The Key To Working Remotely
My name is Julia Petiteau and I am a junior at Temple University double majoring in Marketing and Advertising with a concentration in Art Direction.
In March, I didn’t have an internship yet. I was losing hope, but I wanted to stay positive that I would find something. I opened up Handshake and the first thing I saw was a recommended posting for a Design and Marketing position at rmdy. Being able to be creative while still helping a business succeed through marketing efforts is exactly what I look for in my ideal position. I clicked on the posting and the description was the perfect mix of skills I had and skills I wanted to learn through an internship. But what was rmdy? I had never heard of this company, but I did my research to learn more. I figured out that it was a small company that sells Daily Digestive Essentials for gut health and their branding was super nice. A few days later, I interviewed and got the position.
By May, I officially started my internship full time. It was very weird starting a position without having met any of the people you were working with in-person. I got on the Google Hangouts call on my first day feeling so nervous, but excited to get started. The team is only four people with both co-founders (Kate & Ryan) and a marketing manager (Lara when I started, and then Anastasia). They walked me through the branding guidelines, the brand ambassador program, and any other things I needed to know about. After that initial meeting, I was on my own to start working. It didn’t feel all that new since I was sitting in my living room on my laptop.
I continued to do work everyday. At noon everyday, the entire team met for a status call to discuss big topics, and the rest of the communication during the day would be through Slack. For the creative side of the job, Lara would write out briefs for specific advertisements and email templates that needed to be done. However, as I got more comfortable at rmdy, the briefs became less specific and gave me more room for interpretation since I was more accustomed to the brand and its tone of voice.
The biggest struggles with working virtually was making sure I was communicating enough with everyone. Sometimes, I would read messages about a task and start doing it. However, because I didn’t communicate that I was doing that task, my co-workers didn’t know I was working on those things. After a performance check-in with Kate, we discussed how I just need to be clear about communicating especially when working remotely. After that meeting, I made sure to react or respond to messages with something like “got it!” to make it clear that I saw the message. Another struggle with working remotely was receiving feedback on creative work. Sometimes, not all feedback was clear enough which made it hard for me to make edits. Through quick calls and detailed feedback directly on the creative assets, I was able to better understand what the edits needed were.
Overall, working remotely was not as difficult as I originally thought it would be. While I would’ve loved to go into the office everyday and meet my co-workers face to face, working remotely also had its perks. The way to succeed working remotely is through clear communication.
