Does your Business have what it takes to survive Social Distancing?

A floundering economy and quickly depleting resources are the two ingredient recipe for failure.

These are challenging times for Businesses all over the world. Irrespective of their organizational sizes, managers are finding it hard to establish effective channels of communication & collaboration among team-members, from home.

I am a part of a startup myself, and thus fully understand how times like these can have a severe impact on business continuity & business growth.

The sudden enforcement of social distancing followed by work from home has made the situation even worse. Organizations as well as Employees were neither ready nor prepared for going completely remote.

Companies were quick to instill remote tools such as — Zoom calls, Microsoft Remote desktop, ConnnectWise Control etc.- in their processes and encourage employees to leverage technology for business transformation.

However, remote interactions hasn’t been able to match “Face to Face Communication”and “in-person meetings”. It still lacks the basic infrastructure required to make remote marketing, sales and customer support a complete success.

People have mixed reactions towards this entire COVID_19 situation. For instance, one of my colleagues is having a hard time focusing on work from home. He lives in a joint family and admits that finding a quiet place to work at is increasingly becoming a task. Also, with the line between work and play diminishing swiftly, he is unable to completely switch to either.

In contrast, another of my male colleague is having a ball at home. He believes that working from home has not only positively affected his productivity but has also given him a chance to spend quality time with his kid. Now, as soon as he switches off his laptop, he is free to play games with his 6 years old.

If employees are having a hard time, it is not a cakewalk for employers either. They too are working hard to get used to this new situation and are learning about newer ways of making their processes leakproof.

But no matter how efficient your work from home policies are, there will still be moments when you would feel the control slipping right off your hands.

And how you react in those moments will decide how good a leader you are and how great would your comeback be.

Here are a few tips/thoughts that can help managers stay connected with their remote teams and perform their functions in the most efficient manner:

What is your Medium of communication?

As I see it, communication is very little about “what you are speaking” but a lot about “what the recipient is hearing”. Therefore, it is important that when working from home, you choose a communication medium that helps you express yourself with more clarity.

The case with emails and instant text messages is that although they are easy to compose & deliver, they aren’t complete. They can make the recipient imagine N number of things and can cause confusion & misunderstanding.

Textual messaging leaves a lot of space for miscommunication. Also, it takes enormous time & effort to create a perfect looking email.

My suggestion would be, instead of falling in the Textual trap, use Chrome applications like the StoryXpress Recorder to quickly record short videos bites and share them with the teams.

Videos bring clarity, expression, and emotion to a message. Videos feel personal and have the desired impact instantaneously.

Learn to develop Faith in your Employees

Trust is a two-way street. You give it and you get it back. There is no other way around. As a manager, you need to clearly define what you expect of every single person in your team, and how best they can perform their duties.

Now, you need to step back, trust the talent you hired and see how creative they can get with their work and what kind of solutions they can invent & provide. You might not get the best results in the beginning, but trust you me, in the longer run, it would help individuals develop a Growth Hacking mindset.

Only when you encourage team members to think and take ownership of their roles can you establish a successful Startup.

Personalize Your Approach Now

Every employee is different; what works for one will not work for another person. Working from home has made the entire situation trickier. Since team-leads cannot meet every single individual in person, they are heavily relying on emails and messaging platforms like Slack to broadcast their messages.

Sign up for Newsletters Check out our popular newsletters and subscribe This is not going down well with everyone. I believe that there are certain steps that managers could take from miles away to infuse energy, enthusiasm, and encouragement within their teams immediately.

Say, I created a personalized video message for my inbound marketing head, commending her on the report she created last time around “Product growth ideas”.

Or, we just hired a new member on the team, and shared an onboarding video message with him, welcoming him and explaining to him “our company’s culture & ideologies” How great the person at the receiving end would feel!

With videos, you can get a lot creative!

Encourage employees to Upgrade their Skill-sets

To evolve is mankind’s second nature and a human can unlock his/her full potential by upskilling himself/herself professionally.

This Pandemic has given us a lot of time on our hands and even in these unfortunate times, we can help ourselves by utilizing this free time in upgrading our skill-sets and thus, in turn becoming better professionals.

There are scores of Online Platforms and portals like Coursera, Udemy, Duolingo wherein one can learn new courses which in turn will augur well for one’s curriculum vitae.

Wrapping up…

In these times it is important to stay focused and not lose hope. The market has unfortunately plummeted and thus, the goals one would have defined at the onset of the year might seem irrelevant now. However, transparency in communication and realistic goal setting can not only help your startup in being afloat but also propel it towards a prosperous revenue-generating firm. Want to make your startup journey smooth? YS Education brings a comprehensive Funding and Startup Course. Learn from India’s top investors and entrepreneurs. Click here to know more.