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The lockdown is painful but it is also a test of your grit to rebuild after a disaster, especially if you own a business that has been hit hard. So while staying put at home it’s time to think about the ways to get your business back on track.

One thing we know for sure that there will be a massive drive for business reconstruction from governments all over the world. Billions of dollars will go into providing all possible help required to boost consumptions and other factors that affect business and the economy.

However, there will be a new order, a major thrust towards a complete digital culture. Most of the work will be done remotely through the Internet. You’ll have no choice but to take your business effectively online.

Your website will be at the heart of your online business activities, your beacon of hope in the changed time. So it makes good sense to get a dynamic and happening website first thing by a professional web design company.

How do you define a good and effective website

Count of visits and conversion rates are the deciding factors for a good website. Some websites draw maximum attention and make the most conversions because they are beauty and the brain together- captivating the visitors with great visuals and at the same time, they are dynamic, smart, and engaging, provide all information and generate sales.

Things that matter most in a website

1. Quality traffic:

It means the volume of visits to your website, the more the number of serious visitors the better. This is purpose #1 of your website and here is how it can be optimized.

Aggressive SEO activities in the form of meta title and meta description spell out the purpose clearly to help generate instant clicks by the interested viewers and usher them straight into your website.

That’s all it needs to do. Sounds simple? It is if only done by the experts.

Remember, in conventional marketing, months of research and planning goes into identifying and reaching the potential buyers. Here, they themselves are searching you out. But the big challenge to you is that you have only a second or two to convince the viewers to visit your site, for they have many names on the list, why should they click on you?

2. User Experience:

The most important part of the whole exercise that can make or ruin your chance. A good first impression will make your visitors stay and explore the site.

This is where a reputed website designing company comes to justify its value. The salient points that make your website a great UX are as below

• It should be tailor-made for your audience.
• Your potential customers will find the images and writing impressive and meaningful.
• Navigation isn’t complicated and there may be extra information relating to the subject.

But your website must be soothing, if not enticing, to hold the visitors for a long time. This is again an area where a professional web designing company can make a big difference by blending great visuals and written content to create a moving tale.

3. Call To Action:

If the UX part is about sensitivity, this part is about smartness. The underlying purpose of your website is lead generation. There will be CTA buttons placed appropriately – while reading a content the visitor might feel like chatting or speaking with a specialist. This action generates leads.

Mood and priority of a human may change. #PerfectWebsite doesn’t miss out on the urge and opportunity of the moment.

Also, the “comment’’ and “like” buttons on the blogs help measure the readers’ appreciation. Talking with them through chatting or e-mailing may also create leads if done promptly.

4. Access by mobile users:

Maximum views to your website are going to be by the mobile users; already the rate is around 63.4% of the total visits. Your website got to be mobile-friendly. Considering smaller screens of the mobile phones #PerfectWebsite creates the mobile versions compatible with leading mobile operating systems.

There is a lot of change between the PC version and the mobile version of the website. Though the mobile versions are mostly rid of the graphics, ads, and sidebars used in their PC versions, they use advanced location-based mobile advertising technology with intelligent use of geofencing. This gives your website extra power in terms of

• Event targetting – Targetting customers attending a specific event at a specific time.
• Greater customer loyalty – Reaching out to customers who have visited your brick and mortar location.
• Clever and proactive sales – Targetting the potential customers visited your competitors’ locations.
• Generating custom audience – Targetting customers who are within or have recently visited a specific Geo-specific location.

5. The speed of access:

Your website will have a high page load speed. A slow opening of pages, more than 3 seconds, takes your visitors and businesses to other sites, no matter how good your website is. This is awful for your on-page SEO, branding, and revenue. Your prospects will go to your competitors. A professional web design company takes the right measures to ensure fast loading of your website.

These are some of the major areas of improvement in addition to other finer points that will be worth going to a professional web design company to take on the fierce competition that the post-COVID-19 time is likely to present.

Amid the facts and rumours doing the rounds about how employees of some companies are being subjected to strict monitoring during their work-from-home due to lockdown, Fluidscapes continues to remain a different story.

Fluidscapes has better ways to ensure higher engagement and productivity from its employees who have turned to work from home during these trying times. It is the team building through trust and the use of the right technology that helps to import an office-like environment with all its discipline and decorum. Once they log in, they virtually enter the office.

This policy and culture were adopted by Fluidscapes long before the coronavirus waves hit the country.

Early bird advantage

As a forward-looking company, Fluidscapes experimented with the idea of the virtual or remote teams that are made of members who may be operating from different locations but are committed to a common purpose and performance goals.

This was primarily to save from disruption of works due to the calamities such as infamous Mumbai rains that practically leave the city paralyzed for 2-3 days every year. Fortunately, the same proactive planning enabled the company to remain productive without a hitch during such event as the prolonged lockdown.

