#023 How Can My Business Incorporate Flexibility?

When we asked employees about the benefits of working remotely, 56% of respondents are fueled by the benefit of flexibility. Employees want support from their employers by maximizing their hours and physical working environment.

In this episode, Michelle of the Revela Group asks Beth Trejo, CEO at Chatterkick, about how the organization defined and integrated flexibility into the Chatterkick workplace. They share tactics on how your business can determine flexibility, roll it out to your team, and cheerlead its success. Other exciting topics are onboarding a team member remotely, the value of virtual co-working, and communication tips in a flexible environment.

Learn more about Revela.
Learn more about Chatterkick.

Survey Results on Flexibility:
50.7% would love to incorporate the option to work remotely in the future, but not permanently!

56% of answers on the most significant benefit of remote work focus on flexibility; Flexibility both on hours and physical environment. Everyone agrees commuting sucks. 🤣

Read the survey Results

Biggest Takeaways From This Episode

Tactics business owners can put in place to help figure out flexibility for their business.

Ask what flexibility means to your employees to gauge what they think. We found that each employee had very different expectations when it came to flexibility. We gathered that information and put it all out on the table as our jump-off point.
Simplicity is best! If your team could take it, read it, and repeat it easily, then they'll live by it. If it's a long doc of "this is what flexibility is" and "this is what flexibility is not" your team may be confused in the process.
1. For Chatterkick, flexibility means trust and accountability. If we have those two things within our organization, our team can be flexible in their workday.
Define HOW your organization can practice flexibility. Give them visual examples of what works and doesn't.
1. Chatterkick defined these subcategories. Where you work, aka working remotely. If our team has technology, working equipment, and a professional background, they can work from wherever!
2. The second subcategory is when you work. We let our teamwork when they work best with the understanding that we expect our clients and team to be responded to in a timely manner. Social media never shuts off, so we expect accessibility and responsiveness at all times.
3. The third subcategory we have is communication clarity. Chatterkick defined the tools that our team needed to keep up-to-date in order to stay in the loop with what each team member is doing. For us, that means updating our status' in Teamwork Chat, having an up-to-date calendar, and never leave a client or team member hanging on a response.
Share how an employee can ask for help or be vocal about what is or isn't working.
1. The Chatterkick team empowers team members to raise their hands or reach out if their balance feels off.'

How do you know if flexibility is working? Work with your organization to define KPIs for each of your roles. The Chatterkick team knows that the flexibility is working when those subcategories are taken care of and that they are reaching their individual KPIs.

Transcript

This text below is a straight-up audio transcript of the episode. In our humble opinion, we think the audio podcast sounds much better in its original form. We have not edited the transcription below so there are indeed some grammar errors (some quite funny, in-fact).

All right. Well, welcome to the podcast, Michelle. We're so glad to have you join us. I've really enjoyed our conversations and my thought today was I'm happy to share how we figured out flexibility for Chatterkick. We are not perfect. I'm happy to give you all of our, what we came to the conclusion there's enough and I'd love to here if we made the right call. You're the experts in this stuff. And so, we're going to kind of switch this format up. You're going to actually ask me questions today and so, hopefully we did the right things. so we'll, we'll kind of just get started. Okay, perfect. Well, so I believe, you know, I don't think anyone has like the perfect right answer right now, right? I believe that there's, there's a lot of unknown. We're trying to figure it out and you guys are gonna adjust, which is what you guys do really well.

Um, but kind of looking back on, okay, flexibility at Chatterkick, flexibility anywhere for that matter. We're gonna, you know, as a business, we're gonna start looking at how do we, you know, blend what is now and what was and come up with something and really make it work. What are some tactics that business owners that they can put into place as they are working on figuring this out? What are some things you can share with them? Yeah, so,I'll just kind of share the way that we approach this. We actually had this conversation, it was the end of December, early January. So before we knew what this was going to look like and how much we would lean on this plan, but we've always had kind of a flexible environment. At Chatterkick, we have a team of about 20, a lot of young families and just employees, in their kind of mid-career and early career life cycles, I guess you could say.

