Here’s a hot take: for remote workers, gone are the days of watercooler talk and after-hours drinks at the dive down the street. And the world is a better place for it.

I’ll tell you why. It’s straight up lazy to call unstructured, distracting, and impromptu conversation or after-hours drinks “connection.” Beyond that, it simply doesn’t account for the wide spectrum of personality types that make up your team. Dreaming up an array of ways to connect—and making nearly all of them optional and/or low-commitment—can make a huge difference when it comes to building better, more grounded relationships among your team while also honoring the introverts, the people who don’t like booze, the people who like to keep work and life separated, and everyone in between. 

As a remote-from-day-one growth marketing agency, it took us a long time to figure out a baseline mix of things that help us connect in ways that feel “Tuff.” I’d highly recommend that your takeaway from this is less “let me go install HeyTaco” and more “who on our team might have a good idea to contribute to a conversation about ways to connect?”

And, ultimately, this is NEVER just a box to check. As your team evolves, so should your culture and ways to connect. We make sure to always keep up the zest and excitement for things to update, introduce, and even ditch as time goes on.

But, for now, here’s our (not exhaustive) lineup! 

Full Team Annual Retreats

THIS. This is the thing we constantly find ourselves talking about all year round. Once a year, a small group of volunteers get together to plan our all-company retreat. Although this year it will look much different with 30+ attendees vs. the 12 we had last year, all of the same fun things will be baked in.

First, we always leave space for a full company IRL meeting. In it, we’ll hear from each service team lead about things they’re excited about, areas of opportunity, and goals for the quarter ahead. We’ll hear from Ellen, the founder and CEO of Tuff about Tuff’s quarterly performance and strategy for our growth into the future. We also always do superlatives! Who will win “Best Hair” this year? Time will tell!

A few considerations we maintain for this retreat is doing our best to accommodate the multitide of people on the team. For example, partners are always welcome and we’ll do a full dinner together with the entire crew. We’ll also have several different optional events so that the people that want extra social time can show up and connect, and the people that might have a drained social tank after a big dinner can recoup the way they need.

donut! #virtual-coffee

The donut app Slack integration is one of our newest and most successful ways to connect at Tuff! Shout out to Rebecca for the idea! Our team (mostly Raj and Megan) were noticing that as our team started to grow, there was less opportunity for organically “bumping into” friends throughout the workday. To combat this, Raj started sending out invites to “tea time” to members on the team he didn’t see as frequently. 

Ultimately, we all caught on to how much we enjoyed meeting with Raj and decided to implement “Tea Time” on a larger scale. That’s where donut became our perfect solution. Every other Tuesday—for anyone that opted into the Slack channel, #virtual-coffee—donut randomly pairs you with someone else in the channel and invites you to connect. It even scrapes your calendars and recommends times to meet. Easy!

HeyTaco

On the flip side, the HeyTaco Slack integration is one of our oldest and most loved ways to keep communication pathways open. Admittedly, at first, the loud recognition/public praise aspects of HeyTaco felt a bit contrived. This was especially for team members coming from toxic workplaces wherein praise was few and far between. 

But, we’ll happily report that it’s a staple of our everyday and a great way to encourage we each shout about our teammates’ accomplishments and wins throughout the day. It’s a tiny addition to our Slack process that’s done so much for our positive outlook and culture of feedback. We’d highly recommend.

Book Club

Before we shopped around the idea of a Tuff book club, we had NO idea Tuff was so full of bookworms! We’re currently reading our second book together and meet twice a month to discuss agreed-upon chapters or sections. 

About a quarter of the team participates and shows up with their book and sometimes a cold beverage to talk about ideas, big and small. It’s been a great way to get face time with people around the organization that share interests and want to talk about big ideas. 

Dedicated Weekly Time with Your Manager

As our team continues to grow, investing time and resources into setting our people managers up for success is at the absolute tippy top of our to-do list. But beyond simply making sure they’ve got the training they need, it’s consistency that really makes a significant difference.

Cultivating real relationships in consistent weekly 1:1s with all managers and direct reports is oftentimes one of the most anchoring connections within our company. Having an advocate, a confidante, and someone to nudge you in the right direction is to feel seen, supported, and connected. We’ll never stop investing heavily into our management.

