Guru

How to Spark Employee Happiness While Working Remotely

Sarah Mooney — Wed, 23 Sep 2020 18:30:00 GMT

This is a Guest post from Sarah Mooney Director of Demand Generation @ LEON

A positive company culture is one of the fundamental requirements of any productive workplace. If your team members have a negative mindset while they're working, it's more than likely to reflect poorly on their performance.

At this point, we all know that working remotely comes with its pitfalls. There is no shortage of distractions, and being stuck at home — especially during a pandemic — doesn’t help to keep spirits up.

Company culture is more than ping pong tables and kombucha on tap. When your company goes remote, out of choice or necessity, those “perks” become obsolete. Don’t get me wrong, who doesn’t love ping pong — it’s a great way to get the gang together and whip it Balls of Fury style. But building a genuinely positive work environment, especially in a distributed setting, relies on much more than office perks.

By encouraging your employees to seek out a healthy work life balance, and prioritize their mental health and wellbeing, you’ll give your team the support to really show up when they are online and bring their best selves to work. Cultivating a positive company culture, and keeping employees happy will ultimately save your company time and money. Studies have shown that when someone is struggling with mental health challenges, their ability to perform work tasks reduces by 35%.

Thanks to a variety of new technology and advancements, we have the ability to shift our businesses to a remote setting and strengthen our company cultures in a virtual environment.

Being remote doesn’t have to hinder a company's growth and performance. There’s a long list of tools available to streamline communication, keep internal information organized, and bolster a positive distributed working environment.

Gone are the days of water-cooler chats. Gone are the hallway check-ins with your teammates and walks to grab a mid afternoon coffee. I miss high fives? Do you? ✋What does this mean? The company culture you had at the office doesn’t exist anymore

In this blog, we’re going to dive into a list of ideas you can implement with your remote team to spark happiness while working remotely:

1. Communicate, communicate, and communicate some more!

We all know this one. Thoughtful and consistent communication is foundational to improving remote work culture. “Collaboration and communication” was listed as the #1 struggle that came with working remotely in Buffer’s 2020 State of Remote Work. Communication tools are critical to any successful remote tech stack.

One of the biggest issues remote workers highlight is a feeling of isolation. Following prescriptive remote work communication guidelines, and simple key efforts such as keeping cameras on during meetings, can help alleviate some of those feelings of detachment.

Here are some tips on how to make your comms channels fun and effective:

Get creative with your Slack channels! Consider starting a channel dedicated to ideation. Encourage your team members to post brainstorm prompts and out of the box ideas. This should be a safe space for even the wackiest ideas to be applauded for their creativity rather than shut down.
Are virtual coffee breaks really a thing? They totally are (and are not as awkward as they sound on paper!). We know — adding another Zoom call to the calendar can feel counterproductive, but it will allow your team to reconnect, get some face to face time, and feel a little less lonely. Allocate 15 - 30 minutes a few days a week for virtual coffee breaks, and set the precedent that this is a time to not talk about work — to just mingle with your colleagues.
Morning huddles are also a thing. Let’s say your team logs in at 9:00am, hop onto a daily call to run through everyone's game plan for the day and week. This gives team members time to align on projects and find areas to support one another.
Show some recognition! Moving to a remote setting doesn’t mean you need to stop spreading support and gratitude. Best in class teams prioritize recognizing accomplishments and celebrating one another. Like I said, I miss high fives and a gif is the next best thing.

Don’t you think they should make an ‘The Office’ reunion special?

Collaboration and Communication Go Hand In Hand: How to Harness Their Power

lfriedman@getguru.com (Leah E. Friedman) — Mon, 14 Sep 2020 16:45:00 GMT

Humans are social creatures. While the image of the lone genius — the person who works night and day alone in singleminded pursuit of greatness — persists, if there’s anything the last year has taught us, it’s that, well, being alone is hard. Working alone is hard too (ask anyone who’s ended up owning a group project at school), and while many of us still quote the mantra of “If you want something done right, do it yourself,” that lonely experience takes a real toll.

