Building a team geared towards growth

“The new normal”, are probably the three most despicable words in the last couple of months. But reality check tells us that the world we knew, is not going to be the same place anymore. The planet after this long-holiday will be coming out in a new avatar.

And this is the sign for all of us to evaluate and plan a better future for building our teams. Collaborate to contribute better and let your teams know that this too shall pass!

Keep it Simple Silly

Yes, go back to the basics. Stay connected, talk often, understand their personal circumstances and maybe time to instil little more empathy across the organisation. Always remember that we should never stop from grooming others in the field of communications. Today, when everything and everyone is changing, we need to move faster in extending help.

Upskill with some smarter side gigs

Beyond work and household chores, help your teams understand the need to constantly learn and unlearn. With everything going digital today, maybe one needs to explore domains beyond just social media channels. Ask questions – are you adept on simple designing apps, could you pick some tricks on how to evaluate impact of a digital campaign, and many more like these. Probably collaborate with internal and external teams (be it an agency or an organisation), just simply evaluate what is it that can add value to your time now and be a great skill for future.

Be a mentor

A lot of us owe are career graph surging upwards, to the brilliant guidance from our mentors. These awesome professionals stood by us, answering all our doubts and helping us chalk better paths. So, now its time to be a mento to your team. Help them understand their future goals and how your organisation can help fulfil that. Time to drill down some faith in them, ensuring that the future shall unfold something good. Support your team to understand, where the company is headed and how their contribution can help achieve that. Engaged employees feel empowered to perform better, equip them with that, right away.

Building relationships

Now, more than ever, we all are facing the hard facts of how strong relationships will go a long way. Hence, teams need to go back to the pre-digital era and think of connecting with their internal and external colleagues through simple phone calls or video calls. No more chatting. Spend sometime beyond work chats, remember those coffee and water breaks? Exactly, just build that kind of environment, even if its online. Maybe join an art class over the weekend. Just do something that gets everyone talking beyond work and helps reduce any anxiety (that these constant lockdowns are causing).

Read, read, read! Write, Write, Write!

Get teams enrolled in some reading and writing clubs or some online certification courses. This simple gesture will simply help PR professionals to put their time to a better use, considering our life’s is always so busy with work. A beginner or an expert, we all as PR professionals should devote immense amounts of time reading and writing. Because this is one skill that goes a long way when one has to think out of box or probably don multiple hats, whilst building brand stories. You control your narrative and the art of curating content should always be inherent for a communications professional.

Understand “the evolving” audiences and markets

The post-covid world, will and is opening up newer markets and varied target audience segmentation. A lot of media reports have attempted to categorise these new changes under the buckets of huge spenders and conservative spenders (rather who will cautious and save more) and some who will splurge as rebellions to the current scenario. Similarly, this will call for us to understand how our brands will now need to communicate to the new audience and in the new market. Not necessary, anything that worked previously will continue to work now as well. So, one will have to deep-dive and drastically change the approach, so as to ensure the brand growth is not affected. Get down to evaluating how your target audience is reacting to that particular category and how a specific market is opening up. Some basics, but should atleast help kickstart.

Have penned down a few thoughts and for more, you can view the chat on the YouTube channel. Keep sharing your feedback on the PRPOI groups, it will help us learn better. Stay tuned for more!

– Pooja Trehan Dhamecha