How to Tackle Remote Working for Your Business
These days most people have started being accustomed with the concept of working from home. However, you might still be struggling to streamline your remote work process. Today, we’re discussing how we can maintain the high standards of work that you kept in your office while working from home.
If you’ve been working from home for the last few months, you might have already found your favorite chair, the most comfortable work set-up, and a place with the best lighting in your house where you sit for online meetings. Some of you might still be working completely from home and some of you might have been taking alternate days of working at home and working at the office. No matter how you’re coping with it, I’m sure some things are still giving you a hard time: streamlining your own work and trying to keep track of how everyone else is working.
This might have created a few problems.
How do you retain the high quality of work standard you maintain at your office? How will your business/company run smoothly even when your employees are scattered all around the city or might be — all around the country?
I’ll be discussing some tasks and tools that might help you streamline this process.
Task 1: Set up a fixed communication channel meant just for work.
If you and your employees are communicating via Messenger, Viber, or Whatsapp, then I can guarantee you: there have been times when it got confusing, frustrating, and chaotic.
You might have had a hard time ignoring your personal messages amidst the office ones or some important files and messages were hard to find when you needed them, or you’re simply sick of hearing pings from your office channels on weekends.
The solution to this problem is: Use a separate communication channel like Slack, Discord, or any other good ones you find easy to use.
For this article, I am covering Slack, a proprietary business communication platform developed by American software company Slack Technologies. Here, I’ll show you a few steps that might help you get started with it.
- Create a Slack Workspace
Go here and click on create a slack workplace, then enter your work email address.
Then, confirm your email address by entering the code sent by Slack to your email address.
Give a name to your workspace.
Name a project you’re working on.
Now that you have a workspace, invite your peers into that workspace. Send them a direct invitation to their email address or copy-paste them an invitation link.
Voila, Your Slack Workspace in ready to go!!
2. Learn to Use it Well
Well, getting accustomed to anything has its own learning curve. It’s the same with Slack. Play around with it, watch online tutorials, and use Google if you’re stuck on anything. For now, I’ll tell you a few things to kickstart your journey.
a. A different channel for a different purpose: team, product, project
b. Make the channels private or public as per your need
c. Reply to messages in threads, conversation will more organizable!
d. Keep track of message threads, mentions, and reactions
e. Use the file browser to browse the files sent by you or sent to you in the workspace
f. Add other apps in the channels to add spice to your Slack
Some recommended apps are Simple Poll, Google Drive, Google Calendar, etc.
This is all I am going to talk about Slack in this article. Try it for yourself, I am sure this will make your work-talk much more manageable.
Task 2: Utilize what your GSuite has to offer!
I’m almost sure, you are using many apps under GSuite already. Gmail, Google Docs, Google Slides, Google Sheets, Google Maps, etc. might be some of the apps you are familiar with. However, GSuite offers much more than that. If you’re curious, open your chrome browser and check it for yourself.
GSuite has a lot of services and hence, endless opportunities to use it how your team wants to use it. Here, I’ll be demonstrating you a skit of how you can a team utilize GSuite for the maximum level of productivity and collaboration.
Let’s say your team wants to schedule a quick meeting at 10 AM, then work on a business proposal for a client. You’ve promised your client that the business proposal will be emailed at 2 PM and you’ll have a meeting to discuss it at 4 PM. Now, let’s do every task here with GSuite. I’ll be using Gmail, Google Doc, and Google Calendar here. Remember, you can utilize other tools like Google Sheets, Google Slides, Jamboard, etc. in the same way.
First of all, let’s schedule the meetings. For this, we’re using Google Calendar.
Add your teammates.
The default time window is an hour but you can adjust the time window as you like.
As an added bonus, let see how we can set it as a recurring meeting. Usually, the morning meetings happen every day, so let’s set it as a recurring meeting that happens every day except on the weekends.
You can see a lot of pre-made options but for this purpose, we are setting up a custom meeting. Click on Custom…
I want to repeat the meetings every day except for the weekends. So, repeating it every day won’t work for me. I’ll choose ‘week’ and then select which days of the week I want to keep the meeting.
I’ve ended the meeting on Sep 30, but you can make it a never-ending meeting too! You can also end the meeting after a certain number of occurrences. Once you’re done, save the meeting.
You can schedule the meeting for 4 PM in the same way without making it a recurring meeting.
The meetings are all set up!
Now that you’ve sent the meeting invitations, how do you know your teammates or the client have seen this meeting and are coming? The invited people get a calendar invitation in their email inbox and can RSVP to tell you they’re coming or not. Let’s see how they can do it.
After they RSVP, you get a notification email. This is a good practice that you should develop among your teammates/employees.
We’re set for the meetings. The next step would be preparing the proposal. We’ll be using Google Doc for making it. On Google Docs, you can collaborate with your teammates and prepare it together.
Go to Google Docs and start working on a document. You can use a blank doc or use a template available. I’ll be using the available template.
Share it with the peers you want to collaborate with.
You can share the file with different rights: edit, comment, and view. Peers get edit rights and the client may get view or comment rights if you decide to share it with them.
Now, you can collaborate with your teammates to complete this proposal. I’ll show you a few examples that highlight the perks of using Google Docs for this.
- Add a comment.
2. Tag and assign people while making comments
3. Did someone make a mistake on the doc? Check the version history and reverse the mistake.
4. Download the document in a format you want.
5. Share it with your client via a share link
Congratulations!! You’ve successfully completed this project with your teammate. (Let’s say I’ve completed it, I’m too lazy to actually make a full proposal.)
Now that we have completed our proposal, let’s send it to our client via Gmail.
You also have the option to schedule the email for a later date. There might be days when you finish things at night and decide to send the email tomorrow morning but alas, you forget to send the email the next day!! This is helpful to prevent those mishaps.
Woohoo!! The skit is complete. This skit shows you one of the many ways you can utilize GSuite. If you like the way it worked, go try it for yourself. The opportunities are endless.
Today we learned using Slack and utilizing GSuite for streamlining your work process and improving team collaboration. Please get on the groove and practice doing it yourself. Your remote work experience will get better for sure!