And, so what works for us isn't always going to work for others, but... You know, I think what was, what we noticed happening was people didn't know what flexibility meant to them and it was meaning something different to everybody. It was meaning something different to managers. It was meaning something different to me as the owner. And it was meaning something different to the people who were working with our clients, you know. Social media never stops, so it was really kind of confusing I think in many regards. So, one of our goals in 2020 was really to clear that up, to define what flexibility meant to make it simple enough that people could remember. Because I will tell you, we started with these massive docs and we were trying to figure it out and my executive team was helping me. And you know, it was a lot.

And I think what we ended with was really simple and to me that's always a really good sign that anybody could take it and read it and understand it. It was like, Oh yeah. Even though it was so much work that we put into it. So the first thing we started with is just two words of what flexibility meant for us. And it's going to mean something a little bit different to everybody. But yeah. The words that we picked were trust and accountability. If we had those two things within our organization, flexibility would be no big deal. We don't, we didn't really care the time that people worked. We really didn't care about, you know, all the other factors. But if we had that trust and accountability, and that kind of leads to reliability, we would be in a really good starting point.

So that's where we first started. Then we started going into like subcategories. So working remotely. If you're working remotely and not on site because we have kind of an interesting dynamic of we have an office space in Sioux city and then we have co-working kind of groupings throughout the country, which I imagine that that model is definitely going to get some really good traction as people kind of try to figure this out. But if you haven't looked at that and you have smaller teams that need to collaborate in other areas, that coworking is amazing because what happens is you can bring teams together in physical places, which I really, really believe in. But when COVID happened, we didn't have all this real estate that just was sitting there. And we could just pause our subscriptions or you know, really flex and adjust in real time.

And you know, for any business that has a workplace or workforce that they plan on expanding those coworking spaces, they are, I can't say enough about them. They've been awesome. They provide snacks, they're cool, they're hip. And so that was really something that we leaned into before all of this happened. But one of the things that we talked about when you're working remotely is, you need to have technology, the working equipment and you need a professional background. Those were the three things that if you had all those three checked and you prioritize and over-communicated, we were like, okay, this is going to work. We're going to be able to make this happen. And what we found was a lot of our employees, they just needed some focus time at times. It's funny to say this now because now we're all like, I need humans.

At that time it was like, I need just some quiet space. And so, we also had to talk about what a professional background looks like, do's and don'ts, and you need to give people visuals. You need to give them examples. Go find a picture of somebody's goofy background and say, why doesn't this work? We have to train our people why it doesn't work. Is a bed in the background. Okay... good point, and I think people have been a little bit more casual about it since so many more people are remote. But I will tell you every single time that you're on camera, people are inspecting your background. Right before this I'm like, Oh, I have a hair tie on a couch. I'm going to move it. But I think it's just so important and you, if you have a pet, is it going to bark if your UPS comes in?

And just kind of trying to work through those scenarios with people, make them understand in a way that is very tactical and obvious, even though it makes sense to some people, it may not to others. So I would highly recommend just going through scenarios of like what a professional background looks like. What are the expectations when you're on video, especially now, right? Do you need your headphones in? Do you need. What if your kids are in the background? Like tell your employees your expectations because if they don't have those, you can't be mad at them for breaking the rules that they didn't know existed. Correct. Correct. And I noticed myself doing that all the time where I would get frustrated with, with, um, I don't even know if it was with team members, but it was with situations, but I never told anybody.

So it really wasn't fair for me to be like, well, this person always has this in the background. Well, why don't I just say something? Right. Or, you know, like, make sure you look like you didn't just roll out of bed. Like that's all I'm asking. So I just think setting those clear expectations is really, really critical. Well, and you know, it, it's setting the expectations, which is something that we should be doing every day anyway and everything that we're doing right? The person's responsibilities and the expectations of what job they're doing and the quality of that work. And it's just taking it, which I don't know why we don't think about it, but oftentimes we don't. It's taken to that next step. So, okay, we're going to allow that remote or it's going to happen whether it's forced or not.

