There is no doubt that COVID19 has brought a drastic change in marketing activities. Due to isolation and social distancing, brands are forced to implement new strategies. The only way to resume the work was to enable Work From Home with the support of IT infrastructure.
It was crucial for marketers to ensure proper coordination and last-minute preparation while changing the working paradigm. Working from home has many distractions. It was difficult to interact naturally with team members. The increased level of engagement was a needed factor for maximizing productivity amidst a dynamic environment.
The large-scale brands had implemented the strategy of working from home quite successfully, with the help of video conferences, emails, cloud collaboration software, and other technologies. But the small and medium scale brands are still struggling to implement effective work from home strategy.
The following suggestions will help you to keep your team engaged, well informed, and highly productive.
- Equip your team with productivity tools
The most important step towards team success is to equip the team with productivity tools. This includes project management tracking software, messaging apps, video conferencing platforms, and many more. Equipping the employees with new technologies helps the management to ensure effective coordination.
- Timely organizational messaging
It is important that the brand has to inform the employees about plans and strategies of marketing activities. They can choose any communication path like upward, downward, or lateral communication. The only thing is that the workers must be updated about company policies and other information. For this they can use different tools like recorded sessions, limited attendees video calls.
- Amping up learning and developing initiatives
During this time, many brands paused some of their marketing activities. So, there is not much work to engage the team throughout the 8/9 hours of productive time. This is the right time to develop our workforce. We can utilize the time for implementing learning and development programs. These can cover process education, behavioral development, and/or upskilling the existing workforce.
- Provide emotional and steady support
In this difficult time, the employees may feel loneliness or negative emotions. The management has to provide emotional and steady support. They have to avoid work stress and the workers must feel that the firm is supporting them. Managers should advocate for Remote employees to meditate, exercise, get quality sleep, take showers, and continue on with lives as normally as they can.
- Take employee feedback seriously
In this pandemic situation, the management must take periodic feedback from the employees. Implement surveys or chatbots to ensure regular and open communication. According to studies, employees who feel heard are 4.6 times more empowered to perform their best work.
