Many companies are working toward a similar goal right now: We want our teams that are now working from home (or having trouble doing so!) to be just as effective and empowered as they are in the office. So, what can you do to enable your work-from-home workforce when they sit down to their computers in the morning? Here's what you need to know:
There's no question that COVID-19 and the need to physically distance workers has truly shaken up the continuity of operations for many businesses.
Some businesses have had to close down operations temporarily, knowing that a core element of their business involves face-to-face interaction that is simply too likely to create virus spread.
Other businesses have seen a transition to a work-from-home workforce, rapidly changing computer systems and software so that they operate from devices that can be taken home like laptop computers. This transition may have been fast and easy, especially if your team is accustomed to some percentage of work-from-home responsibility already. It also could have been a rough, error-laden process, highlighting the need for improvement in your business continuity infrastructure.
Other businesses may find themselves somewhere in-between. Perhaps a skeleton crew can keep an in-person operation running, maintaining a responsible distance from each other due to the reduced number of people in the office. The rest of the team can provide support from afar, still via a work-from-home software-based solution.
Companies who have traditionally resisted setting the groundwork for a work-from-home arrangement are likely scrambling to find a solution due to the sudden onset of many local and regional orders to close non-essential businesses or work from home.
No matter your company's stance on work-from-home arrangements, this crisis demonstrates the value of knowing the capabilities of your software systems and how to make them quickly adapt to a massive change in operations. The money you save by having this flexibility could be key to the future of your business.
An unprecedented situation like moving your entire workforce to work-from-home may cause you to re-evaluate how prepared you are for potential changes in your workflow. A range of small and larger changes to how your company does business can create a variety of hiccups in your processes, revealing areas where a more clear emergency response plan would have been helpful.
A proactive and smart response is to evaluate how resilient your institution is to such shocks, and what small but powerful changes might make the transition easier.
Major shifts in the workplace can affect morale and productivity, and while some tremors during a crisis would be unavoidable, institutional resilience can be a major asset when it comes to bouncing back stronger than ever.
Eniture Technology is a HubSpot Solutions Partner, and we've seen how HubSpot's infrastructure can massively increase business continuity and institutional resilience. We help companies implement business solutions from HubSpot and experience amazing growth in efficiency and success down the road.
While we normally talk to people about HubSpot as a marketing, sales enablement, and customer service solution, the infrastructure that holds these capabilities together is a valuable tool for helping all of your teams coordinate and maintain communication, organization, and workflow productivity. It's a feature set we take for granted under normal circumstances. But during disruptive times, what we took for granted is suddenly what's keeping us in business.
Cloud-based platforms like HubSpot create spaces for internal communication as well as constantly-updated documentation. It allows, for instance, for your teams to coordinate their outreach to prospects and customers; it's a tool for streamlining, organizing, documenting, and promoting outreach. It can be used whether your team is in the office or at home, making it ideal for maintaining business continuity no matter how many individuals suddenly have to work from home.
The documentation and organization aspects of HubSpot are particularly important. A crisis like COVID-19 can create unexpected and prolonged disruption to your business. Having everything clearly documented allows your employees to pick up on the work and delegate clearly. You'll save time by re-establishing positive contact with customers and prospects without reiterating or moving back up the marketing funnel in communication style.
Think about it: Have you made sure you have accessible but secure data backups in a data center? Have you documented your processes in a way that allow employees to read, review, and implement a disaster preparedness plan? Have you distinguished and assigned your critical business functions versus the elements you can let fall by the wayside during the core of a crisis? These questions need to be answered, and storing answers in a clear way in a cloud-based business solution like HubSpot is a smart start.
Using these structures in the office may seem like overkill at first. After all, employees just need a few seconds to check in with each other verbally to locate what they need. But what happens when that verbal communication isn't so easy or you can't easily access that drawer or file cabinet? Think about the advantages of a clear cloud-based business continuity tool in contexts like:
Deepening your business resilience is incredibly crucial for these difficult weeks of COVID-19, but the benefits continue long after this crisis fades into history.
Even if you intend to return entirely to a work at office environment, using a tool like HubSpot will improve your day-to-day operations. And having the ability for your employees to work from home when their circumstances require it is good for productivity, workflow continuity, and morale.
So what can HubSpot's tools do to keep your organization resilient during this crisis and in the future? HubSpot has gained its reputation for being a very helpful communication and organization tool for at least two features:
By using HubSpot and leveraging the integrations that are available, you can keep your key metrics, data, and contacts at your employees' fingertips, no matter where they are working from.
Here are just a few of the HubSpot features that offer value both in the office and in a distributed team who are working from home.
Customer Relationship Management software, such as HubSpot's free and widely-well-regarded version, gives you unprecedented control over the process of creating and managing relationships with your customer. The goal of a CRM is to document and automatically update every interaction with a prospect or customer so that you and your employees can use the contact's history to provide assistance in a more meaningful and effective way.
While this is clearly helpful in-office, it becomes even more helpful out of office for a work-from-home workforce. Rather than having to meet or confirm every interaction, CRM software allows you to quickly and clearly assign prospect and customer follow-up to specific team members so they can work effectively from the comfort of their own homes. It also provides a log of productivity and results to help managers ensure that everything necessary is getting done even without the automatic, casual monitoring they can do in-office.