Right? And yeah, this is, these are the things and the, the idea that you bring up about having visuals, we, we learn, you know, we're such visual people and that's the way we learn best. And when we see something, this is what I'm saying, it creates clarity. And when we get the clarity, then people can understand and they kind of, they understand how to stay on the tracks and they, you know, they, they know what they should do and shouldn't do. It allows them to make better decisions, but yet still feel like they're in control. Right. So those expectations meet so many of our basic needs in, in the sense of just those, those feelings of being able to take control, make those decisions, know what I can and cannot do, but yet I still get to make choices and having the clarity of understanding of what you expect.

So you're not, I know sometimes in groups we'll talk about keeping score, but it's those little thing that, you know, you're thinking about that you're telling yourself and then they don't know that you're thinking it, holding it against them. You're upset with them on you express this, but is it really this or was it this, this, this, this. Oh yeah. And this little thing that just happened, you know, you're really upset about it. So creating clear expectations on how to work at home is, is perfect. How about like the KPIs and that you, so you mentioned trust and accountability, right? I heard you say that, I'm gonna go with trust is that we trust each other. That I trust that you have good intentions, yep. That you're going to be doing the right things and that you trust me. So we're giving each other trust as well.

Right, right. And that accountability, it's, I can't be accountable for you, but it's personal accountability. Right, right. Exactly. So, yeah, tell us a little more about that. And then the KPIs are, you know, what are some systems that you put in place to help improve that understanding? Create clarity with projects that you're working on, deadlines and so forth. And in measuring our success, which probably isn't much different than when we were in the office, it just may look a little different. I'm curious. Yeah. So, you know, I think the accountability is one thing that I definitely have gotten wrong in the past. You know, I've like as growing up with, through Chatterkick, we've been around for eight years, I've definitely learned a lot. And I think in the beginning, and even recently, accountability to me was rules and following rules. And if you didn't follow the rules, you get in trouble.

Right. And that was what I thought accountability really was. And I think I had to really switch my thought process on that. Our team had to switch our thought process that it's personal accountability because I can't really control what anybody else does. And so all I can do is foster a great environment and every individual has to rise up. And I think one of the ways we simplified it, because you know, the overachievers and the high achievers in remote environments, they don't get the recognition that sometimes they really crave. And so they'll does burn themselves out fast. And so one of the things that we said to people on the accountability is, raise the flag if your balance is off. It's up to you to tell me because I could, you could be great and I wouldn't, not, but I thought you had too many projects or you could be drowning in what I thought was only a couple of things.

And so we really want to give that power to our employees to say if your balance is off and you can't, like not able to handle it, you need to come and raise the flag and say, it's too much. I need adjustment. Help me prioritize, help me move things around a little bit. And so that was one thing that we really tried to empower our team with. The other thing is we had a checklist of probably six things. It's not overwhelmingly 30 things that you need to do every day, but it was really about is your calendar up to date? It needs to be up to date. Everybody needs access so that I know if I'm trying to get ahold of you and it's an emergency and you're in a webinar, then I might, I might have to use a different way to get ahold of you.

The other thing is if you're going to take a lunch with your family on a picnic or whatever, that's okay, but you need to communicate that and you need to, mark it, we have a, it's kind of like Slack, it's a chat channel. I know people are using different, but we expect those to be updated every day in different parts of the day so that I don't have to go dig around and try to find, you know, 20 different people's calendars. I can just be like, Oh, okay, this person is out for lunch. So even though I may be putting information into chat, I may realize and not get mad if they don't get back to me in 45 minutes. Right. So that was one that we had for an expectations and then that any of like paid time off vacation, that all needs to be updated.

It's pretty, pretty obvious. And then yeah, if you're completely out of the office, make sure that you're obviously marking that. So those were kind of the across the board KPIs that we put in place and we really did rally and we said, okay, everybody, if we do this, this is the reward that we'll get. After we kind of tried this flexibility plan and policy and um, you know, we're all going towards the same goal and it was kind of fun to all hold each other accountable. So it's not just top down management. Yes. And yes. So kind of like what you described, I think about as that internal communication and that strategy that how do we communicate, understand what people have going on because you can still work in the same building and if you're not at your, your area where you normally work and people don't know where you're at.

