Virtual Team building for a remote-working environment
Posted by BBN Central on 14th Apr 2020
We’ve all read the numerous articles sharing tips for working at home, and while the advice these offers is valuable, what businesses still seem to be struggling with is how do you keep home-based teams connected and productive?
Internal Team communications
While tech platforms like Slack, MS Teams, Zoom, GoToMeeting and Bitrix24 are all essential, how should we be using them to keep teams connected and informed? We’ve learned from experience that establishing or maintaining ‘rituals’ is really effective, whether that’s virtual coffee breaks, drinks after work or just regular, scheduled online catchups. The concept of rituals helps to keep us focused, aligned and less isolated. A quick visual check-in in the morning and a quick check-out at night can also help us frame our working day and help us make the switch from work life to home life. It’s harder to achieve the work/home balance when both are in the same place.
We are starting to hear stories of people starting to feel overwhelmed and bombarded by online meeting and webinar invites, so be careful you don’t overdo it and keep these to a minimum. Instead, utilize other communication channels like chat channels that can often minimize the back and forth email frenzy that quickly clogs up your inbox.
External Communications
In light of current restrictions on normal business practice, we also need to find alternative methodologies to ensure that client projects meet their original objectives. With face to face contact, such as in workshops, being impossible right now, we need to find different ways to get the information and outcomes we would have gotten under normal circumstances.
Here, we are in a good position. During the major and prolonged oil price collapse (2014-16), some of our BBN colleagues developed a series of alternative methodologies to address the exact same issue, namely, the inability to convene extended, group, face to face sessions. Instead of using a combination of pre-work via briefing notes plus all-day workshop contributions to gain the necessary inputs, we can employ a combination of online surveys, short feedback validation sessions via video conference, followed by internal discussion and prompt reporting to meet our objectives. Attend our webinar where one of our top brand strategists will share his tips and experiences on hosting ‘virtual workshops in difficult times’
Use this new ‘online’ environment to introduce some basic account-based marketing tactics. Utilise online channels like LinkedIn to get closer to your customers by sharing relevant content and learn more about them.
Unchartered territory
We don’t often see inside our colleagues’ private lives, i.e. inside their homes, but right now, we’re getting more brief glimpses of personal spaces, loved ones, pets and kids than we’ve ever seen before. These new ‘hidden’ insights are having a bizarre effect on many people. Suddenly we feel closer to each other; our interactions are more natural, more relaxed, more human! This feeling of togetherness is captured brilliantly in this short heart-warming and thought-provoking video by one of BBN’s top creative directors, Ned Brown.
“Although we’re apart, we’ve never felt more together”.
Posted by BBN Central on 14th Apr 2020
SUBSCRIBE NOW.
1 email a month, EXCLUSIVE stories, and 10 minutes of your time.
Subscribe now
