The recent global viral outbreak highlights the necessity of having plans in place allowing your team to work remotely. Meeting your deliverables with minimal disruption while protecting your team members' health is vital to any organization's long term success.
The challenge of maintaining business continuity for these employees falls squarely on the shoulders of management. How can managers maintain their team's cohesion and keep production moving smoothly? The content creation process makes this even more complicated when dealing with multiple contributors and tight deadlines. In this article, we look at the top four steps to manage a remote creative team successfully.
Communicate Regularly
Communication is the most critical aspect of working from home. Engagement, productivity, and providing top quality work are all improved by keeping creatives connected and feeling part of a team.
One-on-One Meetings: Weekly one on one meetings between managers and their remote employee’s help address individual challenges.
Regular Standing Meetings: Standing Weekly Team Meetings connect everyone on the team and provide awareness of what each member is contributing and where they fit in the bigger picture.
Project Inter-Team Communications: It is critical to set up quick check-in calls throughout the week between team members working on a project. These calls keep project teams cohesive and the project moving.
Provide Effective Technology Solutions
Technology plays a decisive role in facilitating communication, collaboration, and helping remote employees complete daily tasks. Success hinges on management implementing the right tools for remote employees to get the job done. These tools include:
Corporate Communications
Most companies already have technologies in place for corporate communications. These systems incorporate phones, including voice over IP and mobile, email, a chat platform, and video meeting/conference solutions for face-to-face meetings. These essential tools address the basic communication requirements for every employee.
Creative Operations and Work Management
Implementing the right technology stack with teams comprised of writers, photographers, retouchers, designers, editors, and directors, to name a few, impacts how effectively they collaborate from remote locations.
The technologies used in creative operations are different from those used throughout the rest of the organization. Thousands of products exist to handle all of the various creative tasks. Still, there are core pieces of technology that establish a foundation for remote work environments.
With IO Integration’s extensive knowledge and expertise at working remotely and supporting globally disrupted workforce's, we are able to help you evaluate and implement a plan. We have quick implementable solutions to help you:
- Digitize your work process
- Schedule your remote workforce
- Access your work and production content
- Keep your work in progress organized, in a central location and not on your users' desktops
- Track versions with change logging
- Collaborate, communicate and deliver to your clients
Route and Execute The Work
Marketing and creative work are deadline-driven, so there must be visibility into each project: What stage has it progressed to? Who is currently working on it? What is the task's time burn rate? And more. A work management solution should be in place to answer these questions, provide clear windows into all projects and, push work efficiently through production. When questions arise, managers should be able to check the system, see where the issue is, and take appropriate action to keep projects moving.
Access data and content
Production personnel need fast, secure access to all marketing assets including, images, documents and work-in-progress content, with the ability to control versions, collaborate and update. An ideal situation for remote Access to this data is ideally set up for remote workers in a secure cloud environment to maximise throughput and control versions.
Manage Their Time
Time is money and is the basis for how most creative teams set their pricing or calculate their internal budgets. By knowing how remote employees spend their time, managers have a better comprehension of what motivates and keeps workers engaged. Having effective systems in place helps managers understand how each team member works and how long tasks take. With this information, managers can create realistic deadlines that work for all team members. Managers also gain the ability to estimate costs for future projects more accurately.
Conclusion
While it is likely impossible to completely negate the business impacts of current and future natural disasters, having plans in place to allow your team to work safely at home is important to your success. Having the technology and policies in place to respond to these unexpected and rapidly evolving situations not only protects your team members but demonstrates to your clients that you have forward thinking policies in place to meet your deliverable time lines.
If your organization is currently planning to have more staff working from home during a global health crisis, contact IOI Integration to learn about our fast-track solutions that can be implemented quickly.
Contact us today for a quick evaluation to identify your remote workforce requirements.
or email us: info@iointegration.com
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