And I know a lot of companies that are really big that people will get that focus time that we were talking about. I'll go hide in the conference room and they're hiding the conference room, not for bad reasons. It's because they really want to focus and get things done. Right. But if people can't, no one knows where they're at. Right. And it's like, what is our communication strategy in the sense of how do we keep people in the know of, not that we want to track or know what you're doing, but it's just I can now better understand, Oh yeah, that's not going to get back to me until probably two. Right. You know, so I can, I can plan appropriately based off of what's going on. So it sounds those, those basic KPIs, I know, I know internally when you're, you're not remote or so critical, but then going remote, I agree 100%.

That, you know, those are those, those key things. Keeping your calendar up to date. We look at each of those calendars versus doing that drive by to see if you're in your office. Right. We look at whatever that chat we're using and you keep those statuses up to date. And it's just so we better we know if I can reach you, if you're not available, if you are available and if you have it in your calendar and you have certain things blocked off, I can plan Friday I need to get with you. But it looks like, you know, probably two o'clock is that, you know, based off of you guys' schedule second work. So, I am, you know, I agree 100% that that was for that account accountability and the KPIs. That's huge. What were, what were some other things that you guys had put into place on that accountability of maybe the projects, things that you're working on?

How you track that? Well, one thing that we did is we tried to really simplify like four KPIs per role. And again, we're trying to keep it things so it's not over systematized, right? We have 20 employees, so we do need some, boundaries and guidelines. But, um, you know, we're a creative agency so there's a lot of creativity that comes in and, and there's innovation that needs to happen and I want people to have that kind of head space for it. But just establishing the, how would I know if you're doing a good job if, if, if someone asks me that as a CEO and as the leader of the company, and I could easily name off this for all the roles, right? But sometimes we don't write that down or sometimes we don't even communicate that. And so that was one thing that we just said, okay, this is what success looks like.

You're hitting these KPIs, you're updating your calendar, you're communicating where you are and you know the things that you need. You're not stalling communication. That was the other thing. Because if you're stalling communication that creates extreme bottlenecks from collaboration, especially in like a, when we're all remote. So that quick response, even if it's like, "Hey, I got this, can't get to it right now, but just let you know, like I'll be able to get it to you by the end of the day." And just training and teaching that is just so critical. I think in order to really embrace this remote world and to be fair, don't get me wrong, things aren't like all sunshine and rainbows all the time. We're still trying to figure this stuff out, especially for us. I think I mentioned this in a previous podcast, but we didn't realize how hard having all of our children home was going to hit us.

And not only just having them here with us, but trying to make sure that they're learning and teaching. And you know, I have a lot of employees with babies and kids and that's a whole different dynamic that really, you know, we had to figure things out and we just really said for nights, weekends, off hours, you know, do the best that you can prioritize those things with calendars, communication and you know, status updates and get the work done as best as you can. The timing of it maybe off meaning like it could be at 10 o'clock at night but it'll still be by the "end of the day." Right? Exactly. So that's kind of some of the ways that we've been able to help our, provide I think a little more clarity with the flexibility. Well and I know this is where we're at today right now is, is that extreme.

But what about that new hire you're looking to fill a position, right? And right now we still are, you know, maybe we're still working remote and we were not going to interview them face to face necessarily, you know, kinda depends on your business and decisions you guys make. What are some of the best practices or at least tactics that you can suggest for people on how they can, better communicate what we're looking for. And also then go through that interview process to, to get better at finding that, that new, that new employee. And then, my gosh, you've got the training too, right? I would imagine most often we're used to training people face to face and showing them around, you know, kind of going back to what are those new rituals? You know, originally our ritual might've been, Oh, we've got their day planned out.

