Work From Home Tips To Help Your Company Survive The Coronavirus

Update Customers With Email and Google My Business

Make sure your customers are updated on your business status when it comes to the Coronavirus situation.  This means you will need to send out an email to customers and employees and update your Google My Business profile (and other local listings) to reflect the changes that you have made to accommodate the situation.

Customers will need to know:

• How You Are Protecting Your Employees’ And Customers’ Health
• If Your Location Is Open To The Public
• Changed Business Hours
• Alternatives To Coming Into Your Physical Location (delivery services, teleconferences, etc)
• Discounts / Compensation You’re Offering To Help Customers Out 
• Tips Specific To Your Industry On Getting Through This Time

Manage Work From Home Employees With Hubstaff

Managing remote employees is one of the hardest concepts to wrap your head around when first venturing into telecommuting with your business.  Some employees will thrive in a work from home environment where others will need to be held more accountable from home distractions.

Let our past struggles of managing work from home employees, who weren’t really working, benefit your success.  To make your employee management easy, we suggest using Hubstaff to manage your employees.

Hubstaff is software that your employees will download on to their computers.  When they start working, they will clock on just as they would do a time clock.  And then, the accountability of the software really gets going. Hubstaff will then screenshot your employees screen every 10 minutes which you can review through their administration dashboard. No more employees sitting idle on their computers, playing games, looking on Indeed, etc!

Once the employee is done for the day, they clock out and their time is automatically accounted for in the software. HR can then use the software, or the Quickbooks integration, to easily manage payroll.

The benefits of HubStaff far exceeds these two features, but have been one of the biggest benefits to our virtual team.  We highly recommend it.

Online Meetings & Teleconferencing 

Online Meetings

One of the biggest advantages to working in an office environment is the ability to pull everyone together for meetings and presentations. However, with the recommended social distancing of the Coronavirus, opting for an online meeting rather than gathering your group together in a conference room might be the safest solution.

Using online meeting software allows multiple people to join a video call via their computers or mobile devices where they can hold meetings and share presentations just as you would in real life.  

Teleconferencing

Sometimes your business needs to meet one-on-one with your clients.  More and more often, these meetings are moving online. From sales calls to medical appointments, using online conferencing tools have opened the door to virtually meeting with customers and patients no matter the  time zone or health threat. 

Don’t let working from home stop you from meeting with your employees or clients. Here are the most popular online meeting & teleconferencing tools:

• Zoom Conferencing –  Includes meetings, webinars, phone systems, business instant messaging. – Free – $19.99/month

• Ring Central – Includes video meetings, instant messaging, conferencing, phone systems, contact center and more – From $19.99/month

• Google Meet – Easy video meetings for up to 100 people, sync’s automatically to your Google account – Free

• GoToMeetings – Video conferencing and screen sharing – $12-$16/month

So next time you need to hold one-time, weekly or daily meetings or presentations, try one of these online meeting resources to get the job done. If you are in the healthcare or medical industry, make sure your selection is HIPPA compliant.

Project Management For Remote Workers

A huge concern of employing workers who you are not seeing day to day is the ability to keep everyone on task.  This is where project management software comes in very handy.

There are many project management tools online but our favorite, and the one we will give examples from for this article, is Asana. 

Asana is an online, and phone app, hub for you and your employees to outline tasks with due dates and assign them to different people.  With each task, you have a designated area to transfer files and carry on conversations which minimizes the back-and-forth, reply-all emails.  Each employee has their own task list and inbox to make sure they are fulfilling their part of the big picture in your company.

Online Classes

During this social distancing, many teaching environments have had to close down to curb the spread of Coronavirus. Core Dynamics Dance Studio recently decided to close their doors for several weeks to ensure the health of their students.  Their immediate solution to keep the money coming in while their doors were closed was to hold online classes for their students.

Online courses enable students to register, and even pay, for classes then attend them via the internet. Depending on your class’s needs, there are different solutions.

One-Lesson Live Video Classes

If you are looking to hold one online class where students watch a live streaming video that they engage with, we recommend using software like Webinar Ignition, a WordPress plugin available through Marketing Magnitude. (Contact us for details.)

This method provides the best live experience for a group. Students can register and pay for their class, then are sent a link to the live event. During the live event, the viewers will watch the presentation as it is being given and are able to participate in a group chat and send in questions to the presenter.  Through the system you can add on links to additional downloads as needed. 

Multiple Step Classes With Many Lessons 

If you would like to create a course that combines multiple lessons, videos, quizzes, reading material and more, you will want to go with a more robust course system. You can do this in one of two ways; a Learning Management System (LMS) on your website, or through a course marketplace. 

Both systems have the same engaging elements, but here are a few pros and cons to help you decide which route to take. 

Learning Management System on your website

The biggest benefit to putting a course on your own site is that you will profit 100% on all sales. Plus, you have complete control of your course without having to worry about changes to an external course system, rules or marketing. 

The downfall lies in the fact that you will need to handle all the advertising of your course yourself. This could work well for you or not, depending on your following.  But this is something to take into consideration.

WordPress Learning Management Systems

• LearnDash
• Teachable
• LearnPress

Shopify Learning Management Systems

• Courses
• Thinkific

Course Marketplace

If you don’t have a website or don’t want to put much into advertising your course, an external course site might be the perfect match. Sites like Kajabi and Udemy allow people to upload their courses into their large selection of courses. These sites have a lot of users who are ready to take online courses, so they are likely to find your course easily.  However, this means that you will also be playing that host site for your students. 

Overall, Think Outside The Box

During this social distancing, you might not have the same foot traffic or engagement. Think outside the box in order to meet your customers’ needs as well as keeping your cash flow. 

This might mean adding delivery or pick up services to your business. Think about expanding your services into helpful tasks or a community support group to help your community. Or, take advantage of online tools to offer customers virtual services that you can no longer do in person.

Hopefully, this article has helped you start the brainstorming process so you will be on your way to a successful work from home team that is sure to remain healthy during the Coronavirus.

If you would like to take this down time to work on your digital marketing efforts.  Our work from home staff is still busy working on SEO, PPC, social media and email campaigns to help businesses like yours bring in new business. Just call 702.482.8529 to get started!