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3 Efficient Strategies to Create a Successful Work From Home Experience

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3 Efficient Strategies to Create a Successful Work From Home Experience

Before 2020, companies used remote work as a perk to entice new employees and improve job satisfaction in a way that health benefits and paid leave do. As most companies embraced remote work to ensure business continuity and employee well-being, work from home (WFH) was the new normal by the end of 2020. The technology innovation has made work from home experiences superiors and employees have got accustomed to the emerging workplace environment.  

Even as the companies plan to adopt hybrid work models as a permanent policy,  there is still debate about how the workforce will remain remote. According to a future workforce report 2021, 67% of businesses reported that there were changes to long-term management practices to factor in new workplace realities. The report suggests that fully remote workers will represent 27.7% of the workforce, as one-fifth will be partially remote.

The employee convenience, along with time and cost savings, accelerated the remote work-from-home trend. There are two crucial factors driving the trend. The first is the advancement in technology that enables people to work from anywhere in the world, and the second is the increasing number of employees who value flexibility and work-life balance. In a survey, 74% of the workers have indicated that the option to work remotely would make them less likely to leave the company.

Even though the employees are as productive working remotely as in the physical office, the companies still have concerns about employee productivity and communication in a remote work-from-home environment. Remote employee productivity is the top-most concern of companies when their employees work from home. The companies face challenges such as how to measure productivity and which workforce productivity monitoring tools to implement for the same.

Companies can leverage three efficient strategies to create a successful work from home experience for their employees while ensuring peak workplace productivity.

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1. Build a connected workplace

Traditionally, the term ‘digital workplace’ was used to refer collectively to word processors, emails, and internet applications. It has now evolved to represent a broader set of tools and technologies, which includes human resource (HR) systems, workflow management tools, and data analytic tools. Digital workplace platforms integrate multiple business applications and tools and enable employee access to information through a single platform. The platform enables employees to work seamlessly with their team and customers and enhances their experiences.

A digital workspace is an end-user computing platform that enables employees to work securely from anywhere, using any device. The digital workspace has evolved from a single computing device to a combination of devices such as laptops, desktops, tablets, and other mobile computing devices. Digital workspace varies for employees depending on the type of work they do.

A corporate intranet is a web-based application or a private network used by a company for internal communication and collaboration, knowledge dissemination, and employee development. Initially, the intranet was an information repository containing links to other resources. But with the evolution of the internet, the intranet, too, has evolved. It has become an engaging employee communication and collaboration platform across an organisation. As employees work remotely, the intranet has emerged as a digital hub that helps companies improve employee efficiency and productivity and develop organisational culture. Access to the intranet is restricted to only authorised employees.

Why is intranet important for a connected workplace?

Digital workspace and intranet are part of a larger digital workplace. All organisations have a digital workplace and workspace in some form, but they may or may not have an intranet. Remote work from home (WFH) requires employees to use a multitude of tools and platforms. Intranet offers frictionless access to multiple applications and tools through a single sign-in. It saves employees from remembering multiple user IDs and passwords, improving their productivity and experience. Intranet is a centralised knowledge repository that includes video tutorials, self-help guides, and online learning modules. All these resources make it easy and convenient for employees to work remotely.

Intranet helps to overcome the lack of personal physical interactions by facilitating online community building and binding people and teams into one cohesive unit. It leads to positive culture change in the organisation.

A digitally connected workplace is crucial for success in a remote work-from-home environment. A secure workspace and intranet are important elements of an integrated workplace and lead to better work from home experiences for employees.

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2. Enhance collaboration and productivity

  • Remote work flexibility as the new job satisfaction metric

A digitally connected workplace enabled companies to quickly realign their workforce to the new reality of working from home when access to physical offices was restricted. They had to depend on tools and technologies to fulfil their professional responsibilities and client commitments. The evolution of cloud computing enhanced employees’ work from home experience as cloud-hosted tools and platforms enabled them to meet their professional obligations without any difficulty.

After a significant number of employees have worked from home for a considerable period, the flexibility of remote work has become a part of employee job satisfaction and a key requirement of employees for them to continue in their company or accept new job offers. As high as 82% of employees have indicated their interest to work remotely at least once a week. About 46% will look for another job if the remote work facility is not extended by their organisation.

  • Balance between employee expectation and organisational productivity

The companies are faced with the difficult task of balancing employees’ expectations of an engaging, flexible work environment and organisational productivity. They have to leverage a productivity tracker to evaluate remote employee productivity. Many factors make measuring productivity a challenging task for the organisation. However, it becomes easy for the organisation to track and evaluate its remote employee’s productivity with employee productivity tracking platforms.

  • Employee productivity tracking platform

A centralised employee productivity tracking platform enables real-time tracking of employee productivity by overseeing their system usage without invading their privacy. It provides insights into application usage, activity status, performance statistics and log-in hours. Besides productivity management, the tracking platform also ensures data security. The analytics module provides valuable insights into employee behaviour patterns and enables the company to detect employee burnout in the work-from-home environment.

The relevance of employee productivity tracking for call centres has assumed greater importance now that customers are increasingly dependent on online channels for their purchases. This makes it crucial for organisations to track and manage their call centre employee performance to meet end customers’ service expectations. Some relevant metrics for call centre employee productivity tracking are first call resolution, average handling time, customer satisfaction score, and average time in queue.

3. Use Digital Employee Experience (DEX) for higher productivity

  • DEX as the sum of employee experience across multiple workplace applications

The Digital Employee Experience (DEX) is the sum total of employee experiences while interacting with multiple business applications and digital tools at the workplace. The companies are faced with the challenging task of measuring up to employee expectations of frictionless digital experience, whether working from home or physical office.

Digital platforms are employees’ primary contact with the company, colleagues and clients in a remote work environment. Every digital touchpoint that an employee encounters during their work constitutes a DEX. It includes workforce and productivity tools, communication and collaboration platforms, learning management systems, and human resource (HR) systems. Digital employee experience is of equal priority for the organisation as customer experience, if not more.  

  • Use of Intranet to enhance DEX

The intranet is key to enhancing the digital employee experience in a remote work environment. The single sign-in can offer an integrated and simplified experience across multiple applications and tools. Intranet enables business process automation that helps employees to complete tasks efficiently without any intervention. The intranet also enables the personalisation of content to meet employees’ needs and interests. The search functionality helps to generate relevant search results for employee queries, which improves productivity and engagement.

  • Enhanced DEX leads to happy and productive employees

Digital employee experience contributes to the overall employee experience. An enhanced DEX helps in creating happy employees, who are more productive. It is time for organisations to focus on an employee-centric approach to creating the next generation work environment.

As organisations continue to adapt and evolve in the new normal, it has become important to factor in digital employee experience as part of workplace strategy to create a productive work environment. With client interactions also shifting online, an enhanced DEX will enable and empower employees to extend a similar experience for digital client interactions.

Conclusion

Work from Home (WFH) is a new organisational reality that will continue to evolve, aided by technology innovations. Companies have to strike the right balance between their employees’ expectations of flexible remote work and organisational productivity. They need to invest in appropriate tools and technologies to facilitate an efficient work environment and employees’ well-being. A digitally connected workplace and employee productivity tracking software for hybrid workforce are essential components of an organisation’s remote work strategy. Such a strategy serves to elevate employee experience while enhancing organisational performance.


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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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