In this model, the Individual workgroups are made of a flexible mix of team members in office, home, or mobile, sharing responsibilities for achieving defined objectives. Initially, there were doubts and scepticism about its efficacy and then came the phase of adopting the right approach and technology.

Regular and real-time communication is key to an efficient workplace. The challenge was to apply the right mindset and toolset to keep the geographically dispersed staff on task, work efficiently, and communicate effectively.

The solution came from the cloud

A thorough assessment of many cloud-based apps finally shortlisted the right ones for us that are flexible, robust, cost-effective, and with nice user interfaces.
These apps give remote employees a real office feel. People can collaborate on multiple projects in real-time, share views, flag status, mark times, and chat freely. All data are archived in the cloud for future references. Employees log-in and greet colleagues before starting their works, keep the whole team updated and sign off when they’re done with.

Identifying our needs

There are numerous cloud-based services that can make one go overboard for no real purpose but inconveniences to the employees. We pinned down our needs for a smooth, effective, and enjoyable remote work experience as these:

• HR and administration – End-to-end solutions on attendance, payroll, benefits, admin, employee performance levels, planning, and reporting with statistical charts.
• Communication – Easy searching, chatting, built-in browsing, and real-time exchange of information.
• Project Management – Assigning tasks, creating teams, setting deadlines, monitoring progress.
• Collaboration – Capability to share the shareable instantly among the team members to allow them to edit and contribute with other inputs.
• Storage – Storage on the cloud of the everyday files with required access restriction.
• Backup – Best cloud-based backup solution to store the contents of multiple workstations on a single account and ensure automatic updating and retrieval of each employee’s backups via a single dashboard.
• Security – Multiple level security arrangements with intelligent access control and denial.

The end result

We broke down all our requirements into four main categories and selected robust and comprehensive apps in each of them before getting into the phases of implementation and assimilation. The result was astounding, we were transformed into a company of a well managed, happy, and responsible workforce with improvements in the areas like cost-efficiency, scalability, and fault tolerance.

Today, employees feel more engaged through these apps. Serious works and occasional fun go together to maintain a healthy work atmosphere. On top of these, there are video/audio conference facilities that help to alleviate problems or confusions in the team. One very important point about these services is that they allow the employees to look at their own performance, attendance, interpersonal communications, etc. and improve on them. Also, they have their mobile versions too, so that the employees can stay in touch while on the move.

There, we said it and we are proud of it. With the advent of remote working culture came the insecurity that the employees might slack and the productivity might get hampered due to being at home. This might be true to a certain extent as one might find it difficult to adapt to an informal working environment. However, we always felt that this was a severe breach of an individual’s privacy.

So, what is the solution?

We let our employees monitor themselves.

This might sound ludicrous, but let us explain.

We, as a startup, have always been ahead of the technological curve and have been using the best in the industry tools for our daily routines. Given the unpredictable nature of Mumbai rains, we were already using many remote working tools way before the pandemic hit us. This was one of the reasons why we were least affected by the lockdown and are still able to cater to our client without any disruption. In short, it did not take a global pandemic to bring about a hurried digital transformation of our team.

One of those tools is Wrike.

Wrike is a project management tool that helps simplify planning, enable collaborations across time zones and streamline workflow. Not everything about this tool can be covered in this article, so we are going to focus on the part where it shines the most for us,i.e planning and reporting.

The tool employs Work Breakdown Structure or WBS in short. The project is broken into small tasks and even smaller subtasks in Wrike. This makes managing the project very easy. You assign any member/s of the company to a task/subtask, specify if there is a dependency on other team members/departments and the timeframe it might take them to complete it, which acts as a deadline.

This creates a sense of accountability.

How? you may ask.

Our employees log the time they have worked on a particular task assigned to them in Wrike itself. This makes them self-aware of the time they have put in a task and if they are nearing the deadline. The reporting section gives the managers insights into the project’s status and KPI, which helps to gauge if any of our employees are facing difficulty or roadblocks due to dependency on other members of the company.

The second thing that has helped us build trust is proactive communication. We ensure that we speak to every member of our company every day and listen to them. An open communication channel, either via call, Zoom or Slack (another set of remote tools that we use), ensures that everyone has the chance to get their voice heard and raise their concern if any.

We have always believed in empowering our employees and we encourage other companies to follow suit. Rather than spying on them, let’s give them the freedom of working in their jammies. After all, at the end of the day, what counts is productivity.

Big shout out to Wrike, Slack, and Zoom for keeping us productive.

#TL;DR: Use a project management tool with time logging capability rather than spying on your employees.

P.S: As business consultants, our core strength lies not only in setting up business processes but also H.R. Hiring the right people ensures that they work for the brand rather than for themselves. A new article on that coming soon.

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