14 Hacks To Keep Run Your Business Through COVID-19 Lockup

Julia Grala
March 26, 2020
·
min read

Using the right tools, working remotely comes with numerous benefits. It gives employees independence, enables the company to hire talent worldwide, saves time and money with transportation, reduces ecological footprint and can boost team productivity.

In order to prevent the spread of COVID-19, the majority of organizations are asking their stakeholders to keep digital relations. However, most employees shifting to remote work may face a few challenges and doubts, such as:

  • How to collaborate and be productive
  • What’s the best way to make the team accountable
  • How to separate personal and professional hours
  • Strategies to not lose personal connections
  • Certify that important messages are being delivered and understood
  • What tools are best to use

This article will guide you and your team on how to keep your productivity level high through this outbreak and even further, based on our experience working remotely for the past four years.

14 Main Hacks To Improve Your Digital Collaboration

Based on how we work at Rocket.Chat:

  • Define your own work area. A place you go to enter “work mode”. Choose a comfortable seat and a quiet environment. It can be your kitchen table, home office desk or even your living room if you live alone.
  • Specify work hours and have breaks. It’s difficult to disconnect, so add a daily calendar event for lunch and another for the end of the day, policy yourself to follow it, it’s too easy to be carried away if you have a lot of tasks and no commute. When you do stop working, leave your work area so you can leave that mindset as well.
  • If you share the space, set rules of “interruption” or use of the workspace of the remote worker. It is a good idea to create signals or add a non-disturb note on your door, if you have one.
  • Get rid of the everyday sweatpants. Dressing as you are going for the HQ helps to boost your day and get you ready for video calls.
  • Warm up your day before you start to work. Take advantage of the lack of time spent commuting and start your morning with walking, working out, meditating, reading or watching something, this will make a lot of difference in your focus.
  • Express yourself digitally. Customize your status and use emojis to demonstrate emotion.
status1-3664993
status2-4665382
status3-9439439
  • Be social. As if you are going to the office, don’t forget to ask coworkers how they are, schedule random 1:1s (we use a chatbot for this and it works quite well).
koko-3038685
  • Set meetings through video conferences. Seeing other people’s faces is a mood booster when you are in lockup. Try to schedule a few times during this period to check up on your dearest coworkers.
  • Share your calendar. Maybe you didn’t have this habit before, but as we have been using public agendas at Rocket.Chat for a long time, we realized how it makes scheduling meetings so much faster. Besides, knowing when you are available is an advantage since your team and you are not in the same place for now.
  • Start using a task/project management tool. Focus on applications that enable you to share your work and progress. Even better if you can integrate this tool with your communication platform for updates of team tasks.
  • Transparency is the key to success. Start the week digitally meeting with your team to set expectations and divide tasks. “As soon as possible” is not “stop everything and do it right now”. Manage your time and priorities with the team.
  • Integrate your tools. If you have, and we recommend, tasks/DevOps/project management tools, integrate them with your communication platform for updates, chatbots do a great job to keep everyone updated.
  • Organize your communication. Since you can’t have in-person talks, define how the team will communicate. Create a structure that simulates real life. In Rocket.Chat, we consider it essential to have a real-time communication platform, because this prevents you from losing track of discussions and gives you agility.
  • Find a way to engage with stakeholders. If an entire organization is no longer going for physical meetings, this also means that customers, prospects, investors, suppliers and partners will engage remotely. Be prepared to receive them without having to subscribe to numerous applications or sticking with emails and phone calls. Find tools that are easy to integrate and have different engagement methods (file sharing, video, audio, chat, task tracking).

Still feeling lost or confused about how to manage your team remotely?

We hope these tips will help you to improve your remote work and deal with this challenging moment in a much better and productive way.

Rocket.Chat is an open-source communication hub, ideal for organizations that require privacy compliance and high-security standards, giving organizations total control of their communication.

Currently, more than 350,000 users in 140 countries trust our platform to collaborate remotely.

Get started with Rocket.Chat’s secure collaboration platform

Talk to sales

Frequently asked questions about <anything>

Julia is a Marketing Operations Manager at Rocket.Chat.
Julia Grala
Related Article:
Team collaboration: 5 reasons to improve it and 6 ways to master it
Want to collaborate securely with your team?
Deploy Rocket.Chat on-premise or in the cloud and keep your conversations private.
  • Digital sovereignty
  • Federation capabilities
  • Scalable and white-labeled
Talk to sales
Looking for a HIPAA-ready communications platform?
Enable patients and healthcare providers to securely communicate without exposing their data.
  • Highly scalable and secure
  • Full patient conversation history
  • HIPAA-ready
Talk to sales
The #1 communications platform for government
Deploy Rocket.Chat on-premise, in the cloud, or air-gapped environment.
  • Digital sovereignty
  • Trusted by National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the US Army, the US Navy, and the US Air Force
  • Matrix federation capabilities
Talk to sales
Want to customize Rocket.Chat according to your own preferences?
See behind the engine and change the code how you see fit.
  • Open source code
  • Highly secure and scalable
  • Unmatched flexibility
Talk to sales
Looking for a secure collaboration platform?
Keep your conversations private while enjoying a seamless collaboration experience with Rocket.Chat.
  • End-to-end encryption
  • Cloud or on-prem deployment
  • Supports compliance with HIPAA, GDPR, FINRA, and more
Talk to sales
Want to build a highly secure in-app chat experience?
Use Rocket.Chat’s APIs, frameworks, and managed backend to build a secure in-app or live chat experience for your customers.
  • Supports compliance with HIPAA, GDPR, FINRA, and more
  • Highly secure and flexible
  • On-prem or cloud deployment
Talk to sales

Our best content, once a week

Share this on:

Get your free, personalized demo now!

Build the most secure chat experience for your team or customers

Book demo