Remote work can put a damper on your team’s output. To maximize the benefits of a remote marketing team, you need to have the right systems and processes. Read and learn the most required.
Even if you didn’t want to hear about remote working for your employees until recently, the world has changed in recent years, and employers are being advised to send people home. It’s not just the tourism industry that has been affected: restaurants are closing their doors to the public and taking food out, celebrities are announcing online concerts, and conferences are being moved to the internet. Do you fear for the future of your business? Let’s find out if your marketing team can work without an office with minimal disruption!
How to organize remote teamwork from home
If you haven’t practiced telecommuting before, it can be difficult to get started: there are many peculiarities. Understand how to organize remote working will help with this step-by-step guide:
- Decide on a new format. It is important for the business owner to accept the fact that you will have to loosen control and start trusting employees, giving them more freedom to make decisions. It’s hard, but otherwise, remote marketing is impossible.
- Discuss the changes with the employees you are transferring to remote work marketing. It’s important that they understand that this is not a holiday with elements of work, but a full-time job in a new environment, and can communicate this to their families.
- Decide which computers people will be working on. Give them their office laptops, or ask them to use their own personal equipment. If the latter, get your system engineer to install all the necessary software, as well as TeamViewer or its equivalent and a VPN so that you can deal with technical issues remotely. If personal computers are used, you’ll need remote access to the desktop, logins, and passwords to the corporate email, databases, and all the services in use. Teach employees how to use the software, including techniques that will make teamwork faster and easier — explaining how to share a screen when on a call, for example.
- Establish communication. It will no longer be possible to walk into the next office and discuss a task, and email correspondence can be long and inefficient, so it is important to think through the process:
- Set up group chats for working from home on the marketing of a company in Zoom, Slack, or another messenger (important that it has a good search facility in its history), or use the groupware features discussed below.
- Set expectations so that the manager does not assume that staff will reply to their messages at midnight and that employees understand that they have the right not to read the chat room of any issues after work hours. This will help avoid tension in the team.
- Agree on how to manage a remote team. Changing tasks in a chat room or discussing them on a call without a follow-up fixation is dangerous — “forgot,” “missed,” and “thought it wasn’t for me” are inevitable. Select a service that is convenient and easy to use and train everyone on how to use it.
Technical support for the remote team
A service for setting tasks and controlling deadlines
Asana. Free for teams of up to 15 members, with a paid version starting at 11 euros per month per employee. You can set tasks, attach files to them and leave comments, assign persons in charge and deadlines, set up reminders by email when deadlines are approaching.
Trello. Free for marketing from home teams of up to 10 people, the paid version — from $10 per month per employee. You can create project boards and task cards in them, assign people in charge, view upcoming deadlines in a calendar format, and receive notifications of status changes.
Chat for team communication
Slack. The free version is usually sufficient, where you can create any number of open and private channels, but only 10,000 recent messages will be available.
Chats are suitable for quick communication but are not used for group calls: no video, no ability to share the screen, and no way to record a meeting.
Video calling service
Zoom. In most cases, the free version is sufficient, allowing up to 100 guests and unlimited one-to-one calls. Group conferencing has a time limit of 40 minutes (you’ll have to buy if you need more). Sessions can be recorded and saved.
Discord. Free, similar in functionality and interface to Slack, but does not delete the correspondence history and has good functionality for video calls.
Online appointment scheduling
It’s convenient to use Google Calendar: when you create an event and add guests, these people receive invitations to the email and can confirm participation directly from the email.
Document sharing
Choose any cloud-based service, such as free Google Docs or Dropbox. Remember that recorded meetings are better stored in a compressed format to save space and pay less for storage. For example, here, you can find as many as the top 10 ways to compress MP4 videos, so take your pick.
To summarize
To move your business online without a loss of productivity and learn how to manage remote employees, you need to:
- Provide employees with everything they need: technology, software, access, and credibility;
- Train them to use services they haven’t used before;
- Ensure you have a strong backup by automating business processes as much as possible;
- Let go of the situation and trust that things will get back to normal.