Show & Tell

Back to Slack! Show & Tell is a highly anticipated, always fun, always casual weekly occurrence in Slack pioneered by Richard. Each week, Richard will drop a fun prompt into the #general channel and it always has the ability to fire up conversations. Here are some of our recent favorites!

• If you weren’t working in advertising, what would you be doing? What’s your alter ego’s career?
• What is one artist / musician / band that you consider to be a “guilty pleasure”, and aren’t afraid of people judging you for it?
• What is one piece of memorabilia (from sports, music, movies, culture, etc.) that you own that you treasure?
• What’s your lock screen wallpaper and does it have a good story?
• What’s your all-time favorite “classic” Youtube video? Links required.

Tuff Times

What started as a fun idea soon careened into a full-blown weekly internal newsletter replete with (some) pertinent company information but most frequently hotly contested surveys on the best popsicle flavors, weird TikTok trends, book recommendations, employee spotlights, and so, so much more. 

Virtual Happy Hours

And, of course, the ol’ reliable. We do continue to hold monthly all-company happy hours. Because our team has grown significantly since we first started them, we’ll typically devise a game or activity that splits us up randomly into breakout rooms of 4-6 people so that actual conversations can happen.

Although it took a little legwork, one of our all-time favorite happy hours was when we collected two random facts from each team member and had the opposing team pair each random fact with the human it belonged to. The weirder the facts, the better the game. Here were some standouts:

• I once had to have my dad come to pay for a bar tab I ran up underage drinking in Mexico because the bar refused to take my credit card (while on family vacation)
• I’ve been in a commercial before (lol)
• One time when I was camping, someone dared me to catch, cook, and eat a lizard. I did it. It was gross.
• When I was young I crashed a golf cart into a rock and then ran away

Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide what’s right for your team! The caveat is that if you work to create a work environment where people feel called to contribute and get excited about developing company culture, it will naturally evolve and take on a life of its own. 

And, if you’re still calling watercooler talk and boozy happy hours “culture,” here’s your sign that your team wants more.

The post 8 Ways We’re Helping Our Remote Team Feel More Connected appeared first on Tuff.

This was last updated on November 8, 2023 with new links, information, and data on our current career framework and approach to career development. 

Tuff is committed to building a high-performing team focused on balancing individual and company growth. We have always believed it is important for the individuals at Tuff to grow alongside each other and our business. 

To support these behaviors, we created a career framework with 7 Levels, 2 Paths, and 3 Steps. By offering a clear vision of what the future holds for each individual within our framework, we ensure that no one is left uncertain about their path and how to contribute effectively. This transparency not only helps reduce pay disparities but also boosts employee retention, which is a pivotal aspect of our effort to establish an equitable compensation program and creating a place where people are inspired to do their best work. 

In this post, we’ll dive into the career framework and the steps we’ve taken to build ours at Tuff. 

Creating a Career Framework

Here are the steps we took to build ours:

1. Define our compensation philosophy 
2. List out your Company Roles
3. Create your Career Framework matrix
4. Define the Levels for each role and the Steps for your company

Okay, now for the nitty-gritty. Here’s how to apply each step and what it looks like at Tuff:

1. Outline your compensation philosophy

A Compensation Philosophy is an explicit overview of a company’s views and decisions about total compensation. In job descriptions, you may have seen statements like “we pay 50th percentile” or “we don’t adjust pay based on location”. These are compensation decisions in action that are based on that company’s philosophy on pay.

The type of company and culture we’re building is a reflection of each individual that works at Tuff. As we grow and our team evolves, so will our practices and policies. Our Compensation Philosophy is a reflection of where we are today but it is living and breathing and we may make updates in the future. We strongly encourage team members to ask questions about our approach to compensation.

Having our Compensation Philosophy principles explicitly outlined and agreed upon keeps our Career Framework consistent and systematic while also giving the team a shared understanding of how compensation decisions are made. Our Compensation Philosophy is intended to ensure our compensation decisions are:

• Equitable among employees, positions, and locations
• Supportive of our core business objectives
• Competitive with our market
• Easily understood by every team member

There are two sets of clients at Tuff: the companies that we partner with and the employees of Tuff. For both of these groups, our goal is healthy and sustainable growth. In our approach to compensation, we borrow a lot of the same principles that have lead to growth with our clients.

We’re transparent

Since day 1, we’ve prioritized internal financial transparency. We give team members access to base salary data for every role at Tuff because it is important for everyone to understand their compensation options. 

