So much of our lives are being impacted and restructured as businesses, schools, and churches shut down due to COVID-19. While it can be easy to focus on how disrupting all of these sudden changes are, there is a silver lining to be found in these uncertain times — one of which is the opportunity to develop new ways of working or running your business.
Most likely, your work (or workplace) has been restricted or closed entirely, making it necessary for you to work from home or bring your business online.
Working virtually can feel like a daunting transition, especially if you’ve never done it before, but it’s actually a great chance to build new skills, discover helpful tools, and establish systems and processes that make working online seamless.
With the right mindset and tools in place, learning how to take your work or your business online can actually be a blessing in disguise, providing you with lots of freedom and flexibility, as well as making you a more agile employee or business owner. And, how nice not to have to pay a mortgage or rent bill on physical space?!
In fact, working remotely is a trend that’s been on the rise with or without COVID-19. According to goremotely.net, there were over 8 million Americans who decided to leave the office and work remotely during 2017, thanks to the rise of various platforms and applications that make working from home easy to do. This trend likely will increase, with a predicted 33% of people working from home by the end of 2027.
I’ve run brandiD, my personal branding and website development agency, as a 100% virtual business for the last 11 years, and having an exclusively online business has had countless blessings. Plus, it’s allowed me to work with clients all over the world and collaborate with talented designers, writers, website developers and marketers from all corners of the United States.
We’ve had over a decade to explore, create and refine effective practices for running a virtual business.
I want to share some of those practices with those of you who suddenly find yourselves working online—or others who simply need to refine their current work-from-home processes.
The technology that exists to help us work remotely with clients and co-workers is highly advanced and getting better each day. As an online company, here are some of our go-to favorites: Click To TweetVirtual Collaboration Tools
The technology that exists to help us work remotely with clients and co-workers is highly advanced and getting better each day. The tools and platforms at our fingertips are seemingly endless. Here are some of our go-to favorites:
- Google Docs – Google Docs allows you to create documents and collaborate real-time with others, no matter where they are. Just share your document with the email addresses of your collaborators, and you can give and receive feedback on your document in the blink of an eye. No need to download files to your computer, upload them after you edit and send them as attachments. You can do this with Google Sheets and Slides too—they easily replicate into Excel and PowerPoint.
- Zoom – Zoom is the video conferencing platform we use for all of our client and team meetings. It’s the perfect tool for working remotely, while still maintaining that personal, face-to-face communication that is so important for building meaningful connections and relationships.
- Free Conference Pro – For clients who prefer talking via phone, we use Free Conference Pro for conference calls. It accommodates meetings big and small, allows you to record your conversations, and is a fantastic backup for those days your internet decides to act up, or when you’re not video ready!
- Schedule Once – My favorite self-select scheduling tool is ScheduleOnce. Calendly is another excellent option, and there are many others. These tools make scheduling so much easier by eliminating the inefficient back and forth with “How about March 9? No? How about March 10?” You just send your client or coworker your scheduling link, and they’re taken directly into your calendar with the dates and times you mark as open and available. They select the time that works for them, and voila—your meeting is set with connection details right in the invite which is delivered automatically to their inbox!
- Basecamp – There’s no need to search for messages between your clients or co-workers in email, text, or the random sticky note. We use a project management tool called Basecamp that helps us organize our work and communications for each of our client projects, show and share documents, images, and mockups among our internal team members, and generally keep everything all in one place, for everyone to see and reference whenever they need.
Team-Boosting Tools
You’d think that building a strong sense of teamwork and camaraderie would be tough when working remotely, but that doesn’t have to be the case! Our brandiD team is scattered all over the country, but we’re as close and in tune with each other as any in-office staff. That’s because we abide by the following key practices:
- We make communication our top priority – Our branding and website development projects involve a lot of moving parts, and require the talents and skills of the entire team. Because of that, it’s crucial that we’re constantly in communication with each other about our respective parts of the creation process. Each of our team members has made a commitment to communication—and we keep each other in the loop with status updates, questions or needs we have, and any adjustments that need to be made to our schedules. We use a communication platform called Slack to help with that. It’s an easy way to organize projects or topics and have one central place where we can communicate with each other, just as a team. Not only does it help our efficiency and productivity, but it also allows us to develop friendships and connections with each other that can make working remotely a LOT less lonely.
- We set clear expectations – When you work online and don’t have much, if any, face-to-face contact with your clients or co-workers, it becomes crucial that you learn how to set clear expectations. If not, people can be off working on a project or an assignment, unaware that they’re heading in the wrong direction. When you set clear expectations, you cut that problem off at the start. Throughout our years as a virtual agency, we’ve learned to be as clear as possible in our process and our expectations for both our team members and our clients. That means stating in detail what is needed and when, discussing what the successful outcome(s) will look like when a task is completed, as well as what the next steps will be to move the project forward.
- We’re flexible – One of the best things about working remotely is it comes with a fair amount of flexibility. If you’re used to being on a strict schedule, however, that can take some getting used to! Experiment with your daily schedule to see when you’re the most productive or when you naturally have the least amount of distractions. Keep in mind that your clients and your co-workers might have schedules that differ from yours, so find that common ground that’s right for collaboration and communication and that’s flexible when things need to shift.
In such a quickly changing and unprecedented time as this, it’s easy to resist or dread the changes that are being thrown at us on a continual basis. Working remotely doesn’t have to be one of those tough transitions, however. When you take advantage of the tools at your disposal and head into it with an open mindset, you might just find that working online offers you a new perspective and some unexpected perks.
As mentioned above, it could be just the nudge you needed to test out fresh strategies, discover new resources, and develop powerful skills you can draw from not only right now, but for the rest of your career.
Favorite Resources
REMOTE: Office Not Required
In this book, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson show both employers and employees how they can work together, remotely, from any desk, in any place, anytime, anywhere.
How to get paid to teach your class online (even if you have no budget)
In this book, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson show both employers and employees how they can work together, remotely, from any desk, in any place, anytime, anywhere.
COVID-19: All the resources you need to survive and succeed | Workable
You’ll find useful COVID-19 (coronavirus) resources to help you and your team go fully virtual and maintain best results during these uncertain times.
How to Transition to a Remote Job
This blog post by FlexJobs gives you helpful tips for transitioning to working remotely, from setting up your home office to finding work-life balance.
About The Author
Rachel Gogos is a serial entrepreneur with a passion for people, the web, and creating strong personal brands. She started her career at the United Nations headquarters in New York City, where she helped create the look and feel for the organization’s first website. Today, in her current role running brandiD, Rachel channels over 15 years of marketing and communications experience into each and every website for brandiD’s clients. Find out more!