Remote work is here to stay. Sure, some younger folks prefer this type of work lifestyle, but the pandemic also made it impossible to avoid this change in the workplace. The challenge for businesses has been effective remote team communication, but these tips may help.

Define Communication Channels

The smartest thing to do is to define your communication channels. This may sound easy, but it can become a real mess if not done right. Some businesses choose multiple channels using multiple companies to save money.

This can confuse the remote team. It’s better to choose a platform with all communication channels, like Unified Communications so that communication is accessible through one singular platform. Be sure the platform chosen supports your team’s needs, like video calling or emailing.

Finding Collaboration Tools

A remote team will be working together. To make this possible for them, they need to have the right collaboration tools that are beneficial to remote workers.

Some of the collaboration tools are connected to communication, like emails and texts, but you’ve got that covered. What you need now are tools like cloud services that allow remote workers to work on projects that can be shared online. This also makes it easy for you and managers to track progress, which is pretty important, too.

Guidelines Need to Be Clear

The next thing to worry about implementing is communication guidelines. These are of the utmost importance now that most of your team is working remotely. They need to know what’s expected of them since you won’t be there physically.

Your team won’t know what to do without clear guidelines. For example, you could have them check in every hour to see if there are updates that everyone needs to be aware of. You might require team members to report their work every day or week. The more clear you are about what you expect from them, the better communication you’ll have.

Schedule Video or Audio Calls

Even if your team communicates well enough on different projects, it’s still a good idea to make video or audio calls a regular thing. Now, these calls must be useful and help steer the team towards a unified goal.

This means you cannot have unnecessary meetings because these not only waste time but are annoying. Each meeting must have a clear objective and must be crucial to the job. These could happen weekly, monthly, or maybe after each project is complete.

Encourage Proper Communication

Proper communication is of the utmost importance, especially with remote workers. Since folks are working on computer screens, tablets, and smartphones, it’s easy to rely on shorthands and other language liberties. This is something you want to discourage.

People don’t have to have the best grammar, but deliberate liberties with language should not be taken by those on the remote team. It is also wise to discourage any sarcasm or jokes. These don’t read well when typed and could lead to misunderstandings. These could be costly, and no business wants that. Remote workers need to stick to the basics and always be as clear as possible. Work on promoting positive conversations, and everything should be just fine.

Limit Participants During Meetings

It would be a good idea to break your meetings apart into small groups. Sure, having everyone join all at once saves you time, and that’s always a good thing, but it might not be as beneficial. Having the entire team in one meeting could make it hard for folks to speak up or ask questions.

Smaller teams encourage participation and promote understanding. These are more important than saving time because they should lead to productivity. Ideally, you’ll want to segregate the folks in each meeting by the team members’ agenda. Avoid asking folks to listen and be involved in a meeting they won’t gain much from.

These are just some things you should be doing with your remote team members, but there’s much more you can do to improve communication. For example, you can record some of these meetings to analyze what could be improved or to circle back if needed. Hopefully, some of these tips help your remote team be more effective.

Building an online business in the UK doesn’t have to cost thousands of pounds. Many aspiring entrepreneurs have limited budgets that make it difficult for their company to invest heavily in advertising or hire professionals.

Let’s jump straight into the 8 quick ways to grow your online business.

1. Pick the Optimal Platform for Your Business

Always choose the right platform for your company website. The suggested solution for small businesses is WordPress.org, which is completely free and includes several plugins to expand its functionality. Choosing the wrong platform complicates things and you may have to spend a lot of time looking after your account rather than looking at other aspects of your business. If your organization has more resources, you can hire a web designer to create and support your own custom website.

2. Offer Your Customers Multiple Ways to Contact You

Providing multiple calling options like email and direct messaging to customers is critical to growing your online business. If your business is new, you should learn how to get more email subscribers as it is crucial for successful messaging and customer interaction. The perceived quality of customer service is critical to building a loyal customer base. It is also recommended to add popular communication channels in the market like Discord and Facebook Messenger.

3. Focus on SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most effective ways to get first-time visitors to a website. From day one of starting your online business, focus on developing a good SEO strategy. In contrast to advertising, this method is cheaper and brings good results with a good investment. Your SEO strategy should be scalable and should work well with other digital marketing tools like email marketing and social media marketing.

4. Offer Multiple Payment Options

When your customers think of a product or service on your website, they should be able to buy it right away and with maximum ease. Providing multiple payment options like PayPal and credit cards is critical to growing your online business. Suppose you have a lot of customers in developing countries. In this case, you should also offer payment options like mobile wallets and cash on delivery, which are popular with buyers in developing countries like China and Nigeria.

5. Create a Data-Driven Growth Strategy

Your online growth strategy should be data-driven and use free analytics tools like Google Analytics to generate customer-related insights. You should also publish modern machine learning algorithms on your website. This allows you to monitor what is working best for your marketing campaigns and how your consumer preferences are changing and mixing up over time.

