Staying Efficient While Working Remote
Efficiencies at Action Rocket.
It’s important to recognise the boundaries between work and personal life have become a little blurred. As we are embracing remote working it’s been vital for us to ensure both efficiencies and team morale are maintained successfully. So how do we stay productive AND sane? While working virtually we’ve found it helpful to split larger teams into smaller ‘squads’ on projects. This allows for easier communication and collaboration.
We rely on some great online tools and platforms to help us stay efficient. Ensuring the whole team is familiar with each tool minimises disruptions and has helped us to work together easier. As many workplaces are adapting to meet these challenges, we wanted to share the tools which are helping us enhance our digital collaborations both internally and with clients.
Internal Tools:
- Asana – this is our main tool, we use the Asana calendar in our morning resource planning meetings and scrums with the whole team so we can keep track of workloads.
- Slack – Our day to day tool for contacting each other. We have both work/client channels and group chats in Slack, where we talk about our favourite netflix shows and show pictures of our pets in lockdown.
- Jamboard – A new tool we’ve starting using through G suite, it allows several collaborators to draw scamps and add ideas onto a page together, great for jotting ideas down at the beginning of a new brief.
- Dropbox – The Holy Grail, where all of our agency work is kept neatly filed.
External Tools:
- Instagantt – We use this to give clients the full scale of their project timeline, and continue to share it with them to reflect any changes that may be occurring throughout the project.
- Asana – We use Asana both internally and externally, it gives clients a breakdown of the project plan and we can tag them in their tasks so they know when to expect a project and when feedback is due.
- Google Drive – Google Docs and Sheets allow us to directly collaborate on the same piece of work with clients, this is really hand for amends.
Our Top Tips:
1. Know your workload. Hold resource planning meetings with the whole team every morning to catch up on workload.
2. Set an agenda. Ensure all meetings have an agenda, you don’t want to be wasting anyones time.
3. Put processes in place. Introduce a QA checklist for each project to stop the back and forth.
4. Communication. Make sure that Slack is used as a communication tool – It’s not for project management, work can get lost in chats.
5. Be creative. Set up fun tasks for the team to do – online art gallery tours, get creative with cups of tea…
6. Have a break. The key is balance. Step away from the desk at lunch times, writers block doesn’t just happen to writers!
7. Be kind. Give your teammates a call every now and then to see how they’re doing.
Understandably, happier employees work harder. Team morale is extremely important at Action Rocket, and balancing this with productivity is key to our success. With the help of some great tools, we are able to ensure collaborations are just as easy digitally.
Katie Inwood
Account Manager @ Action Rocket