by ludadrummond | Mar 14, 2020 | Advertising, Marketing, Productivity
As of early March 2020, many firms are at least partially shutting down their physical offices and asking their professionals work from home. While most of us have done work from home before, often late at night or on a weekend, many professionals have not worked full time from a home office for any extended period.
I’ve been a marketer exclusively for law firms for the past seven years. I work from a home office. Most of my systems and client relations work is conducted through email, over the phone, or via video. Here are some of the things I’ve learned about being productive when working from home.
Get dressed: It is VERY tempting to work in your jammies. I’m telling you, don’t try it. “Not even once”. You will be more productive if you “show up for work”. Shower, brush your teeth and put on some decent clothes, at least “business casual”. Remember that you’ll probably be connecting with co-workers and clients via video. There’s nothing worse than being caught off guard with” bed head” or no makeup. So, top of mind: While you are in your home, you are still going to work, so you have to tell your brain, “Today is a work day, even though I’m not in my office.”
Keep to your work routine: If you normally work from 8:30AM to 5:00PM, keep to the same schedule if you can. Even when you are working from home, try to live by the same rules you have at work. You wouldn’t leave work to or run home errands in the middle of the day, so you’ll often need to fight the urge to treat work from home like a working vacation.
Create a dedicated workspace: Find a place at home where you can minimize distraction and focus on work. Your kitchen table should not be your desk unless that is your only option. Once you decide on a workspace, stick with it and use it for nothing but work. Clear the workspace from clutter and distractions. This is your “office” where you will be expected to be working. Avoid an occupied bedroom or high traffic areas of the home. Adequate lighting, seating, and room for your computer and work materials are all you need.
Minimize distractions: Maintaining focus, especially in times of anxiety and change, can be difficult. Everything seems to call out for attention- children, partners, social media, news, and that pile of random papers or laundry. If you wouldn’t do it at work, don’t do it during regular office hours. Just because you are working from home doesn’t mean that you can crank up Pandora music, watch the news, have Facebook open and play video games with your kid. Focus on doing one thing at a time. And do it well.
Manage your time: Use your calendar to block out specific times for work that requires concentration and scheduled meetings. Use “time boxing” techniques to assign time on your calendar for important tasks. Schedule time between projects to check on email and texts. If you have to, set an alarm at every hour to remind yourself you’re at work. This also works to remind yourself to take a break. Speaking of which…
Keep focused and plan you breaks: Work in sprints of 60 to 90 minutes, then take a ten minute break to walk around and clear your head. Focus on one task and do it well, take a short break, and re-focus. No one can effectively concentrate on work while checking messages, looking at social media, and dealing with external interruptions.
Use your commute time wisely: Remember that long commute to the office? Use the extra 30 free minutes you have now to start your work day when you normally leave the house and end when you would normally return from the office. This can give you an extra hour to deal with those non-work activities that arise during the day. This is especially true if your kids are home from school during this time. So maybe instead of 8:30 to 5, it’s now 8-6 if you haven’t finished what you know you should.
Connect with colleagues: Extraverts don’t like working from home. Some feel a little lost and anxious distanced from their colleagues. Find time in your day for a phone or video app conversation with a co-worker at least once per day. Even better, find ways to brighten someone else’s day with humor or just showing that you care.
Use video meeting apps: Applications like Zoom (free for small meetings up to 45 minutes), Microsoft Teams (free for a limited time), Skype or FaceTime are great, and here’s an article to find more. https://zapier.com/blog/best-video-conferencing-apps/ Connecting via video will probably be awkward at first, but it will help you feel more connected and (more importantly) accountable to each other. After a few days, it will feel normal.
Don’t be too hard on yourself: You will not be 100% productive on your first day. If you find yourself wasting time on unimportant tasks or zoning out, stand up, stretch, walk around, drink some water, and get back to your “todo list”. I personally use Todoist.
Stop working at end of the scheduled day: You need to transition from work mode to home mode, otherwise you end up living in work mode, which produces guilt and anxiety, conflict with family and friends and can lower productivity .Develop an “end-of-work routine” that helps you transition from work mode to home mode. Maybe put an “out-of-office” notice on your messages. “End of work” can also be signified by literally shutting down the computer and putting your phone away. Then start a conversation with your partner, child or a non-work friend.
Important bonus tip: Take time to reflect and be grateful. Every morning I write down 5 things I’m grateful for. Focus on those things that you are grateful for and look for ways that you can help others. In times of crisis and change, it often helps to spend some time to reflect on your situation and evaluate what’s working in your life and what’s not. This includes the people in your life, too.
by ludadrummond | Jul 27, 2018 | Advertising, Marketing, Optimization
This is an article Kern Lewis wrote for Forbes.com.
This is the story of an old friend and new convert to social media marketing, a lawyer in Northern California named Mark D. Poniatowski who runs a small practice with just a handful of partners.
