When your buyers and your staff have been living in an environment that has, through the pandemic, slowed to a crawl, it can be tough to get them moving again. That’s what we’re about this month.
One primary block to creating urgency with a company’s staff is the scenario in which you might have some of your staff working from home, and some working within an office. During the pandemic, it was common to have all staff working from home. For some businesses, this has remained a reality.
The Pajama Culture
Working from home has created what could be termed “the pajama culture.” Because people don’t have to leave home, they often don’t engage in the same routine as when they had to go out to work every day. They can even get away with staying in their pajamas. If they are attending an online videoconferencing meeting, they only have to look presentable from the waist up.
Before the pandemic, a person had a routine of preparing to go to work. This might have consisted of waking up with a cup of coffee, going to the gym, coming home, having breakfast, showering, dressing, and heading off to the office. Whatever an individual’s daily routine, it had its own discipline and structure and created its own sense of urgency.
That sense of urgency has now disappeared, as someone can literally roll out of bed, grab a cup of coffee, and start work on their laptop on the kitchen table.
Alone with a decreased sense of urgency, “the pajama culture” and working strictly from home have contributed to an overall lowered standard, which we’ve been discussing throughout this series.
Melding the Office and Virtual Environments
Now that you’re recreating the urgency lost during the pandemic, it’s a matter of injecting some life into the sector of your staff working from home. While it’s much easier to get the team within your office inspired and creating a sense of urgency in them with direct contact, it is more difficult with those working remotely.
One way to get that urgency instilled in your remote staff is to set the same mindset and standards for them as you do for your on-site employees. In a sense, you’re then melding your office and virtual environments and making them a unified whole.
If your company has a dress code, insist that those working remotely have at least an on-camera appearance that is professional, and makes it appear that they are operating within a corporate environment.
If your business engages in a morning staff meeting, make it mandatory for remote employees to attend as well. This should be live participation, not simply viewing a video recording of the meeting later in the day. The same should be true of members of your sales team, virtual or in-house—they should all attend the sales meeting.
Creating this combined workplace environment with staff who work virtually and those who work on-site, will not only create urgency in all staff, but will assist in bringing the standards back up to where they should be.
To learn more, sign up at SELLability.com.
