Dhruv Mehta June 16, 2020 The Pandemic Impact on Digital Marketing Team Work
We all are going through a tough phase because of COVID 19. The virus single-handedly disrupted the regular activities of companies and in some cases, forced them to close all operations.
In this time, Digital Marketing is hugely affected. Agencies are not receiving new projects and are working on tight budgets. The marketing team working on in-house projects is forced to take work from home. In other words, they all entered into a remote working world.
Now, the alarming situation starts with possible adverse impacts on productivity with chances of reduced efficiency. Considering the management concerns, this situation is further explained in detail as below:
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Too Many Distractions!
While working from home, you will face certain situations like doing household chores, unnecessary time spending on social media, binge-watching Netflix, etc. These distractions can divert your attention from regular work with reduced productivity.
For example, you are interacting with the client via email and suddenly get a notification about social media updates. 30 minutes wasted on checking updates. After that, when you return to the interaction, you have no idea of where you stopped and spend more time on figuring out where to resume.
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Internet Speed Fluctuations
Normally, what is a good internet speed?
It depends on the activities you are performing. Normally, 3-4 MBPS is a nice speed when you manage email and Skype communication. When changing connection mode from cable to fiber, you have multiple speed options to choose from depending on connection type availability. If you are working from home in the countryside with limited penetration of fiber-based Internet, you should go for cable-based connection.
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Chasing the Work-Life Balance like Tom chases Jerry
When you work from home, you need to manage your work-life balance. Apart from work commitments, you have the family to look after. It’s difficult to manage both things at the same time. However, if you manage things effectively, you can streamline your office work with a boost in productivity. Also, 80% of agencies agreed on the connection of remote working and higher productivity.
The missing strategies required to increase the efficiency and productivity of remote working Digital Marketing team discussed below:
1. Hire Team Members of Cultural Diversity
McKinsey’s report stated that hiring members from diverse cultures can boost 35% of creativity. People from different cultures come up with varied skills that boost the project completion speed. The curiosity to know about each other’s culture can help in breaking the communication barrier.
Apart from that, people representing different cultures can provide their inputs in global marketing strategies. This will help in building a growth-focused product marketing plan.
2. Setting Up of Weekly Meetings And Daily Micro Goals
When you work remotely, there are instances in which you feel isolated and left alone with no frequent team communication. To fight this, the team leader has the responsibility to organize a weekly online meeting to check work status. In addition to this, he can schedule a daily individual call with members to fight boredom and motivate them to work.
To increase daily productivity, you should prepare the list of activities before starting work and tick the activities once done. Also, at the end of the day, you can check the rate of activities completed for calculating efficiency. Daily reporting to your team leader can help you to stay focused on goals and keep a check on progress.
3. Online Training Activities
Apart from daily responsibilities and tasks, it is mandatory to conduct online training of team members to keep them motivated. Management can conduct the first survey to find out the training requirement of the individual employees and find out the relevant training programs for them. Before training, it will be their responsibility to share relevant learning materials to help employees during the training.
After the training, the team leader can track how this program is helping them in daily activities and whether it’s successful or not.
4. Leveraging Correct Project Management Tools
In a remote working environment, there is a need for frequent collaboration. For that, you need to invest in project management tools. There are tools like Slack, Jira, Asana, Trello, etc. for managing daily work and internal collaboration. These tools come up with great features of smooth internal work management, daily reporting facility, and easy file sharing that can save time and complete the project within the given deadline.
With investing in tools and using features, you can see the impact on the quality of the final Digital Marketing campaign and resulting enhancement in customer engagement.
The only thing required is the correct choice of the tool based on the budget and nature of work. Leveraging the right tool can boost the productivity of the remote working team to a larger extent.
5. Team Building Activities
When you are not in the office and with the absence of one to one communication, there are chances of following ineffective and informal communication practices while working from home. Also, employees may feel monotonous while working on the same thing everyday and result in lower productivity.
As a break from the daily routine, the HR department can design and implement online team building activities that every team member can take part in and enjoy a collaborative environment. They need to make sure that every member is contributing actively. For the Digital Marketing team, HR can design activities related to making fun logos of brands, creating catchy tagline of brands and roleplay of popular advertisements, etc.
6. Implementing Reward Programs
Every team member has certain desires in terms of achievement and recognition. Company management can take this thing to notice and design innovative reward programs for employees. Considering the focus on Digital Marketing activities, they can design a reward program connected to the accomplishment of marketing metrics and managing successful campaigns.
These rewards will further boost their morale and encourage them to do wonders in their field.
Final Words
There are already enough critics out there slamming the remote working environment and how it can demolish the normal work culture. However, those people are really in trouble as the pandemic pushes companies to start this new normal culture. Although some offices have started operating, they still have to follow the new social distancing norms.
Instead of criticizing the situation, management and other surrounding aspects, we should implement these strategies in our daily routine to fight the pandemic with higher productivity.
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