How to boost productivity while running your business remotely
With COVID-19 forcing employees to telecommute, many business owners are asking themselves: “How can we stay productive without physically being in an office.” Here are three strategies to help your business run remotely:
1. Schedule internal video calls — a lot of them. We have a company-wide morning webcam meeting, and team video calls throughout the day. The benefits of using video are two-fold. First, you get to see your team to achieve that face-to-face time without worrying about spreading germs. Second, it holds everyone accountable. It’s easy to blend into the background on audio conference calls, and it is tempting for folks to call in when they might not be fully engaged in work.
We use Zoom for our video meetings. The platform makes it easy to host cam-calls for anywhere from 2 to 100+ attendees. You get a lot of functionality out of the free account. If you’re looking for more functionality such as a dedicated meeting link or longer meetings, the pro account is reasonably priced at less than $20/month.
2. One-on-one discussions should happen over video as well. As a rule of thumb, if I’m having a conversation that I would have had in-person two weeks ago, then that conversation should now be done via video. At Keybridge we use Skype for one-on-one video discussions. Zoom and Google Hangouts can also work well for this.
3. Keep Working! Don’t use remote work as an excuse to be less productive. While you may need to be a little more creative on how to complete certain tasks, you should always be in the mindset of being able to remotely accomplish anything that you could have done in the office. To enhance remote productivity at our company, we’re allowing employees to take equipment home, including monitors, computers, even chairs. So they can replicate their full office desk setup at home if they want.
If there has been a slow down in client work, use it as an opportunity to tackle some of those back-burner internal projects that you’ve been procrastinating on. Tackle that writing task, implement a new internal system, or revamp your website (our web division Keybridge Web can help with this). The important thing is to keep moving the ball forward.