10 Customer Follow-Up Mistakes Experts Make

Jeffrey Smithson — Tue, 08 Sep 2020 20:00:00 GMT

Customer service requires balance. You must balance the needs of your company and your sales quotas against the needs of your customers. Customers don’t want to be constantly interrupted while processing a buying decision.

Guru Customer Q&A: Brooklinen

Callie Rojewski — Tue, 01 Sep 2020 17:00:00 GMT

When the team behind the internet's favorite sheets had to onboard remote hires fast during their biggest sales rush of all time, they realized something had to be improved: their access to internal company knowledge. We sat down with Brooklinen's Knowledge & Training Manager, Caroline Svenson, who shares more about their journey to wrinkle-free knowledge management while navigating COVID-19.

Back to School Resources for Working Parents in 2020

ewilcox@getguru.com (Emma Wilcox) — Wed, 26 Aug 2020 18:31:33 GMT

Whatever this back to school season looks like for your family, it’s bound to be unconventional. In some states schools have fully reopened, others are giving students the option for in-person learning a few days a week, but for many families, school remains entirely remote for the foreseeable future. For those whose home has been converted into a digital classroom of sorts, parents suddenly find themselves in the position of homeschool administrator, IT support, recess monitor, and full-time at-home worker.

What’s New With Guru: Facilitating Better Cross-Company Knowledge Sharing

Chandler Sopko — Tue, 18 Aug 2020 12:00:00 GMT

We get it: we’re in month six of working from home, and even though you have a real home office set up by now, a remote-friendly tech stack, and (mercifully) have seen the end of overly-frequent Zoom happy hours, remote work burnout is still all too real. With companies like Slack and Facebook working from home until Summer 2021, and Shopify and Twitter working from home indefinitely, the challenges that accompany remote collaboration aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Trusted Election Info: Register to Vote & Read a Poll Like a Pro

lfriedman@getguru.com (Leah E. Friedman) — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 15:26:29 GMT

This year at Guru, we’ve broadened our mandate to connect people who have questions with trusted answers. And because there’s a ton of honest confusion and misinformation surrounding the 2020 election, we’re here to help in the way we know best: by putting together resources from verified sources and subject matter experts to clarify things!

How To Improve Employee Efficiency At Work

ewilcox@getguru.com (Emma Wilcox) — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 20:06:48 GMT

As industries across the board are navigating the transition to remote and asynchronous work, we turn again to the perpetual question: are employees less efficient working from home? And if the answer is yes, how can employee efficiency be improved in 2020?

Guru Customer Q&A: ServiceSource

Callie Rojewski — Fri, 31 Jul 2020 19:00:00 GMT

Guru the Gathering is Guru's user group program, where Guru admins and power users meet up to share ideas, tips, and resources for how to best leverage Guru to level up their teams and career. During our most recent event, we interviewed Brantley Merritt, a seasoned knowledge manager on the learning & development team at ServiceSource.

ServiceSource is the leader in outsourced B2B growth solutions. They sell products on behalf of their customers, known to their teams as ‘logos.’ Serving big tech companies like Microsoft, Google, ServiceSource uses Guru to enable their sales delivery teams and unify all the knowledge across various tools and ecosystems. Until recently, the ServiceSource onboarded their teams and new clients using multiple knowledge bases, leaving information inaccessible and dispersed across platforms. Now, ServiceSource leverages Guru as their #1 source of information to do their jobs.

Meet Guru’s Search Team

Sydney Sundell — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 18:22:49 GMT

We’re always working to enhance and improve our users’ experiences with Guru, from the way knowledge is created in our editor to how it’s shared through Slack, Teams, and beyond. One area that holds a special place in our team’s heart is our search functionality, which is core to how our platform is used to seek and share knowledge. Last November, we shared a glimpse into how we use product data to improve search within Guru. Since then, we haven’t slowed down a bit, making incremental enhancements to our search UI within our web app and browser extension, as well as directly to our algorithm. Today, we’ll dive into a Q&A session with two members of our dedicated search team to better understand how we make sure that search at Guru is always improving.