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.

Pair the new hire with a senior practitioner for 1:1 coaching on the specific gap — paid-media bid strategy, GA4 event setup, brand-voice editing. Cheaper to invest 4-6 hours of senior time now than to lose the hire at month four.

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.

Install Bonusly, Matter, or a simple #kudos channel. Set the norm in the first week — leaders shout out specific work (the editor who saved the launch, the designer who turned around the LinkedIn carousel overnight). Norms set in week one stick.

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.

CMO or marketing director sends a written monthly: pipeline contribution, brand-health indicators, what shipped, what's at risk, what changed in priorities. Written beats all-hands video — it scales to async teams and creates an archive new hires can read on Day 1.

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.

EAP details, Spring Health or Lyra access, manager training on recognizing burnout signs in creative teams (missed deadlines suddenly, withdrawal from review meetings, quality drop). Burnout in marketing concentrates around campaign cycles — peak season, product launches, year-end planning.

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.

Post internal openings to the team before external. A demand-gen marketer wanting to try product marketing, a content writer moving into SEO, a designer growing into brand strategy — supporting these moves retains institutional knowledge that takes 18 months to rebuild externally.