What a Remote Production Team Needs To Succeed — and How Your Digital Health Brand Benefits

Every health tech company is looking for ways to innovate their products and up their marketing strategy to promote them. So, finding a trustworthy digital agency that has new ideas (*cough* animation) for how to accomplish just that is paramount. 

If you’re like most people, your instinct is to look for local partners to fill this role. But don’t limit yourself based on geography. A professional and trustworthy team is set up to support outstanding work — from anywhere and for anywhere. 

At MOWE, our remote production team has the right blend of specialized technology, comprehensive planning, sound communication, and a rock-solid internal culture to create brand stories that resonate all over the world.  

3 Must-Haves for a Successful Remote Production Team

I don’t advise bringing on just any remote firm for your motion graphics needs. There are three critical structural pillars that MOWE has tailored to provide digital health companies with great marketing and in-app animations:

1. Technology Suite

Technology is the ground floor of our remote “office building.” Everything we do is built on top of — and made possible by — the tech we employ. Forming a remote animation production timeline is more complicated than forming one with a “normal” in-studio team. Just think about the varying time zones to consider! 

MOWE uses more than 10 tools to fuel our remote scheduling and production work and even our business-related activities, like HR, legal, and finance tasks. Here’s a sample of the tech suite used to create our animations and the needs each software primarily meets: 

• Slack for communication
• Notion for documentation 
• Miro for creative collaboration
• Ziflow for asset-proofing 
• Runn for managing our team’s workload 
• ClickUp for project development

This bears repeating: Impactful remote work couldn’t happen without modern technology. All of our software is intertwined during production to allow for a creative workflow that gives our team the space for deep work and independence. 

2. Internal Culture 

Deep work and independence, as mentioned above, are wholly necessary for innovative digital health animations. An artist must be able to put their head down, without distraction, and create. But camaraderie and a solid internal culture are just as crucial to the creative process. 

At MOWE, we’ve built and continue to nurture an internal culture steeped in trust. Trust is what drives work and people. Everyone on our team knows they’re partially responsible for taking each project from a loose idea to an engaging experience for your customers — and our trust in them, and theirs in each other, is what allows this to happen. 

How do we develop this all-important team trust? We’ve found that the following works:

• Openly discussing the studio’s values and vision.

• Ensuring each team member — prospective, new, and veteran — believes in our values and vision.

• Applying our values and vision to the ways we work so they’re not simply hollow words.

• Respecting our values and vision from the top-down. 

When everyone on the team understands and values the same principles, they automatically work more effectively. At MOWE, that feeling that we’re all rowing in the same direction is a powerful motivator to produce impactful projects for our health tech clients.

3. Optimized Communication

Few things are truly urgent. Yes, there are moments when we need everyone in the same “virtual room.” But most of the time, sending a message and waiting for a reply is sufficient to solve a problem or receive an answer without breaking one’s creative flow or taking an unnecessary amount of multiple people’s time at once. 

Limiting distractions by elevating only urgent matters to in-person or in-the-moment communication is what creates space for deep work. And we always want deep work to be the default at MOWE, with collaboration happening as needed. 

Along the same lines, we have an internal policy that caps the number of regular meetings we hold. Every meeting we do schedule needs to be valuable to the people involved. 

Another important aspect of how we optimize communication for our remote production team? We don’t force our team members to work at the exact same time.  

When there’s a time zone difference greater than one or two hours between an artist and whoever is directing them, we ask them to define an approximate four-hour chunk of the day wherein people can work together with their leaders on the project they share. At all other times, our communication is asynchronous. 

As a bonus, asynchronous communication and work allow people to create when they’re feeling creative (whether that’s in the wee hours of the morning or the late afternoon) and take breaks when they’re in a rut. 

How MOWE Meets Your Commercial Needs

At the end of the day, what matters the most is how we help you achieve your goals. Our objective back in 2015 was to build a reliable and talented team capable of self-managing and self-learning, always eager to try something new. And we’ve achieved it. 

What’s more, we’ve also pushed ourselves, as a studio, to break out from the advertising world and become a more focused creative partner, capable of developing engaging, holistic campaigns for the digital health industry. It’s an exciting time to be at and work with MOWE.

Specifically, we’ve built MOWE — across the years — so we can:

• Access global talents depending on the project’s requirements — without negative impacts on quality or speed. 

• Build a flexible and responsive team capable of adapting to each project’s challenges.

• Foster a collaborative environment where people are eager to learn and develop both their technical abilities and their expertise in our client’s field.

• Understand how to be cost-effective, not by underpaying people, but by perfecting our workflows and understanding where we’re losing hours of work.

• Empower cultural diversity by bringing together people with various backgrounds and unique insights that get translated into client projects in infinite ways.

We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished and how we run MOWE, but only because of the work it results in for our clients. Making a difference to your marketing efforts — through motion — is why we do what we do.