They suffer from the traditional business development issue most small professional services firms have:
When they are busy, they have no time to prospect for new business.
When the business eases up, they find themselves in a dry patch, and hustle to reconnect with past clients, business networks and other referral sources.
This cycle drives them crazy, but they have always considered it a cost of keeping the firm small (which they like quite a bit.)
Good marketing pal that I am, I begged to differ, and pressed them to make better use of social media tools to keep their referral sources warm while they worked long hours on cases.
With the advent of his latest “break” from a heavy work load, he agreed to dedicate the time to test a plan he felt he could manage within the demands of his day:
- He chose one online networking tool to test, which was LinkedIn.
- He spent one hour cleaning up his profile.
- He spent about three hours reaching out to all the people he knew professionally, and connecting to those whom he found on LinkedIn.
- He set a thirty-minute appointment for a late weekday evening each week to work on building up his network of contacts, and engaging that network via pings and content sharing.
Results came within a couple of weeks:
- Many connection invitations came right back with social conversations, and were happy to reconnect.
- A handful had business that they could place with him right away and were “glad he reached out.”
- Within those few weeks he had referrals worth $12,000in billable hours that he would not have had without his 3-5 hour LinkedIn campaign. That represents a 8-10x ROI on the time he dedicated to it.
The pace has calmed since he harvested that low-hanging fruit, but he reaped one other big benefit:
Connecting with distant clients – An international manufacturer and a national food distributor both use Mark for their commercial lease work in California. He can only justify one trip a year to each of their Midwestern headquarters. But, using LinkedIn to follow the people who manage his part of their legal affairs has made the trips much more powerful.
- He keeps track of position changes that impact him.
- He can research key people ahead of each trip.
- He set up introductions using his current network, and reaches out to the new connections prior to the trip to kick-start the new relationship and make the in-person meetings much more useful.
Here is how Mark sums up his experience:
“I immediately recognized that I was able to connect with attorneys and clients that I worked with over the years and had lost touch with, so it was actually a fun exercise. Some of them were good friends as well and we’ve since gone to lunch. I think that the business generation aspect has been a natural fallout of reconnecting and will increase. I did find that the best LinkedIn for me is during the commercials while watching sports!”
LinkedIn does nothing for you but set up the channel of communication. You have to reach through that channel to electrify your network. It isn’t Rocket Science, but it does take commitment. Here are some of the tried and true steps to take to get into a rhythm. (I am sure commenters can adjust and add to this list!)
- Set up a social media management widget like HootSuiteto make updating your content easier, and your activity more easily tracked.
- Select a manageable set of professional groups and join them. Connect your updating/sharing widget to those, too.
- Participate in discussions that are relevant to your area of expertise.
- Seek advice within your targeted groups on questions that are not your area of expertise (this is very much viewed as good behavior within many professions, so capitalize on it.)
- Use the widget at least weekly. Find something germane and interesting, add your own insight to it, and post it.
- Leverage your own ongoing education about your craft. What you discover through studying provides a steady stream of content you can use to keep your sharing fresh and interesting to others.
This vignette about how useful networking is for a professional services firm it isn’t new, and “networking” hasn’t changed strategically since professions were invented millennia ago. All the tools have improved, though, and can put your efforts on steroids with just a few hours a week, right from your desk. Indeed, one dedicated hour at home with LinkedIn may outperform two hours (plus travel time) at an industry cocktail party. Both have their benefits, neither should be neglected.
by ludadrummond | Jul 27, 2018 | Advertising, Marketing
Surely your firm has already trained the assistants how to answer the phone, but it can’t hurt to use a little “Continuing Education”.
Why is this so important? In my experience, most clients are lost before they even get into your office. How the front desk handles incoming calls is THAT IMPORTANT.
Make sure you and your assistants continue training in best practices for answering the phone.
- Call Tracking: Having a dedicated phone number just for first time callers asking questions and inquiring about a consultation.
- Call Recording: Recording your calls helps with making sure assistants are making a good first impression and HR evaluations and work records for employees. Having every call recorded also helps with training aspects for future improvement. Most important to the bottom line—It ensures that each call is more likely turned into an in office consultation, which maintains a higher average of conversion into paying clients.
- Call Notifications: This cuts down on the missed calls by sending emails and text messages for each incoming call. If a call is returned within 5 minutes, you are drastically increasing your chances of getting that person into your office for a face-to-face consultation.
- Answering Service: If you have a front desk assistant that can and will answer the phone every time it rings, then this section is not for you. The main thing to remember is that each call is a huge opportunity and it has cost you in either time, effort or money—more than likely all of the above. If someone is looking for a lawyer and they don’t get a real person on the phone, they are very likely to call other law firms until they get a real person on the phone and schedule an appointment. If that happens, you’ve probably lost them.
These are some of the rules that make the law firms we work with MUCH more successful in lead generation and converting those leads into paying clients.
