Customer Service | Amendola Communications

At the time, I did not realize we were so innovative. When I founded the agency in 2003, it was clear to me that with the Internet, email, phones, and the nature of our public relations and marketing communication services, not everyone needed to be in the same office all the time. I also recognized that I could more easily attract and retain the best talent for our agency – whether they were in California, Texas, Massachusetts or North Carolina – by not forcing them to relocate to our office in Scottsdale, Arizona.

In 2021, our agency looks prescient considering most of my staff have always worked from their homes. In reality, at the time, I was just doing what was best for my business. To this day, though, employee after employee tells me that the choice to work from home, not uprooting their families and starting a new life in a new town, was a major attractive feature in joining our agency.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues throughout most of the country—and survey after survey show how much employees prefer to work from home—some employers are considering that they may need to loosen their policies to allow more team members to work from home. Although it might make it harder for our agency to compete for talent, I would encourage you to do it. Here’s how to make work from home work for your company:

Set Clear Expectations

Like all businesses, our agency runs on deadlines. Whether it is an article, press release, white paper or PR plan, having clear, accountable deadlines ensures that the distractions of working from home do not detract from productivity.

Another expectation we have is accessibility and responsiveness. We offer flexible schedules as long as the work gets done and clients are happy, but when a member of our team says they will be in their office, we expect that they will indeed be available either by email, phone or for web meetings. That availability is important for internal communication, but it is even more crucial to better serve our clients. Being available and responsive to them must always be the top priority during work hours.

2. Communicate, communicate, communicate

Although many companies use Slack and other business communication platforms, our team has still found email to be the most effective and easiest way to stay in touch with each other on a daily basis. Of course, we have plenty of phone calls and web conferences, but the bulk of our daily communication runs on email.

Once again, if one of our clients wants to use a business communication platform, our account teams happily use that method. The key is the consistency of communication and setting the expectation of a prompt response during a team member’s regular schedule.

3. Show Me the Schedule

Our account teams do a lot of writing, editing, and strategic planning, which is much easier without the distractions and interruptions of email and meetings. We also do not want to disrupt any of their client meetings with our internal questions or calls.

For these reasons and others, our account teams make their schedules public so their managers and colleagues can visualize their availability. Other than client meetings, our teams also make sure to block time in their schedule for writing, editing or creating a presentation. Blocking a schedule sends a message like an office door being open or closed. As a colleague, you know what it means when you see it.

4. Company-Wide Meetings Are a Must

Although the actual time seems to constantly change, our agency still meets regularly on a web conference to talk about agency updates, share success stories and best practices and even feature guest speakers. To keep it fun, we compile positive feedback that team members have received from clients or colleagues and share them. We also have a drawing where a positive comment is drawn at random and the person receiving the compliment wins a gift card. We call it our “kudos” drawing and it is always an uplifting way to close a meeting.

5. Check-in Regularly

Every six months, we have a formal check-in where a manager will talk with a team member about their work, accomplishments, challenges and solicit feedback to find out how we can improve as an agency. Since we are still relatively a small company with 25 team members, I also still check in with people I haven’t spoken to in a while on a more personal level to see how they are feeling about work, their life and if we can support them in any way. Since we can’t have impromptu “water cooler” or coffee machine moments, these random check-ins help nurture a sense of closeness and camaraderie that is difficult to cultivate when we don’t see each other in person as often.

A bonus tip: If your work-from-home team feels comfortable traveling, have a company-wide retreat either once a year or every couple of years, depending on your company’s size and budget. It is always rewarding when we can get together in a fun location, enjoy meals and learn from each other. The fact that we so rarely get to see each other in person makes the retreats especially meaningful for our team.

So whether you plan to bring all, some or none of the team back to the office once the pandemic is under control, I recommend instituting an option to work from home, if it is feasible for your company. Our teams appreciate the perk and show it to us every day in their high quality of work and client service.

