by Fronetics | Oct 1, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Current Events, Logistics, Marketing, Strategy, Supply Chain, Talent
Considering instituting a work from home policy for your business? Ask yourself these three questions first.
As the supply chain becomes increasingly digital, many employers may be considering implementing a work from home policy. After all, we know one way to attract millennial talent is to allow for this kind of flexibility.
But before you make the decision to open the door to a work from home arrangement, consider these three questions.
3 questions to ask before implementing a work from home policy
1. Are your employees organized and self-motivated?
Ask any employee who works remotely, and they’re very likely to tell you that working from home makes them happier and more productive. And they aren’t necessarily wrong. There’s certainly evidence to suggest that with today’s technology, there’s essentially no downside to working from home, and it does often enhance productivity.
But working from home isn’t for everyone. Writing for the Harvard Business Review, marketing strategist and Duke University Professor Dorrie Clark suggests that workers considering a work-from-home arrangement first take a moment to introspect and understand how they work best.
According to author Natalie Sisson, “If you’re good at managing your own time, and you’re productive and have discipline, you’ll be able to do work from anywhere. But if you need to be in one place, and you need to go into an office, or need to be surrounded by the same people all the time, it probably won’t work for you.”
2. Is there a wealth of local talent?
One of the less-often-considered factors when businesses consider remote work arrangements is actually an important potential benefit for employers. Not every location has a tremendous amount of local talent, but that doesn’t have to limit your business. If you’re in an area where finding qualified employees is a challenge, making remote options available can be a big resource — essentially, the world is your oyster!
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Consider having remote hires come onsite for training, team-building, or orientation, and make sure they’re equipped to meet the requirements of their positions. Once that initial foundation is laid, and expectations are clear, they can work from anywhere in the world — and save you the office space.
3. How much collaboration is required?
Are you considering remote work options for positions that require extensive collaboration with other employees? If so, it’s not necessarily a deal-breaker, but it does require some additional forethought.
With the technology available today, remote collaboration should theoretically be a piece of cake. But it’s important that everyone be on the same page about expectations. If remote workers are needed in a scheduled daily meeting, for example, it’s important that that expectation be made clear from the outset.
It’s also crucial to make sure that remote workers are given the resources they need to collaborate with their colleagues, and that they have a good understanding of the technology they’ll be using.
Work from home arrangements can be beneficial for employees and employers alike. But it’s important to consider all the variables to ensure that it’s the right thing for your business.
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by Fronetics | Apr 17, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy, Supply Chain
Are you using subtitles as part of your YouTube marketing strategy? You should be, as well as these other tips.
I’ve written a lot about YouTube and how the supply chain should be leveraging it as a marketing tool. Of course, I don’t recommend just creating videos at random and throwing them up on your channel. Like any content or platform, you should approach YouTube strategically.
Here are some tips for optimizing your YouTube marketing strategy.
5 tips to improve your YouTube marketing strategy
1) Do the groundwork.
It may seem like a bigger-than-necessary investment of time at the front end, but doing your research is often “one of the most undervalued aspects of content marketing,” according to Forbes contributor AJ Agrawal.
This means getting a grasp of the existing landscape before you publish your content. Look at others in your market, and what works or doesn’t work for them.
2) Create “content buckets.”
“YouTube marketing really comes down to picking a few key areas where you feel you can deliver true thought leadership, entertainment, or some kind of value, and then mass-producing content that falls within those larger buckets,” says Agrawal.
“Buckets” refer to the broader categories your content falls into. For example, if you’re looking to create awareness about the role you play in a larger supply chain structure, one bucket might be education. Once you start organizing your thinking this way, generating quality content that falls within your larger strategy gets much easier.
3) Create a standard for your content, and stick to it.
Agrawal points out that one of the most important keys to building a loyal audience is consistency. This can be a challenge when it comes to posting quality video content, since it requires an investment of time and resources.
But it’s crucial that you “set the tone from the beginning and let your audience know what to expect,” including what kind of content you’ll be posting, and how often your audience can expect to hear from you. Once you’ve done that, stick with the promises you’ve made.