6. Focus on Effective Content Strategy

The content of your website is intended to make customers aware of the practical benefits of your products and services. Post useful content on your platform and update the linked blog regularly. A website that regularly publishes new, high quality content has a better chance of ranking high in the search engines.

7. Improve the Website Performance 

For many online businesses in the UK, the website is the only point of contact with customers. Hence, it needs constant improvement in terms of speed, availability and user experience. Try to make a simple design for your platform that is easier for customers to navigate and use. If you have more budget, choose the best possible provider and managed hosting service to entrust the maintenance of your website to experienced and professional people.

8. Use Social Media

Despite the current bad publicity on social media, it is still a powerful online marketing tool. If you use this tool wisely, you can make noise in your products and communicate with your customers. Unlike email marketing, social media enables two-way communication with your audience. You can easily collect customer feedback on your products and grow your business with it.

To Conclude

Innovative thinking and careful planning can help you grow your online business tremendously. If you carefully follow the tips in this article you can achieve these results on a budget, which can be very important when starting a small online business.

Different commercial properties and businesses adopt various methods for their indoor heating and ventilation requirements. While it sounds pretty simple, in reality, it is quite a critical part of every company’s commitment to stakeholders, employees, customers and community. This commitment revolves around compliances and controls concerning the business processes and how it complies with Greenhouse gases and CO2 emissions. There are many costs and activities associated with these compliances. This becomes all the more critical and important during the winter period.

Employees and customers look forward to visiting workplaces that are warm and conducive. This is one of the main reasons businesses allocate funds in their annual budgets and invest in adequately-designed and appropriately-sized heating and ventilation systems. According to Business Energy Comparison, assessing different heating solutions can help businesses choose the most cost-effective and energy-efficient options, reducing overall operational expenses.

Such commitments from businesses help create an ideal environment for both their employees and customers. Having said this, just installing a heating and ventilation system will not serve the purpose. The design needs to comply with the statutory rated energy efficiency standards and safety protocols.

Why is the Heating System Installation Critical?

One way is to install a system for central heating requirements and one for generating and distributing heated water in the facility. While significant A-Rated heating and ventilation systems can be bought and installed, it is imperative that an A-rated water heating system also be installed.

One such heated water system that commercial facilities and businesses could look at is immersion heaters. These are basically heating elements inserted in insulated tanks to create heat through electricity or solar energy. These types of immersion heaters are also sometimes known as megaflow boilers.

How Does It Work?

It is essential to know how an immersion tank works to understand the concept of an immersion heater. Essentially, there are metal hoops or coils that are housed inside a cylindrical tank. The coil or hoop is charged with electricity which heats it up and raises the water temperature stored in the cylindrical tank. This type of installation also becomes a storage type water heater. These are basically like the electric kettles being used at home in kitchens.

Why Are Heating Systems Imperative For Businesses?

In commercial facilities, businesses invest in installing and maintaining their heating and ventilation systems very diligently. Many companies prefer to invest in a heat recovery unit and install it in conjunction with their heating and ventilation system. These heat recovery units are basically heat exchangers which recover all the lost heat from the facility. In simple words, it is also known as a waste heat recovery system. This helps many commercial facilities cut down on their costs and expenses related to issues due to moisture build-up in the system.

The heated air from indoors is collected and returned to the system, and external fresh air (which is re-heated) gets circulated. Doing this brings down the load on the heating boiler and furnace for extra heating capacity to heat the external fresh air. Add to this, there is the benefit of getting external fresh air at all times.

How Does An Efficient Heating System Help Businesses?

A significant chunk of the monthly energy bills is consumed by the heating and ventilation system. While it is the most critical equipment system in any commercial facility or office premises, the fundamental criterion of these systems is that operational performance is expected to be at peak levels at all times. So that such performance efficiency levels are maintained, periodic and regular servicing of the equipment becomes critically important.

When the heating and ventilation system of the business premises is maintained regularly, the energy consumption will automatically reduce and reach optimum levels below the peak. This will also ensure the smooth running of the entire system. In turn, it translates to a reduction in operating costs and improves energy efficiency.

On the flip side, if the heating and ventilation system is neglected and not regularly serviced, the system will start drawing excessive energy to operate at par levels, thereby increasing the expenses significantly. It is known that to remain competitive, every business needs to reduce its costs and overheads, but paying appropriate attention to such equipment though at a little extra expense, will increase the overall profitability of the business.

As an average, it helps to follow the globally adopted and time-tested process of maintaining a consistent temperature range for your heating and cooling system throughout the year. Doing this has yielded immense savings on energy consumption bills. In a few cases, the energy savings have been as high as 35 %, translating to average savings of approximately 15 % on costs.