they're not interested in. You can also use ConvertKit to actually build out a page and a form so that you can easily grow your email list and turn subscribers into customers. So you know that we always want you to be growing your email list and I can tell you that if you dive into ConvertKit, you can start adding subscribers to your email list within a day of focused effort. It's not that difficult. It's super easy to set up, build a landing page, put an opt in and then start getting people on your list. So if you are ready to take your email marketing to the next level, I want you to head over to BonnieCristine.comResources and sign up for a free trial on ConvertKit today. You can go ahead and dive in and get familiar with the program. Their support is amazing and see what you think. This is truly an email service provider who can grow with you from one subscriber to 500,000. So again head on over to bonniecristine.com resources and check out ConvertKit today.

The other thing that we do is something called personal updates and in less than 60 seconds they are everyone on the team goes around and shares their big one from last week, their big focus, their big one focus for this week and a personal update. And so it could be like last week I was working on our content strategy for Q4. This week I'm working on our Pinterest strategy for Q4, and I took my son to his first Facebook baseball game over the weekend, and we won, and it was incredible. And we had, you know, peanuts or whatever. And it's just like that little extra include the personal story. It goes so far in connecting the team.

So I want to invite you, really,

as the boss, to just kind of loosen up a little bit. You know, sometimes we worry about stepping away from our business, and honestly, our team needs us to. Our team loves it, hopefully, when we're there, but it's different. It's a different energy when we're there. And we're constantly kind of providing feedback and ideas. When you step away, maybe take a vacation from your business, it allows your team to kind of figure out things on their own and ideate on their own and see what it's like without you. The other thing is, this is hard for you, or at least it was a little bit for me. But I realized how important it is. Maybe if your boss, if you're in an office and your boss is out of town for the week, you know, you just kind of show up with a little bit more of a relaxed sense. Like maybe you show up 10 minutes late with your hair in a bun. And that is actually so incredibly important for the people on your team to do, to have permission to do, to have the occasion where maybe they don't have to be so on. And I think that in the virtual setting, it's really easy to just expect all of your people, because you're virtual, to be on at all times. And when you think about holding people on your team for years and years to come, it's really important that they have, on the occasion, times where they can be a little bit more relaxed. Now, of course, this is given that they're doing incredible work, My team always delivers and over delivers, and that makes me want to allow even more freedom with this kind of thing. So I just wanted to invite you

to think about how you could really

foster connection, relationship, not worry so much about how much it's costing you, because the benefit far outweighs the cost. All right, my friends, create the beauty that you want to see come alive and world. And remember, there's room for you.