They're sitting with different people and you know, they're getting to know the team. We'd go to lunch, Oh, well that's not going to happen right now. So what are the new rituals as we're bringing onboarding? So I kind of asked you two. One's the interview, sorry, one is the interview, and the other one is, have we talked about those rituals if we're going to hire someone because what, what are some key things that we should be thinking about to help set that new person up for success so they can feel who Chatterkick or whoever, you know, the company is, they get to feel who you really are, not just a, we're stressed. This is, you know, right sky is falling. We want them to feel good about their decision and you know, set them up for success. So a couple of things that I think make a big difference.

First of all, if you're a business and you haven't realized that the talent pool and the talent that's in the market right now is insane. So talk about opportunity to bring people onto your team across the country. If you can make your business happen remote, you will have access and the opportunity to get some of the best and brightest. I wholeheartedly believe that because it's really opened up the talent pool. So that's something I really wanted to preface, but when it comes to bringing someone on or even hiring and screening, let me just tell you a little bit about what we've done. And, first we used social media to recruit and we're definitely looking for candidates, you know, with certain skillsets, depending on the role. Indeed has a free like assessment that they have. They have all different categories from social media to critical thinking.

It's free and if for many businesses Indeed can serve as your applicant tracking system or connect and integrate with some of them. So, we have all of our like cold "candidates" take those assessments just so we can start narrowing down some of the talent. And then from there, you know, we'll do a video call and interview. And if you don't have them do some sort of a form of assessment, even if it's very basic like writing assessments, critical thinking ways that they process information are things that are so hard to teach, right? So those things that are like the non negotiables, I need someone who can do XYZ, send them some little quiz or test or something super basic so that you can get some sort of a framework of where they're at, how they process, how they think. And then once we get the candidate into the organization, we have done remote orientation and training, for a while now.

And a lot of what we do is they're kind of, they're basically PowerPoint decks that have different parts of our business and that's how we take them through the orientation and they're with different people. So the new candidate gets to meet different people along the way and they'll be training about a certain topic. And so even if it's a small team, I still think that's nice to get some exposure to other people shadowing, just hearing and meeting new people. And we have one person that will kind of schedule that all out for them. So it takes some of that burden away from our team members who are also trying to, you know, do their jobs and train at the same time. Yes. And then the other thing that I think that I would recommend to people if you have anybody that you're really trying to integrate into your organization virtually, at a high pace is try virtual coworking and what that is, is you just both hop on zoom, you put your browser to the side.

But like if you have questions, you don't have to chat it. You're just like, Oh, Hey Michelle, what did you say about this? Or I can't find that file. Where is that at? Or it's those little things that happen a lot in the first couple of days. So even if you do half day remote coworking, I think it's fun for a lot of people. We've seen our collaborations really increased with that. We've seen it really helpful if people are struggling with just prioritization or just trying to minimize distractions, it really helps, because it's kind of that accountability at the same time, but not like babysitting. Right. They're still working on their stuff. You're still working on yours. Yes. And that's the virtual coworking. That is brilliant in the sense that we know where it's like, I don't want to say an office, but it's like we're in cubes, right?

Yeah. It opens your head. Yeah. Hey, was, I got a question for you, right? Because it removes that barrier of guilt of, Oh gosh, I gotta I gotta reach out to Kelsey, I'm going to probably bother her. It's, Hey, we're here if there's, you know, and I'm right here and I'm available as you have questions and you know, we can just let it flow as if though we were literally sitting next to each other. So that's a huge takeaway. I love that. Yeah. I think that might be even a, you know, kind of going back to our, to the survey that you know, where people are feeling lonely, that, what was that 12-15%. Right. Maybe as a team, we, maybe we look at, maybe it's not the whole team because every organization's different sizes, but maybe we say, Hey, let's break people up into groups of three or four and let's do some, you know, whether it's cross-functional or whatever.

Let's just do some virtual, the whole virtual coworking. I love that idea because you can now help people still connect. Yep. In a way where they probably aren't, they're there naturally. It's just we, when we're working at home, we're, we're just not picking up the phone. Like we would just walk in their office or walk in their space or yell over the cube, yell around it or whatever. So we've done that for, like movie watchings and viewings as well. And that's kind of fun because we'll have like, especially like industry related movies or something that had to do with social media. We had it playing, you know, and so some people were still kind of working. We were all on video and it was fun because it was one of those things where, you know, a lot of times it was quiet.

