Dealing with COVID Chaos - Communication

Hi, Kevin Brown here with LeadSmart Technologies. I hope you're doing great. Doing an additional follow up video in an email that's going out today to our clients and subscribers and colleagues out there sharing some thoughts and ideas, as we did at the end of last week, regarding how we can take these challenging times that we're living in right now. So many of the people around the world are having to work from home, if you're even able to work. And the idea that we've been trying to get across is the concept that says, you know, things are hard right now, things are different. People are needing to adjust and make changes to their day to day work life as well as their personal life. But the concept that we talked about a little bit was the idea of turning this challenge that we have not into spring break, where we take this time working from home and just kind of see what happens, but really what can we do to turn that into spring break, becoming a springboard to some huge growth opportunities for us. So in our previous email, we talked about expectations and the importance of both our employees, our customers and ourselves having clear expectations of what to expect from each other, us to our employees, our employees from us. And then certainly as leaders, how can we know what to expect from ourselves during a time like this? The second topic that we wanted to talk about today though was about communications. How can we communicate well with our teams? How can we communicate well internally so we can get out of this scenario that we're in now where this isn't going to last forever, where we're all working remotely? So what can we do now so that when we get out, whether it's weeks or it's a month out or whatever it might be, where things start to come back to normal so that our business, our teams and employees are all thriving? That's really what we want to talk about. So today is our second topic that we want to cover out of the series and that's about communications. So I have five things I wanted to talk to you about that hopefully you can implement into your business. If you're not already doing, or if you're doing them, maybe think about how to do them better again. We want to come out of this downturn, both from our teams and how they're working and the economic downturn we're facing in the marketplace and turn that into opportunities for ourselves. So when we talk about communication, let's think about the first piece. Piece being technology or what I like to just say, technology and tools. We have lots of people in our Organizations who are working from home or remotely for the first time. You know, I work remotely a lot, whether I'm traveling or I'm home office, not always together with the whole team, been doing it for a long time. But one of the things that I've seen is that organizations that have an external group like their sales teams working remotely have some processes in place, but what they don't necessarily have for these new remote workers, our hr, our accounting people, our support and admin staffs and so forth, we don't necessarily have unified platforms for them and certainly that having unified platforms that are being utilized in the same way, we may have one group of people that are using our ERP system and another group of people that are focused on using our CRM. But now we probably need more people using the same software and technology away from their office. So we need to think about that. What is it that we're using across the organization that's a unified platform and that everybody clearly understands how to use it and how to benefit each other and use it properly. The other things to think about with that topic is our logins and our access. Just as we have new people come on board using a new piece of technology, we need to make sure that usernames and passwords and rights and access are in proper place. It's as important to get them the right access as it is to keeping people out of seeing the wrong things. So technology and tools unified everybody using them the same way is key. Second topic. Now's a great time to start thinking more and more about cloud based software products or SaaS products and how are we working with our data and information. You know, day in and day out I still talk to organizations as we talk about our software product lead Smart I, I talk to organizations that are extremely large, hundreds of millions of dollars in sales that are still tracking large pieces of their business or large parts of their business through spreadsheets. It's 2020 friends. We have an abundance of tools that we can use to do a better job than spreadsheets and emailing them back and forth through Outlook. Not only is that not the best way of doing things, it's as a best practice, but it's really not very secure to do it either. So when we start thinking about it, now is the time to maybe use this, this right now, this time that we have to get out of that. Use this as our excuse to get out of this monster repository of spreadsheets that we have to track and manage our business. There's better ways there's better tools. At a bare minimum, now is a great time to start using Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive or products like that. So you have cloud based storage. Most people are doing that. But now is a much better time to make sure that that's working efficiently and all the right people have access. The other thing is, is that now is the time to really look at our ERP systems and as an example, our CRM system. Is our CRM system really a data repository or is it working with our workflows and processes and so forth so we can share that data across the organization and grow versus stay stagnant? Right now, the third topic, our tone of voice. What do you mean by tone of voice? We never know what's coming through when we're typing and or texting or on an instant messaging platform like Slack or Microsoft Teams or one of those. Right. We've all received that text message where we're looking down and reading and seeing. What do they mean by that? Well, I'll show them. The person probably had no bad intent. They probably didn't know they had cap locks on or something like that that looked like they were yelling at you. Now is a great time for us to really pay attention to how we're dealing with each other. Are we being kind? We all have a lot going on at home. The stresses of what's going on in this world right now. We've got kids, maybe working from home, spouses working from home. We're working from home. We need to be kind. The tonality that we use in our communication, all of the things we need to think about. I've always tried to really rely on a rule because it's so easy to get wrapped up in this back and forth of email is if you need to talk to somebody by email about the same topic back and forth more than three or four times. I've always said just go down the hall and talk to them. Now I would say get them on the phone or get them on a Zoom or some type of Microsoft Teams, whatever. Some type of live communication and get out of that back and forth of typing. Right. There's that old phrase of tough guy behind a keyboard. We don't want to be that. We never want to be that. But right now let's be even more sensitive to people, external and internal with our own teams and support. Encourage them. Fourth topic is about group meetings. Great tools. Zoom, Microsoft Teams, WebEx, GoToMeeting. Great, great tools. When we do these meetings now, we want to have clear agendas. Clear timelines. We want to know exactly when we start, when we end. We should test them in advance. Something even to think about now is let's talk to our team. Since they're working from home, do they know about proper etiquette? Do they know decorum? Is there any reason that they would come to company zoom or online meeting and look or be dressed? Any reason they would be if they were in the office? Probably not. Let's keep that momentum of being in business mode and focused on growth across the company and within our teams. And then lastly, the fifth thing we wanted to talk about today is one on one meetings. Right when we're at the office as leaders and executives, we can see when someone's in a bad mood. We can see maybe if they're not feeling well. We don't know that when they're remote and away from us. Why not pick up the phone once a week at least do a zoom meeting, see their eyeballs, communicate with each one of our team members to let them know one we care how they're doing and their families are doing and then see how we can be of support to them. Let's keep this momentum going. Let's get business going through the rest of this year like it was last year. There's no reason we can't do that. So we put all these five topics together. That gives us some good tools to think about, about how to communicate with our teams that are not working in the office right now. We've got some great availability of US capabilities for us all to use these tools that are available. Let's do it. So if you're watching this on YouTube, which I hope you are, and you found this valuable communication and us communicating together here, look right below. Click the like button if you would. But more importantly, click that subscribe button so you'll make sure to get all of our updates. Subscribe More coming in the next few days. Be safe, be kind, and let's get work done and keep going. Springboard, not spring break.