The coronavirus forces almost all organizations to work remotely, but many are new to the game and struggle to manage a remote workforce.
This is why Glenn Gaudet sat down with Clinton Bonner, VP of Marketing at Topcoder, an on-demand virtual talent platform, for this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing. Topcoder has been in business for about 20 years but has been a 100% remote workforce for over 8 years. Bonner shared his tips for leading a successful remote workforce and how he operates Topcoder’s marketing strategy. In this episode, you’ll learn:
Why it’s important to stay up to date on what productivity tools are out there.
Collaborative tool recommendations for remote workers.
The pros and cons of mixing tools rather than having one centralized platform.
Stay Up To Date on Productivity Tools
Almost any organization can be successful with a remote workforce, but it’s imperative that you have the right productivity tools. There are multiple factors you have to weigh before adopting a platform to know if it’s the right fit for you. Does it meet your regulation requirements? Can you afford it? Does it easily solve the problem you’re facing? Will people in your organization use it?
Sometimes these can be tough questions, but you’re the only one that can figure these things out because you know your organization the best.
Another difficult question you need to answer is, is this tool better than other products out there? The reason this question is so difficult to answer is that new platforms come out all the time.
“It is a constant progression of tooling and understanding of what’s out there to be on the edge of understanding of how to best work virtually and how to best work with remote, distributed teams,” Clinton said.
Related: How Communication Technology Fosters Employee Engagement
The Basic Needs of a Remote Workforce
There are so many new and advanced platforms for organizations to pick from. At your most basic level, you’ll have to choose your productivity suite – G Suite and Office 365 being the most popular. Most organizations either have one or the other.
These are your first-day platform selections. Think about what that shows in terms of how fast we’re moving. These are collaborative cloud applications that a lot of people weren’t using just five years ago, and now these are your basic needs.
Then you might use a cloud storage platform such as Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, or something similar. This helps you share files quickly, collaborate with colleagues, and store files security.
An important factor for any remote workforce is how you communicate with each other. There are many tools out there for messaging. Many organizations use Skype for Business, Google Hangouts, and others. In recent years, Slack has been one of the fastest-growing messaging platforms around.
Video calling has been increasingly popular too. Skype, Hangouts, and Slack all offer video chat capabilities, but you might implement Zoom instead. If you hadn’t heard of Zoom just a couple months ago, you probably know it now, as it’s the app that has probably gained the most popularity during the coronavirus pandemic, allowing users to easily have person-to-person contact.
Productivity Tools in Clinton’s Remote Workforce
Frame.io
Not everything you do at work revolves around emails, calendar invites, slideshow presentations, and word processing.
Content is incredibly important, and the most engaging type of content is video. Within the last few months, Clinton’s team started using Frame.io for a recent documentary project.