So I wasn't that distracted. At least I, maybe other people were. But, it was very much like an office space. And we even thought about, you know, cause we have this dynamic of in-person and virtual always. And so we've thought about, you know, live streaming that like live coworking so that you can just see people on a projector on the wall and that kind of combo and making sure people feel included, I think could be a really good benefit for employees to feel connected. And I think it could be really good for managers to realize, especially again, those people are probably overworking more than underworking. I think that's what happens with remote work, especially again, if you assume that everybody's intentions are good, that it's really powerful too understand the end. Some, you know, 70 hour weeks in, we should really acknowledge that.

Yes. And that goes the gratitude, right? We've talked about that before, but, as a manager it's, it's harder to find the things to show gratitude for because when we work together, we saw it, right? You'd see things and we'd like, Oh yeah, I really appreciate that. Or Oh, thank you for that. And some of us are probably better than others. I think that's something that we all can look at and say, how can I be better? But that's a barrier. I think there is right now working that remote. There is a barrier in, in regards to being able to find those things to show gratitude and show appreciation. And it's interesting you brought up this whole coworking, one of the things that conversation I had with a group a few weeks ago. One of the vice presidents had talked about his team has, he's had a team that was at their space and then he found that reversal and that's how they were before.

Right. And he said he didn't realize it until they all went virtual. They really didn't know each other. The virtual group versus that in office group and office group was good and cliquey. Right. And then you have the virtual group and they really didn't connect. They didn't really feel like they belong necessarily. And he said one of the things that they've learned, you know, over the last several weeks is he started hearing conversations. They did start doing this whole kind of virtual, let's just have our Zoom up and we're available and, and we have the meetings now we're all on meetings where before, yeah, they would only have the people that were in the office in the meeting and they probably wouldn't, they would just update the people who are virtual and now they're all coming together as meetings. He said he's hearing conversations he's never heard as people are getting to know each other relationships and I'm like, that is perfect.

You know, what are you going to do? You know, when we go back to normal, whatever, whenever, right. The new new, new normal and it's important that we recognize this is something that yeah, a bad situation caused us to have to realize it, but this is making us better so we need to make sure whatever we do do that. We include this type of virtual coworking and I guess we didn't call it that, but that's exactly what it was. And just including them more on meetings. I'm like, I just was sitting there, I'm like, you didn't have them in on the meeting?

And he was like, we just updated it and I'm like, Oh wow. I would have felt left out. I would have felt like part of the team, my voice didn't matter. Right. And as a, as a leader in the organization, that's some of those, those basic needs that we have as humans. It's important that, okay, we're doing what we can do to meet those needs so they feel valued and part of the team. Right. And I think just recording meetings, it's so simple, but recording them for the people that can't be there is also just a good reminder. We have a lot of people that have to go back and watch meetings or sometimes, especially if it's like a brainstorm or a client meeting, you know, it's way easier to process information after the fact. Then, especially if you're speaking or if you're talking to someone.

Um, and so that is definitely something like, don't forget about just recording those meetings, sending them out to people that maybe couldn't be there or had conflicts or just you didn't have the Zoom capacity, whatever the case may be. I think that that's just a very simple, but, um, definitely powerful tool to leverage. Gotcha. That's a great tip. That I had never even crossed my mind, but I could see, yeah, it doesn't, yeah, it doesn't even, I don't think about that, but yeah, that is perfect. Having it recorded then they can join. And if anything, even if you were a part of the meeting, you could still go back and rewatch it again. Let me talk about, let's, let's, you know, I'm unclear. Instead of having to ask questions, just hop back on there and you know, look at it and listen to it real quick and you're probably going to have a better understanding, a better takeaway.