If your company relies on email for part or all of its business outreach, you'll find that the email template features of HubSport are outstanding. At a time when things are rapidly changing, you can use these templates to send personalized emails to your prospects and customers en masse that reflect their real-time experiences.
You can use HubSpot to assign the task of creating an email template to one of your work-from-home employees. The creative work can be performed by your best writer, and then immediately made available to the rest of your remote employees. Your emails will have consistent messaging and quality, while still bearing the signature of the representative that sent it.
HubSpot integrates with Slack, a messaging platform that, during work-from-home circumstances, can replace the casual "chat over the cubicle wall." Slack easily organizes and stores conversations with large and small groups. The integration with HubSpot makes it possible to send tasks and notifications straight from the HubSpot CRM to Slack, effectively assigning work without a complicated communication flow.
If your office doesn't yet have a useful messaging solution, your staff is most likely spending lots of time on the phone during this work-from-home time, which cuts into productivity. See what you can do to implement Slack for quick questions to keep everyone working quickly and efficiently.
Hubspot integrates with Zoom, a popular videoconferencing app, in addition to a variety of other software that can help you meet or call. HubSpot helps you schedule calls with customers, prospects, or internal stakeholders, and when you make a scheduled meeting, a Zoom integration can automatically generate a videoconferencing link that makes it a breeze to get everyone online at the right time. While working from home, having these smooth integrations can be incredibly helpful; invitees see a link where there would normally be a conference room location, and by clicking on it, they're easily ushered into the meeting.
Having this capacity is helpful, even while operating your company during normal circumstances. Many meetings involve at least one off-site member these days, and if someone unexpectedly cannot join in-person, an auto-generated Zoom link might help save the meeting.
Vidyard allows you to integrate videos into your communication with prospects and customers, including videos that have customized buttons and calls to action at the end. During a time when your sales staff cannot make in-person visits, creating customized videos related to the current moment can engage and inspire your potential prospects.
Your company probably can't survive if it comes to a standstill during a crisis or emergency. Vidyard allows you to get some of the benefits of face-to-face interaction without having to be in-person, and those benefits continue after your emergency protocols have ceased. There are plenty of times when sharing a video with your prospects or customers could be the perfect way to communicate.
Workflow automation tools in HubSpot are great for notifying your staff when it's time to follow up with a prospect or customer. Workflows can automatically send a text or email based on a prospect's or customer's interaction with your website or a recent email. You can create complex automated workflows by using branching logic and setting triggers for a variety of events and behaviors.
When your team can't make in-person 'hand offs", workflow automation may be just the ticket to facilitate your business processes. After you automate your business processes, your work-from-home employees can stay focused on getting new customers and servicing your existing ones. If circumstances dictate it, they can update your outreach assets to take the current situation into account or address new pain points of your buyer persona.
Even when everyone's working in the office, it's commonplace to lose productivity trying to locate a particular document to share with a prospect or customer. When you have a work-from-home workforce, you're simply out of luck if the document is in a file cabinet at work. The document stands a better chance of being found if it's hosted somewhere, provided it's not on a server or workstation that can only be accessed while at the office.
HubSpot's searchable document library makes it much easier to find and share documents. Since the document library is in the cloud, you can access your documents while at work or home. You can use permissions to limit which of your employees have access to which documents. Share documents in the library via email or in email templates and if you want to know if a contact viewed the document, turn the tracking feature on.
Any tool that saves a message or phone call helps your team contribute to business continuity and productivity. Especially on those days when your employees are already out of their comfort zones.
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It's no surprise that many businesses were caught unprepared for a work-from-home workforce when the the COVID-19 crisis hit. This particular level of social distancing is unprecedented, and its impact on business has been immense.
The longer term day-to-day business impact of COVID-19 has yet to be determined. Already there are projections that the impact on commercial real estate may be profound. Companies that maintain or realize productivity gains during this work-from-home period may choose to downsize their office space significantly. Why spend thousands of dollars each month on commercial office space that your employees spend hours commuting to and from daily when they are happier and more productive working from home?
A platform like HubSpot can make your business more efficient in-office and more resilient during a major disruption that suddenly requires your employees to work from home. It can enable you to transition to a company that minimizes its overhead by reducing the amount of commercial real estate needed for essential at-work personnel while allowing others to work productively from home. Even if you just can't grapple with the idea of having some percentage of your employees permanently working from home, your on-premise staff will be more productive. And if there's a repeat of something like COVID-19, you won't miss a beat.
Implementing HubSpot has residual benefits as well: Morale is higher among workers who feel calm and assured about business operations protocol in the event of an emergency. Your team can handle smaller discontinuity factors and convey to clients that your operations are seamless. That's a far better scenario than having to apologize for people being out of office or meetings being hamstrung by lack of teleconferencing options.
Fortunately, HubSpot has free versions of all of the modules that make up its platform: CRM, Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and Service Hub. If you aren't already using HubSpot, sign up for it today. You'll quickly begin to experience the benefits and you'll feel much better prepared for the future.
If you need help implementing HubSpot, reach out to a trusted HubSpot Solutions Partner like Eniture Technology. We'll be happy to help you.
Eniture Technology specializes in helping e-Commerce merchants grow by providing useful information, digital marketing services, off-the-shelf apps that solve common problems, and custom programming services. Please contact us if you need help growing your online business or implementing the concepts presented in this blog post.
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