Employee Engagement Checklist

Hiring manager owns the plan: 30 days for stack ramp (HubSpot/Marketo, GA4, Looker dashboards, brand library), 60 days for first owned deliverable (campaign brief, blog draft, ad set), 90 days for an independently-shipped initiative. Marketers ramp slower than expected when the plan only lists tools — include the named first deliverable.

Buddy should be a peer marketer on a parallel function (content buddy for content hire, demand-gen buddy for paid hire) — not the manager. Buddy answers the unwritten questions: UTM convention, who owns the editorial calendar, which Slack channels actually matter.

Marketing ops grants seats per role: MAP (HubSpot/Marketo/Pardot), CRM, GA4 + Search Console, ad managers (Google Ads, Meta, LinkedIn), DAM/Figma, Ahrefs or Semrush, Litmus or Email on Acid for email roles. Confirm SSO works before Day 1; new hires hunting for a Marketo login on their first morning is a slow start.

Manager + new hire review the 30-60-90 plan against actual ramp. Flag stuck areas honestly — incomplete tool access, unclear ownership of the editorial calendar, brand-voice ambiguity. The 30-day mark is when course-corrections are still cheap.

Tie recognition to outcomes the team can influence: pipeline sourced, MQL-to-SQL conversion, organic sessions lifted, ROAS improvement, NPS movement. Avoid "campaign of the month" judged on aesthetics — it teaches the team that craft beats results.

Post launches in #marketing-wins with the specific contributor named, not just the campaign. "Priya shipped the LinkedIn nurture that lifted MQL-to-SQL from 18% to 26%" beats "Q2 nurture launched." Recognition lands when it's specific.

Document level expectations by track — IC content, IC demand-gen, IC brand, manager, director. Each level has scope, autonomy, and skill markers. Without a written ladder, promotions feel arbitrary and the strongest ICs leave for clarity elsewhere.

30 minutes max. Format: in-flight campaigns, blockers, last week's results vs. plan, this week's launches. Avoid status-theater — the meeting earns its slot when it surfaces a blocker the team can unblock together (a creative review stuck in legal, a paid budget pacing hot).

Use Culture Amp, Lattice, or a 6-question Google Form — short beats comprehensive. Track eNPS plus a free-text "what would make this a better place to do marketing" question. Compare against last quarter; the trend matters more than the absolute number.

When the pulse comes in below benchmark, pull the lowest-scoring themes (workload, tooling, manager support, career growth) and run small-group sessions — not all-hands theater. Commit to two specific changes within 30 days; "we heard you" without action damages trust more than the original signal.

Tie review to the IDP set at the start of the cycle — concrete craft skills (GA4 event design, ad copy, brief writing) and outcome metrics. Avoid the trap of evaluating marketers on activity volume; tie to pipeline, organic lift, conversion improvements where attribution allows.

Document core collaboration hours (e.g., 10am–3pm in the team's primary timezone) and explicit expectations around off-hours response. Marketing teams running global campaigns drift into 24/7 expectations without a written policy; agency teams especially.

Default no-meeting blocks two half-days per week for makers — copywriters, designers, SEO leads need long uninterrupted time to ship quality work. Managers respect the blocks publicly; otherwise the norm decays in a quarter.

Surface what's actually available — gym stipend, ClassPass, meditation app subsidy, ergonomic equipment for remote staff. Adoption is usually low not because benefits are bad but because nobody knows. Re-promote quarterly with a simple how-to-claim post.

IDP names two craft skills to grow this cycle and one stretch project. Examples: "learn GA4 explorations and ship a custom funnel report," "write 4 long-form posts under 800 words to tighten copy." Vague IDPs ("grow as a marketer") don't drive behavior change.

Approve the directly-relevant ones: GA4 certification, HubSpot Academy, Meta Blueprint, Google Ads, LinkedIn Marketing Labs, Semrush Academy. Skip the resume-padding cosmetic certs. Budget per-person quarterly so it doesn't compete with travel funding.

One conference per marketer per year, role-relevant: INBOUND for content/demand-gen, MAU for growth/lifecycle, SaaStr for B2B PMM, Cannes Lions for brand/creative leadership, MozCon for SEO. Require a write-up shared with the team — turns one ticket into team-wide learning.