The Top 3 Things I've Learned by Having a Blended Remote Team

Taking a creative enterprise to the next level became more possible based on this remote model, let me tell you what. We were invited to be better-focused, more strategic, more aligned and digitally coordinated. I never expected to like the model as much as I do, but even for myself, with the gift of gab, I am absolutely more productive myself.

A Strategic Plan in Place

Further apart pushed us to better illiterate our goals. A well thought out Strategic Plan came to life because of this. It went from being a nice idea that Mercedes wants to being critical to lead our organization with. By doing this together as a team, we intentionally aligned on our Mission, Vision & Values.

Having these key elements there as a foundation was more important than I knew. Essentially I leveled up - I resisted having tools like this in place because of past bad experiences trying to make similar concepts happen. It was refreshing to brush off the past and newly work on bringing these important elements to life. I went from Mercedes 2.0 the artist & sales jockey with my hands in a lot of the marketing to Mercedes 3.0 the CEO who guides creative and has empowered a team of leaders - owning that we are no longer a small start up. (deep breaths) This revived a personal value of mine which is never give up. Even I need my team to pick me up at times and being 19 years into this, I had a lot of room to grow and I owned (own) it.

Getting the Right People into the Right Seats

Structure is embraced, in fact the more structure we put in place, the better things have gotten. At times, the structure has slowed down "my start up ways" and frustrated me, but then I'd have to remind myself of the purpose of the structure and give myself a little smile in the mirror and be on my way - embracing structure for the bigger picture. Whether the person's seat was primarily in their work from home office (aka the dining room table) or in one of our production studios, the better we defined the seats, the easier it was to have the teams execute the playbook. In making this goal to better define the seats and drive the goal of getting the right people into them - it's a work in progress. I'm not sure when we'll be fully done because the organization lives and breathes and changes as these changes happen, so it feels like it'll never be done. What is visible is employee engagement, increases in leadership scope, better metrics being tracked and innovation. The clearer we've made goals and expectations, the more ownership executives within Mercury Mosaics have had in leading and improving the areas they are responsible for.

In summary, I've learned that if you want something worth fighting for you need

• Clear Vision
• Project Management Chops
• The Right Team

These are the 3 key things I learned once we became a blended in person & remote team. For some, this is just crazy-obvious. For me, it took me being in a crisis like 2020 to get it and I now get it, I've got it and I remain passionately committed drive by heart & perseverance!

Mercedes Austin is a misfit in the tile industry, take everything she says with a grain of grout, she's making it all up as she goes.

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