That's a good one. And I think that specific instance, one of the things that has really helped us with, you know, just communication, right? Because when we work with businesses, we'll manage their social media assets for them or we'll run a campaign for them, but before they kind of come into the organization, We have a kickoff call with each new business and we want to hear from their mouth what they do, what their value is to their customers, where they feel like they shine and separate themselves. And we have a dialogue about that. And most of the time, you know, in that discovery process, the business has already kind of talked to me about some of this. But I want it from them and I want it to the team and I want it to the creative director and I want it to the person who is responding on their behalf.

And I want that message to be so cohesive. And it's so simple. But just a video recording that we put in their file. We have those recordings. You put them in their file and they get watched a lot because we're like, what was, they used the word customers, not clients. They use the word, you know, like it's the industry jargon and we're trying to make that authentic experience for those clients. But I'm sure that so many other businesses have parallels even though they're not like developing content on their behalf. But you want to know your customers and you want to know their problems. And so if you can get that from them in the beginning, it saves so much of that like re-asking questions or misalignment, you know, of team members and it's really simple. It's just a video call. We record it.

We can make blogs out of what they were talking about. We can make videos and visuals. There's a lot of different things that we can do just from one simple call. And I'm so glad that you just answered my question cause there was like, if you're doing these, if you're videoing them, can you take it in that, you know, that next step, right? And let, let's pieces and let's put it out there. Let's put it on our social media. So we're communicating, cause we have talked about, you know, that fourth. That fourth, you know, grouping that we're communicating to families and are there some of those that we can use that information to, to get out too All of our audiences simply from one recording or a few of those. You know, we did that for one of our clients. They actually, they let us jump into one of their sales calls and it was, it was a meeting that they were kind of updating their sales team of like what's going on on the behalf of the business.

But we're like, Ooh, this is perfect cause we can get content from this and we can change the verbiage a little bit and protect any private information. But we can write it in copy, we can create visuals for it. We can make sure that everything is aligned on their website. Everything's aligned on their Facebook page on their LinkedIn account. And all they had to do was just their normal day. We just popped into the meeting and we're able to extract anything we needed from the recording. And again, think about doing the same model for your team cheerleading session, right? Maybe it's your stand up, record it, send it to your marketing department. They can put that on your website, send it to your HR department. They can make sure candidates know of what the state of the businesses. Send it to your customer success team so that they can interact with customers.

And the messaging is all the same as a business owner, all you had to do was push the record button. You don't have to send in a million places. You've been telling people a million different things. Like it just, it's those little things that we forget about that can be streamlined and they're free. They're simple like, you know, but they can make a huge difference. Oh, huge. And yeah. What is the number one thing that, you know, businesses struggle in and we've talked about this communication, right? And, and even as a new hire, as you talked about jargon and industry jargon as a new hire, you can feel like you are in a different country. You don't understand what they're talking about. Right. And by having those recordings, that's brilliant. Where it, you, you're just simply improving the quality of the messages and really kind of created some alignment with what really is happening.

And that, like you said, HR, marketing you know, marketing obviously can do it for the external and so forth and internal. But that leaves so many opportunities to improve on your communication and what we're doing. I love that. I absolutely love that cause that's, that's a good one to remember and to, to have people really, really be more disciplined to hit that record button. Yeah, I mean really that if that's all it is and I think again, what a beautiful world that we can scratch all those highly produced training videos. Like just get those all, like don't worry about those unless you have a specific business need and don't need anything fancy. You mean Aoom, RingCentral, Go2meeting all those different things. You can just use, straight up, your video camera on your computer, too. You don't have to have any fancy software technology.

And, I think the disruption of communication is probably one of the things that frustrates people the most. Right? The, I've answered this question a million times and a lot of that can be solved if you just had a place for someone to access the information. And I think businesses get that but they don't want to do these training videos. Like that's what they think of in their head is training videos. And this is not this, this is your team meeting recorded in a folder and they can access it. This is, let me tell you how to find files. Let me tell you about my softwares that we use every day. And let me tell you about your colleagues that you're going to be working with quick done that you can consume at a later date. Well yeah and it's that self study too. So as a, as a new hire, I don't have to feel like I'm always maybe having to ask the questions or bother people.