We’re consistent

We have a standard Career Framework so each team has the same number of Levels and paths for growth. Using our Career Framework, every possible Level for every possible role at Tuff has a standardized base salary. This means we don’t adjust pay based on who negotiates and who doesn’t. We also don’t adjust salary based on location because team members provide equal value to Tuff no matter where they log in from.

We’re data-informed

Pay transparency reduces pay gaps and improves employee retention. We will always look to data to understand the practices for creating an equitable compensation program.

We balance company and individual growth 

We aim to collectively balance ownership for individual growth alongside company growth. We encourage individual growth through our Career Framework and its ties to base salary and 401k matching. We also offer compensation pinned to profit and revenue to empower everyone at Tuff to make decisions as if they are spending their own money—because they are.

2. List out your Company Roles

At Tuff there are two core roles on the team. At the highest level, they are:

Growth Marketer: Looks holistically at a client’s existing condition, finds the bottlenecks preventing them from achieving their goals, and corrects them with innovative improvements

Channel Specialist: Focuses exclusively on one platform or channel (i.e. PPC Specialist, SEO Strategist). They have a strong marketing foundation and specialize in one or two areas.

3. Create your Career Framework matrix

Once you have your company roles listed out, we have 11 at Tuff, the next step is to create a company-wide career progression chart. While we customize  the description for each of these roles, we always start from the same set of Levels and Steps for each role. 

Here’s the template we use for each role at Tuff:

7 Levels: There are 7 Levels in the Tuff Career Framework: L1, L2, L3, L4, L5, L6, L7. Using this Framework, every team at Tuff will have role specific definitions for each Level.

2 Paths: We offer 2 Career Paths: People Manager and Individual Contributor. This splits off at L4. We do this to offer flexibility on how you can grow at Tuff and to account for the mix of skillsets that make a strong team.

3 Steps: Within each Level there are three Steps: A,B,C. Steps are marked by the progression ring in your Level in Pando.

4. Define the Levels for each role and the Steps for your company

This is where we put the Company Roles and Career Framework matrix together, it’s where the magic happens! 

These are our org-wide Level definitions at Tuff. We have these to provide objective standards and calibration among Levels. 

Each role at Tuff then has its own set of competencies that further defines each Level. Those can be found in our career progression tool, Pando. 

We’ll share our competencies for a Senior Growth Marketer so you can see what that looks like in practice: 

How this connects to our compensation model

The types of compensation we offer are informed by our Compensation Philosophy and growth goals. At Tuff, we offer a matrix of compensation to balance short-term and long-term payouts as well as payouts based on individual growth and company growth.

Base salary is short-term, guaranteed pay based on individual growth. We offer standardized base salaries at Tuff. Using our Career Framework, every possible Level for every possible role at Tuff has a set base salary. As a team member grows and progresses through Levels, base salary increases.

Continue Reading

We’ve worked closely as a team to develop our Career Frameworks. It’s always a work in progress so please reach out if you have any feedback or questions.

While building our own version that works for Tuff, we’ve also leaned on some great existing resources. If you’re interested in learning more about Career Frameworks, here are some of our favorite reads:

• A career progression framework which works for everyone: how we fixed career progression at CharlieHR
• Continuing to Improve on Pay: Our Latest Changes to the Salary Formula and How Much it Costs
• How We Approach Employee Compensation

Ellen Jantsch

Ellen is the founder at Tuff and one of the team’s core growth marketers. She is a versatile marketer with expertise in multiple channels – from ppc to seo to email to others – responsible for the experiments and testing.  She is happiest when she’s on the ski hill or outside pointing her mountain bike downhill.

The post How We Created a Career Framework For Growth on a Performance-Based Marketing Team [Updated] appeared first on Tuff.

Comp.

Whether you finish the rest of that word with -ensation or -licated, compensation is an important piece of running a business and hiring a great team. 

We are dedicated to creating a great place to work where team members understand how they can grow and develop at Tuff. Also, as a bootstrapped team, it is important for each of us to understand how our spend impacts our overall profit and ability to help our clients grow. 

To support these behaviors, we compensate our team in two ways: Base Salary tied to a Career Framework and Profit Sharing

Base Salary through a Compensation Formula

We wanted to create a compensation formula that was flexible enough to adjust for factors like experience and location but broad enough that it didn’t require in depth calculations and research every time we bring on a new team member. 

