The requirement for teams to work from home has been something that businesses across the world have been getting used to since the beginning of 2020. Now your team will be slick operators—using conference calling on their laptops like pros, and using the cloud to save and share work. This is especially important for teams working in public relations, who need access to the materials they’ve worked with before in order to release prompt and appropriate statements at the drop of a hat—at any time and from any place.
Here’s how you can work even better as a team as we head towards 2021:
Snappier meetings
Many of us have become used to the long and drawn-out conference call in the morning, a kind of team meeting that lasts for an hour and gets very little done. A long call can also make your workers disengage from their working day, meaning that they get less done once you hang up. The best way to improve video meetings when your staff are all working from home is to keep them short and snappy. Set an agenda the night before and stick to it – and let everyone get on with their work as soon as possible.
Experts in the cloud
You’ll no longer be saving files into a physical server that’s located at your place of work, you’ll be saving them on the cloud. In fact, all of your work will now be based on the cloud—from the small bits of content that you write for your clients, to the larger-scale PR strategy documents that your whole team work on simultaneously. To become pro at using the cloud, get cloud certification from a trusted online education platform. This will help you make the most of this work from home technology.
Smarter communication
One of the things that holds back teams working from home, in the PR industry or otherwise, is that they’re not used to communicating with one another through different chat boxes, email threads, conference calls, and other co-working apps like Slack. Messages often get lost or ignored during the working day, which leaves your colleagues concerned, and slows down the work across your company. Get used to using your co-working and collaborative messaging apps in order to communicate better across your PR team.
Instant responses
As you’ll be well aware, your PR team is based on the kind of rapid response to events that you cannot predict. This means having a kind of alarm system to get your team to work as soon as possible, and as hard as possible, when there’s a PR disaster to manage. Whether you choose to organize an alert system on work phones that you require your staff to manage at all times, or you use other cloud-based chats and software to help you respond to events quickly, this is a huge part of helping your team work effectively in PR from home.
Use these tips to smarten up your PR team in this new working-from-home working normal.
