Today, we are fighting a war with an enemy we cannot see. COVID-19 (the enemy) has impacted the daily lives of people around the world and affected everyone’s routines in a snap. At first, we were left to wonder how to continue simple everyday tasks, but with a little compromisation, we have adapted and solved the current challenges we are facing. Let’s stay strong and believe that-

When the number of COVID-19 positive cases were starting to increase, like everyone else, we were worried how to deal with it in the following days. As a solution, we tackled the worst case scenario that could happen and prepared a Business Continuity Plan. Knowing that this situation is unprecedented, we are surprised to be able to still follow our contingency measures.

Allow us to share how we efficiently continue our usual work — client management, client retention and even client acquisition while strongly prioritizing our employees’ safety.

Checking in our team

Just a quick story, before the official quarantine period, the management announced that there’s a huge chance that we will work from home. Each department’s possible challenges were listed. Our problems varied from one another, some have slow internet connection and equipment unavailability, while others need to watch over their children and other family members. We had to know these in order to create solutions, back up plans, and to also foresee future challenges.

Even now that we’re in the work from home setup, we continue to check on our team’s health, safety and productivity. For any occurring problems, we list them via Google Sheets where we also keep all of our contingency plans, for a more accessible storing on Google Drive.

If you have a Gmail account or use G Suite like us, you may be familiar with the two handy tools mentioned. We use Google Sheets for recording data and charts and it automatically saves every after edit done. While Google Drive serves as a cloud-based storage where all G Suite files are backed up. Other files like photos and videos can also be stored here. Less hassle!

Managing and coordinating with a virtual team

When Malacañang announced the Enhanced Community Quarantine, effective on March 17, 2020, it means that work from home has officially been implemented for us. From day one, we still continue the same process:

1. In the meantime, we record our timesheet using Google Forms. (another G Suite tool that’s helpful in collecting responses and surveys)
2. Every team member coordinates and communicates that they’re online and ready to work.
3. We update our tasks for everyone’s visibility on monday.com. (Sharing is caring! monday.com is our favorite tool to keep track of our tasks. We highly encourage you to utilize this app as well, especially in this setup.)
4. When our productive day is to be over, we discuss our accomplished tasks in our departmental conference calls.

We also have some tips for you on how to get your individual tasks done when working from home. Check out this link: https://www.facebook.com/i4asia/posts/10156637225022134

Being in a virtual team can be easy when using the right tools. For us, monday.com has been one of the helpful apps during this crisis. It’s the perfect platform to disseminate assignments, discuss and collaborate each task, and accomplish daily goals wherever you are.

Here’s a sample of what a monday.com board looks like. Remote teams rely on monday.com Know more about remote work with monday.com

Keeping communications and collaborations open

Aside from our mobiles, our modes of communication also run around G Suite since we send out our emails through our Gmail accounts, and conduct conference calls using Google Meet. Other than those tools, G Suite helps us to organize our meetings, and collaborate effortlessly with our colleagues and clients.

As you can notice, G Suite is important to our daily routine since it performs connectedly with its variants of tools which makes it easy for us. We have been using G Suite ever since and it has become even more helpful now in this setup. Here’s why:

• We can directly send online meeting invitations and it will automatically sync on our Google Calendar.
• For online meetings, we use Google Meet instead of Zoom to maximize G Suite’s platform. There’s no need to jump to another app! With this, we can easily share our screens and present the way we would in person.
• We can actively create and share projects using Google Docs, Sheets and Slides. I previously shared how Google Sheets is helpful to us in the meantime. While for Google Docs, we use this when we construct proposals and other documents, and Google Slides is where we compose our presentations. I just have to repeat it twice that files are automatically saved on Google Drive!
• The best of it? We can involve our client even if they don’t have a G Suite subscription! They can either view, comment and even edit shared files and folders.

Building and keeping a healthy client base.

One thing that we’re really proud of is building and maintaining lasting relationships with our clients. Our secret: we act as their partners and not as their mere third-party service provider. Good thing for us, we work closely with the top global brands like Freshworks that consists of customer/client engagement tools such as Freshdesk, Freshsales and Freshchat.

We continue to address clients’ concerns via Freshdesk, which is a helpdesk software that enables them to raise tickets from multiple channels and then have it solved by specific teams based on a workable time frame.

For Freshsales, we get to track our leads and prospects and continuously win new clients. It also has an AI-based lead scoring system that automatically tracks if you’re about to get that partnership deal.

Freshchat is a live messaging software which is a great tool to use especially in this time when most people are online. This tool can be applied to your website and allows you to engage with potential customers.

We have used the aforementioned tools even before Enhanced Community Quarantine and we think these tools have helped us more to continue to connect with clients in this current difficulty that affects businesses as well. Now that we have proven working from home and online can still be efficient, we hope that you can apply it too.

We’ve shown that working from home works, and provided links to the helpful tools we use. If you need help in getting your team organized in this setup, we’d be glad to help. Just shoot us a message. In every crisis, let’s help one another!