You know, if, if we are disciplining ourself to, I mean, which I think Zoom or any platform like this where you can show your screen, walk them through it. Cause again we go back to as being visual. I know some people will have FAQs and they'll have the checklist and so forth, which I think are very valuable, but I do believe in that, physically seeing it, and some people are going to learn better and have a create much more clarity than, than the checklist. Right? Because there's, there's, there's bound to be things that we don't include on there. Is it this one or is it this one or whatever. And having, you know, taking the time just to simply record those and have, you could set them up in a plan for the first month. This is kind of the ones you want. You need to be watching and have conversations with them right about what'd you watch.

But it allows your, your new employees to start feeling like they can contribute and really make some decisions on their own right up front. And they have tools right there, right, that they can, they can watch it at midnight. They can watch it at, I mean, goodness, if you're Kelsey, you're watching it at 2am. Exactly. Yeah. She doesn't, I mean, she's not tough. Right? So it's like, but again, it's everyone. Everyone's a little different. So it allows them not to have to wait and so forth. So, and think about like a very simple training plan, which is a, I'm going to use Google because, it's just easy, but a Google doc, yeah. That you have linked up to like your video recordings in the file that you use. Here's the steps, include whatever checklist you have. It's so technically simple. And then your employee comes in day one and you say, here's your training plan for the next 30 days.

These are the things you need to know. Here's video recordings of everything. This is where you're going to find information. And then it's not as much of a process for training as, I mean, it's always, you know, bringing new people into the organization is always work, but okay. Hopefully it will pay off quicker because those people will feel more empowered, more trusted, more supportive, and, you know, you can really find those critical thinkers. Well and I, and I like the idea that you had talked about earlier was with some of those videos you're having purposely having different people do it. So now I get to, Oh, I get to see Beth, I might not know her but Hey, I'm probably going to be interacting with her. Right. And then looking for those when we talk about the train and looking for those rituals do to create that social connected.

Right, right. We're okay. They might do have some of those video times where it's available that that plan is perfect and you're right. Google doc is really easy for that or any of those kinds of like places that you can do it in word too, but just being able to have like a live link because I think finding information in the first 30 to 60 days is really hard. Right? Like I don't know what file folder I go to to get this. I know I'm supposed to put this here and do that there. But like where do I go again? Like, I've never used this. And I mean we have very tech savvy people that we hire and it's still confusing. So I, I know that, that it's the little things that typically make the biggest difference. Well, and it's even the, I don't know who to ask.

Yeah. You have your different departments. Right. That's one thing that we bumped into quite a bit with that in that first 30, 60, 90 days. I think I should call this department. I don't know who to ask this department. I'm not, you know, yeah. That, that can get some clarity and independence. They feel better about how they can contribute that upfront versus after several months have gone by. Right. And I think, you know, kind of circling back and wrapping up, the flexibility is just, it goes back to that how you define flexibility, right? It's people are going to define it differently and maybe your flexibility doesn't look like what Chatterkick's flexibility looks like. But I think if you don't define it, then you were giving it to the world to define. And it's a little different for everybody. So the one advice I can give or tip is just get a plan in place, define it, have a conversation, what it means to your organization.

And hopefully we've given you some tactics and ideas today too. So. Well, and I would say the one common word I've heard you say is simplicity. Keeping it simple. Let's not overthink it. Let's work it and let's make it simple for people. That plan that you're talking about, we've got to keep it simple too. Yeah. That, that to me is probably one of the biggest takeaways. You know, get the KPIs and get those things, but don't complicate it for people. Right. Right. They won't remember it and it'll be too hard to execute, so. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Well this was fun. Thank you. I'm glad I got to be in the hot seat today. So thank you again for collaborating and joining us and all the beautiful minds behind the Revela Group.If people have not had a chance to look at you, your website, your social assets, or even just talk to one of you, I would highly encourage them to do that. They are amazing. All of their team members are, so, thanks for joining us and until next time. Sounds great. Thank you so much. Thanks for the afternoon.

BusinessChatterkickJune 3, 2020crisis communication, covid19, flexibility