Serendipity Lost: Bringing More Pizazz Into The Virtual Workplace
September 24, 2020 Joe McKendrick
In September 2020, Neora was featured in Forbes. In the article, Co-founder and Chief Sales and Marketing Officer Amber Olson Rourke discussed how to engage virtually with our sales force who are spread across the world.
We’re now several months into our great virtual workplace experiment, forced by the Covid-19 crisis. For many, the ability to work at home has been a productivity booster. At the same time, widespread remote work appears to be curtailing career-bonding opportunities. A majority, 53 percent, of the 1,625 professionals responding to a survey by Blind, an anonymous professional network, claim their careers have been negatively impacted by the crisis. Networking — the fundamental route to opportunities — ground to a halt, with 74 percent of surveyed professionals stating that they have not been able to network internally since work from home began, and 75% have not been able to network externally.
Neora, a skincare and wellness company based in Dallas, has a large sales force spread out geographically across the nation and world. The company has been “connecting virtually for close to a decade, long before tools like Zoom and Skype were as advanced as they are now,” says Amber Olson Rourke, chief sales and marketing officer for Neora. “In our experience virtual interaction does not subtract the serendipity of human interaction.”
At the same time, Rourke says, “we must take additional steps to create engagement opportunities. For example, we had our first virtual digital regional training, and instead of spending an hour talking at our team, we made it a two-way conversation by adding polls and Q&As. We have found that this brings back that human interaction that is so critical to creating a sense of community.”
Additionally, “interactive digital elements give more timid team members the opportunity to be heard without physically speaking,” Rourke continues. “In a sense, we actually have more opportunities to interact now because people are now more widely accepting tools like Zoom. We feel like working from home has accelerated the country’s acceptance of what we have been doing successfully for years – connecting with our team digitally. People make all the difference and we have the best in the business.”