4) Use subtitles.
People are increasingly watching videos on their mobile devices in public, without the sound on. Taking this small step means that, rather than bypassing your content because they can’t hear what’s being said, people are paying attention to your videos no matter where they are.
5) Collaborate.
Content marketing at its very core benefits tremendously from collaboration. “One of the most effective ways to get your content disseminated, shared, and ultimately seen is by collaborating with other people who have audiences as well,” says Agrawal.
Collaborations are beneficial for everyone involved, particularly when you chose your partners strategically. If they share a similar audience, it boosts exposure for both parties, as well as boosting credibility within your industry.
Tell us about your YouTube marketing strategy.
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by Elizabeth Hines | Jul 15, 2015 | Blog, Leadership, Strategy, Supply Chain
The sharing of tangible and intangible assets will increasingly become a fundamental feature of successful businesses.
Few developments of late are as intriguing as the rise and disruptive impact of the collaborative economy. In a very short time, services that we may have thought of as permanent fixtures of our business and personal lives have been rendered obsolete by the sudden sharing of tangible and intangible assets in the peer-to-peer, business to consumer (B2C), and business to business (B2B) spheres.
B&B and hostels, car rental, and DVD rental are giving way to peer-to-peer accommodations, car sharing, and music and video streaming. The Marriott Hotel chain used the online platform LiquidSpace to convert empty conference rooms into rentable work spaces for guests as well as outside visitors. Walgreens teamed up with TaskRabbit, an online marketplace for outsourcing errands, to deliver products during flu season. The list is endless.
Rachel Botsman, an innovation strategist who has spent the past four years studying 500 collaborative economy startups worldwide, concludes in Harvard Business Review:
The real power of the collaborative economy is that it can serve as a zoom lens, offering a transformative perspective on the social, environmental, and economic value that can be created from any of a number of assets in ways and on a scale that did not exist before. In that transformation lie threats—and great opportunities.
While consumer sharing may have received the most media attention, Robert Vaughan, an economist at PwC Strategy & Inc., argues the open sharing of resources among businesses may present an even larger opportunity. Although, on the surface, it seems like an unlikely marriage – businesses do compete, after all – a growing number of successful collaborations prove Vaughan is right.
He writes:
In just a few years of activity, it has become clear that the unfettered exchange of otherwise unused major assets, including physical space and industrial equipment, allows a sharing company to operate more efficiently than its non-sharing rivals. Companies that go further still, wholeheartedly embracing the sharing of less tangible assets, may benefit from a different sort of change, one involving their culture, that builds new types of connections with, and sensitivity to, the world outside.
One example of an interesting collaboration involves General Electric and Quirky, an online inventor community. GE and other market giants such as IBM and Samsung file thousands of patents every year, most of which never move beyond the drawing board. The collaboration gives Quirky open access to GE’s patents, allowing for products that normally would not have been put to productive use – such as a smartphone controlled window air conditioner – to be brought to market.
Sometimes a direct collaboration may not even be necessary. A company may choose to place an undeveloped product on an online technology exchange, thereby opening itself to the possibility of building a connection to another company with complimentary expertise.
In many respects, enterprise sharing is still in its infancy and is likely to evolve just like Airbnb, whose concept seemed “fringe” when it launched in 2008 (it was initially marketed as a service for people to stay the night on their air beds in strangers’ homes). Now the company has amassed more than 650,000 rooms in 192 countries and threatens to disrupt not only the hotel industry but the entire hospitality sector.
Fronetics Strategic Advisors is a leading management consulting firm. Our firm works with companies to identify and execute strategies for growth and value creation.
Whether it is a wholesale food distributor seeking guidance on how to define and execute corporate strategy; a telematics firm needing high quality content on a consistent basis; a real estate firm looking for a marketing partner; or a supply chain firm in need of interim management, our clients rely on Fronetics to help them navigate through critical junctures, meet their toughest challenges, and take advantage of opportunities. We deliver high-impact results.
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