How is your sales team adapting to remote working during Covid-19?
Covid-19 has created an urgent need to work remotely whenever possible. As a sales manager, you want to ensure your team are adapting to this new way of working without compromising results or employee well-being.
In a survey carried out by FlexJobs, 65% of respondents said they feel more productive in their home office than at a traditional workplace. However, A Stanford University research study, discovered that employees are only 13% more productive when working remotely.
As a sales manager, there are certain practices you can implement to try and ensure a smooth transition to remote working. These might include:
- Setting clear priorities and sales goals - A Gallup poll of German workers found that 38% of workers feel engaged and motivated to succeed when management is clear about the sales goals.
- Enabling communication and collaboration using easily-accessible tools and software. The pie chart below shows that communication and collaboration is one of the biggest reported barriers to remote working.
How is your sales team adjusting to a remote work environment, what is working well and what can you do better to help them with their challenges?
Comments
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I felt situation is much more challenging for our team since we have been working from home.
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We are an ISP and could overnight pack up and work from home (as most households have fibre (internet) setup at home already and we make use of cloud-based systems.
We sent a survey about 3 weeks ago to see how everyone is doing and they all feel more productive, however the main issue seems to be "not being able to switch off" after business hours.
We have team VC's 3 x a week to catchup with everyone and our clients can still get hold of us on our direct office lines as we make use of UC1 solutions (receive the call via mobile phone), so everything is working perfectly.
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My company has always been remote. However, the pandemic still created challenges with my team. Now they have other family members at home using internet at the same time with their work or children being home schooled through the internet. The challenge is both the bandwidth issue and a time / distraction issue. It seems like we have worked through most of that, although I will be interested to see what the fall school season brings.
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Our company is based in Nairobi, Kenya and about a week ago, our HR Manager conducted a similar survey among employees and did a blog piece on the results http://energyzedworld.com/advisory/working-at-home-vs-working-from-the-office/
It's amazing how similar the challenges being faced by different people in different parts of the globe are.
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We are a global leadership and management training and development company, and your findings are in line with ours. We've found a real need for workshops with our clients to help them not only manage and re-connect virtual teams, but also to innovate and find their "new work rhythms". For example, a certain weekly meeting (or monthly) may no longer be as viable as when it was a standard process at the office. Another key finding and important dynamic is that we all need to develop new management competencies in certain areas: for example, employee mental health is now a manager's consideration. Customer service has shifted, and we're all trying to re-imagine the future. And there are real tools and resources that the winners will apply as they evolve from "business as usual" or "business as before" thinking. I just got off 3 calls with clients who were pointed, specific, metrics based in identifying how they are using recently learned processes and ideas.
From the sales perspective, remember that collaboration and communication in these times are a superpower that help in setting the right goals, expectations and priorities.
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At Fingent we found that four our 400 employees the sudden and now extended need to work from home and the inability to get into our offices was greatly mitigated by (here is the shameless plug) our having adopted infince.com as our collaboration platform.
One unexpected impact was that the provisioning and use of customizable dashboards provided a "social media like" context for even the non-work activities in addition to the consolidated news reports on ongoing projects.
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