If you had a goal of demonstrating how NOT to handle crisis communications, you couldn’t find a better template than the actions of United Airlines after a flight crew forcibly removed Dr. David Dao from Flight 3411 from Chicago to Louisville to accommodate its own need to get four of its employees to Louisville for another flight. It’s definitely cost the airline a lot of goodwill (something most airlines have in short supply already) and could end up costing them hard dollars as passengers stay away from United for a while, either out of protest or fear the same fate could befall them.

In this guest post, James Foster, Director of Marketing and Sales Operations at Amendola Communications client ePatientFinder, looks at what happened, the fallout that’s occurred so far, and what United should have done instead – the real template for handling a crisis. You can read the original post, along with other great ePatientFinder content, here.

In looking at the fiasco that is unraveling for United Airlines, I am reminded of the Stanford Study done back in 2005 that still holds a lot of weight. United would do well to remember the lessons learned, given that, as of this writing, the stock prices are down 4%.

Stanford Graduate School of Business associate professor Larissa Tiedens and her associates studied businesses from 1975 through 1995 and looked at companies that took responsibility for a bad year [or event] and showed they realized better stock performance than firms that blamed external uncontrollable factors. “Only explanations for negative events mattered, but those explanations mattered a lot,” says Tiedens.
Tiedens continues, “Executives who blame external, uncontrollable causes for problems may seem less trustworthy. ”

What does United CEO Oscar Munoz do in the case of #uniteddragspassengergateofftheplane ? He doubles down and blames the victim, calling him “disruptive and belligerent.” He then “blamed” the process and the policy by saying “employees followed established procedures for dealing with situations like this.”

This is blaming everything but yourself and your company and not really accepting the ownness of the fault, even if the passenger had acted like a jackwagon (do you blame him for over-reacting? [It appears the passenger has had some issues and was previously a doctor but that does not excuse the treatment he received]).

Passengers that talked about the victim show that he was calm and not abusive.

“He was very polite, matter-of-fact,” Powell said. “I could hear pretty clearly. He was acting appropriately annoyed. I was 100% with him I wouldn’t have gotten off the plane either.”

Removal after Boarding
United did what it called “involuntary denial of the boarding process.” Here is the problem, the passengers were already boarded, seated in their plane, and ready to go. Anyway you try to justify it, if words matter, then how do you deny boarding after boarding has already occurred?

Hindsight is 20/20, but is having another flight delayed worse than the PR nightmare that they are dealing with currently? Passengers are used to having canceled flights even last week Delta and Southwest experienced canceled flights, but that’s not what people are talking about today. The narrative today is that passengers would rather have a flight canceled then get a beat down by United. That paints a pretty bad picture.

What to do?
The prevailing opinion about “what to do” during a crisis is undoubtedly that the company should own up to what happened and be transparent about the entire situationat least that’s what most customers would tell you. So I’ve compiled a learning list of what to do or what not to do:

Own up to the mistake, and ignore the lawyers (as shown above, defuse it through transparency). If you’re going to get sued, being more transparent and open will weigh into what happens, and usually for the better.
Make things right for the passenger, I mean really right. He took a beating; you owe him for the public embarrassment. I’d go farther and make things right for the other people on the flight subjected to the incident. It may not stop you from getting sued, but it will certainly help your public image.
Admit that your process and policy are flawed, change it, and after the incident subsides, invite the public to participate in the solution if applicable. This is an opportunity to improve and come out the situation stronger for it.
Control the conversation. Right now United has lost total control: On Tuesday, the top trending topic on Twitter in the U.S. was #NewUnitedAirlinesMottos, with users suggesting slogans such as “not enough seating, prepare for a beating.”
Don’t release app updates during PR nightmares. Wow really: Drag and drop feature?

Clearly, this situation spiraled out of control. Even the security officers have been suspended because in a time when the public has a massive distrust of the TSA, and airline security over-zealousness, they do exactly what we expect them to do, and over-react. This situation is evolving or really, devolving, on a minute-by-minute basis so only time will tell how United pulls itself out of this PR hole it keeps digging deeper.

[Editorial note: Oscar Munoz has issued a 2nd apology and taken more of the blame. How much damage has been done, again, only time will tell.]