Amid a global pandemic, economic evolution, technology progression and life transformation there is no surprise many people are concerned with ‘The Burnout’.

 Study shows that when people are more content with their work, they are more likely to produce better results. integrityCo is well aware of the stress of modern economic demand. While everyone is focused on hustle and productivity, our company promotes a holistic life/work balance.

Working in a company that promotes these values was music to my ears. In addition to being a marketing junkie, I am also a yoga teacher and I make sure that my team stays positive and content. (So while everyone is busy with content marketing, we focus on marketing and life contentment!)

Hi, my name is Kim Bassan and I’m a marketing intern at IntegrityCo. While I was trying to brainstorm trends on artificial intelligence and machine learning I came to the conclusion that our society is facing extreme challenges beyond the computer.

In times where we spend most of our days in front of a screen, touch of humanity and empathy could be a nice break. Today, I will share with you a glimpse of my interests and share my 5 tops tips to finding work/life balance and avoid the burnout.

1. Take breaks

Your brain needs to rest! It is essential and necessary. Yes, there is pressure to meet quotas and deadlines but your brain demands rest as well. Thinking and focusing for a long period requires energy, and taking a break will keep you focused, allow you to think logically and in return progress towards your goal faster and with a clearer mind. So, if you are one of these people who thinks that taking a break will put you even further behind, think again! (but then take a break)

For fast-acting relief, try slowing down.

―Lily Tomlin

2. Get into your body

And I’m saying that not as a biased yoga teacher, rather as a sedentary worker who spends most of the time on the computer. The human species was designed to move, walk and activate our muscles. Slouching at your desk can damage your spine, shoulders, lower back and generally hurt your posture which may extend to your emotional health. 

So, while you’re reading this blog, stand up, shake your legs, give yourself a nice round of shoulders. Drop-in with your body, I promise a physical break can go a long way! 

3. Allow yourself to have those ‘blah blah’ conversations

I know we all avoid those casual talks because we think they might be useless. Now that most of us work remotely, we don’t get the opportunity to socialize very much. Don’t cringe at the small talk, ask your coworkers questions and allow yourself to drift off work topics from time to time. It is refreshing and you may surprisingly find a common interest with one of your colleagues! 

4. Diversity and creativity

You might be thinking “Kim, I can barely draw a stick figure, you ask me to be creative?!” And I’m here to answer: 

“Yes, you can teach yourself to be creative!”

Stay inspired by diversifying your resources, start getting ideas from other fields and translating these practices into your work environment. Creativity is not about being Leonardo da Vinci it’s about pushing past the boundaries, letting your mind wander for a few minutes and never, ever doubting yourself. 

For example, I was thinking about what to write for my blog post. I was thinking about writing all kinds of marketing practices which are probably educational and valuable. But, there are so many blogs about SEO, email marketing and many more that I decided to take a different approach and be creative! Bridging between my yoga knowledge and the marketing work world to bring something relevant just as A.I and machine learning are.

If you want to succeed, you have to fuel yourself. You cannot pour from an empty cup. ― My Mantra

5. Take care of yourself in your off-hours- set the boundary

In a time where personal and workspace boundaries become blurred, it is important to distinguish between work time and home time. 

While working from home means more flexibility, no commuting and other benefits, it faces us with big challenges as well.

Procrastination, productivity, lack of team collaboration and most importantly, where and when do we draw the line between work and home hours?

To create this distinction make sure to communicate your needs with your surroundings.

• Block time:  set a schedule and stick to it. Make sure to set aside some time for your family as well. 
• Set the space: shut the door, organize your desktop, whatever works for just make sure there is a physical separation between leisure and work time
• When the clock hits- you’re done: don’t be tempted to check emails, Slack your team, just stop and dedicate some time for your family, significant other and yourself. 

You need time to sleep, eat, exercise and leisure. Rejuvenate and fuel your system with your loved ones, work will be there tomorrow and every day. Make sure you invest in yourself, it will help you come back stronger and motivated. 

Don’t confuse having a career with having a life.

―Hillary Clinton

While it is nice to wear my yoga pants for work, remote work faces us with new and different challenges. In our hustle-bustle culture economy, we need to actively engage with practices that encourage us to put ourselves on our ‘to-do” list as well. Just as Hilary Clinton said, making a living doesn’t mean you’re fully living! 

Find your tricks and rituals that help you stay away from the BURNOUT zone

Comment below which one of the practices in this blog you liked, and let me know what is your strategy to get work life balance! 

Stay tuned for this part 2 series in which I will provide tangible practices such as breathing and mindfulness techniques that you could try to use while achieving work and life balance.