It was also important to us to use a data source and apply structure to our salaries to reduce bias and hold us accountable to paying people fairly. 

We wanted simplicity and objectivity. Enter: a compensation formula.

We share this with the whole team:

We’ll break it all down below.

Role Salary: How do Levels & Steps work?

We’ve created a Career Framework with a system of Levels and Steps for each role to make sure teammates have the opportunity to grow in flexible ways. 

Levels: Levels make up the vertical axis of the career framework. At Tuff, there are 5 levels for individual contributors: Entry, Intermediate, Advanced, Expert, and Principal. Levels are defined for each role at Tuff and mark distinct jumps in terms of area knowledge, role complexity, and scope. 

Steps: Steps make up the horizontal axis of the career framework. At Tuff, there are 5 steps housed within each Level and are meant to mark smaller milestones of growth. Steps are defined at a company level, not specific to your role. Rather, they are defined by increasing amounts of Ownership and Initiative. 

Using this Career Framework, we’ve entered early-stage company salary data at each level of experience for every role at Tuff. 

Here it is in action for our Growth Marketer role:

Cost of Living Multiplier: How do we adjust for remote?

We have been remote from the start and a big piece of that decision was wanting to access talent from anywhere in the world. We chose a high cost of living city as our benchmark so we can keep our salaries competitive. 

We start by understanding the difference in cost of living in the team member’s city compared to San Francisco. Using Numbeo, we calculate the Adjusted Cost of Living + Rent Index to compare two cities. Then, using this number the city falls into a defined Cost of Living Band. 

Adjusted Cost of Living + Rent Index

This compares the Cost of Living + Rent Index between two cities. By starting with a base of $1,000 in San Francisco, we look up how much money we would need to have the same standard of living as the city we’re comparing. 

Cost of Living Bands

By finding the Adjusted Cost of Living + Rent Index, each city falls into one of the following bands:

The Cost of Living Multipliers

These calculations help us get to the final number needed for the compensation formula. Once we know what Cost of Living Band a city falls in, we can use the Cost of Living Multiplier to reach our final base salary. 

Putting it all together

As a reminder, here is our compensation formula:

Let’s pretend we’re about to make an offer to a new Growth Marketer on the team who is based out of Portland. We were looking to hire someone who fell into our Level 4 definition of a Growth Marketer and we found someone great! 

We decided to make them an offer at Level 4, Step 2 and pull that Role Salary from our Career Framework.

To dive deeper into our compensation formula, you can view our spreadsheet here →.

Profit Sharing

The other piece to how we compensate Tuff employees is through Profit Sharing. 

Because we’re a small team, everyone works directly with clients and shares responsibility in driving their growth. The more our client’s grow, the more we grow and we wanted that to reflect in our compensation. We don’t offer the traditional stock options that some startups and public companies do but Tuff’s team members are critical to our success on every level.

We distribute profit sharing on a quarterly basis so once you’ve been at Tuff for a quarter, you are eligible. We look at Tuff’s profit balance, your time at Tuff, and your performance to calculate each team member’s share. 

At this point in Tuff’s growth, the amount we offer in profit sharing is quite low. It’s not going to give someone the ability to retire anytime soon! But, it’s important to us to offer profit sharing so early because each team member truly is an owner in our Tuff’s growth. 

Continue Reading

We’ve worked closely as a team to develop our compensation formula and to make the decision to offer profit sharing. 

While building our own version that works for Tuff, we’ve also leaned on some great existing resources. If you’re interested in learning more about compensation formulas and profit sharing, here are some of our favorite reads:

• Continuing to Improve on Pay: Our Latest Changes to the Salary Formula and How Much it Costs
• Remote Employees Shouldn’t Be Paid Less Based on Geography
• A Counterintuitive System for Startup Compensation
• How We Approach Employee Compensation
• How We Created a Career Framework For Growth on a Small Team

Ellen Jantsch

Ellen is the founder at Tuff and one of the team’s core growth marketers. She is a versatile marketer with expertise in multiple channels – from ppc to seo to email to others – responsible for the experiments and testing.  She is happiest when she’s on the ski hill or outside pointing her mountain bike downhill.

The post How We’ve Connected Salary to Both Personal and Company Growth appeared first on Tuff.