The post Top 5 tips to avoid burnout and maximize productivity appeared first on Great Ideas are Born Here.

We will spare you the worn-out talking points, we all understand that COVID-19 has forever changed our familiar life and economy. Face masks, two feet distance and all of a sudden we became hand-sanitizer experts. But to stay successful in the market, the real expertise you want to acquire for remote working conditions is how to manage your business successfully.

While COVID-19 faces us with many challenges, technology has also progressed and offers creative ways to work from home and manage a team, clients and lots of data.

So, with social distance standing in our way, how do we maintain work collaboration, customers, leads and all of our information in this digital world?

By no means is this new technology, most companies are using a CRM of some sort. And with a consumer-driven economy, all companies can benefit from this tool. From E-mail marketing, sales, business development, customer service, B2B, CRM is your company’s go-to for online productivity.

But what is it and how can we use it to our advantage?

CRM is the acronym for customer relationship management and just as its name suggests, it is a software that helps businesses to manage relationships with customers, team and information. It is the substitution of the physical space we used to hold and translated it to the virtual world for the organization’s workflow.

With remote-working and new business models, having a successful system to operate within is essential to your success. However, most sales reps are not using it to its full capacity. 87% of sales reps admitted they only use the CRM because their company requires them to and 78% said they only “check the boxes.” This means a lot of important activities and information are being left out of the CRM and kept in the sales rep’s records. Which of course will have dire consequences for the business. When this much information is being left out of your main database it is a given that business will fall through the cracks and relationships will fall off. Amid a recession triggered by COVID-19, we must adopt new digital techniques to keep our business in the game.

In this article, we want to show you how you can leverage your CRM to make remote work more efficient for you and your team. Your team must understand that CRM is not just a tool for management to police what everyone is doing. Instead, it is a sales enablement and communication tool that can be used from anywhere. If it isn’t already, this should be your business’ new home base. So be sure to get your sales team on board with using the CRM.

Enter all relevant data and activity into your CRM.

This is the most crucial step a sales rep could take to improve the business while working from home. Your CRM is a secure and centralized database. Having all your data in one place has an array of benefits.

Keeping detailed records means that anyone on the sales team can quickly pull up a customer’s history and offer top-notch customer service because they already know what preferences they might have or challenges they might be facing. All of a sudden extra data comes into play! Our computers can hold more information than our brain and with an organized CRM you can pull that bit of information at the right time, the right place and SEAL THE DEAL!

And for the future, having heaps of relevant data is valuable. Data can be analyzed and leveraged in many ways to make a customer’s experience more personalized, improve customer service and increase revenue.

So all in all, with data being romanticized in the modern world, a bit of extra data can never hurt anybody…

Integrate all workflow applications into your CRM.

Integrate emails, calendars or any other workflow applications your team might be using. Keeping all your information on one platform reduces confusion and ensures that tasks or meetings don’t fall through the cracks (which can happen with distractions around the house).

It is the easiest way to communicate, create a smooth operating system across multiple channels and automate any task that doesn’t need direct human interaction.

All in all, it saves you a lot of time, energy and consequently, money.

Clean up your CRM data and automate where you can.

We cannot emphasize this enough. Seriously, a CRM filled with junk either turns a sales rep to use their methods of maintaining records or they end up wasting an unnecessary amount of time trying to sort it out. During this time, many people holding off on investing in their companies, you might find yourself with more downtime than usual. It is the perfect opportunity to start tidying up your CRM. You can start by getting rid of any redundant or useless fields, filling in any missing information or activity on prospects and customers, update leads that have fallen through the cracks, and merge duplicates.

Of course, if your CRM is large it could take years to clean it up. If duplicate and outdated leads are a challenge, now is the time to look into getting some of these mundane and time-consuming tasks automated. It will save you a lot of technology frustration, ultimately, creating more time to focus on developing your business, building stronger relationships and reaching a new level of success.

Final words.

While there are many CRM options in the market, each one specializes in different challenges. Pick the CRM that tailors to your goals and business strategy. By using CRM you connect all your workpieces and letting the CRM bring your business to new success.

You can think of your CRM as the new office. With employees working remotely, this is the new home base where everyone on the team can coordinate and keep up to date on what needs to get done. While some of us are still trying to navigate through Skype, Facetime, Slack, Zoom, Google Hangouts and making our home as our office. The CRM was built for the remote worker, collecting, storing and analyzing your data. So, it increases work efficiency and now is the time to leverage your CRM!

The post The Rise of the CRM in a Work from Home World appeared first on Great Ideas are Born Here.