Every week we ask the most prominent experts in the affiliate marketing industry one question that concerns us all.
In today’s briefing, we are aiming to figure out how companies involved in the affiliate marketing business are adapting to the coronavirus pandemic. How do they keep their work routine healthy these hard days? More importantly, how do they keep the mental health of their employees intact? What did change, what did not? Learn more from leading experts from the top companies in our industry.
Today we ask:
HOW ARE AFFILIATE BUSINESSES OPERATING DURING THE PANDEMIC?
Our expert for today are:
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Adam Pivko
VP Strategic Partnerships at
DFO Global Performance Commerce
“DFO Global is truly that – a global organization. With 300+ people across five continents, it can be difficult to scale, focus and even keep in touch. Fortunately, we’ve leveraged technology to ensure our people feel connected and close – even if they’re 10 time zones apart. Tools like Slack and Jira have allowed us not only to grow, but operate at a high level of efficiency; our product sourcing and development teams in Hong Kong can communicate immediately with our development teams in Vietnam and Brazil, and those teams can loop in their media buying partners in California, or their creative partners in British Columbia.
Like all companies during the COVID pandemic, we’ve gone on a travel hiatus and canceled large scale event participation. Instead, we’ve incorporated video sharing platforms such as Zoom, which bring teams even closer together via video conference. It’s a unique and friendly way to ensure teams around the world get facetime with managers and friends.
The uneasy feeling many of our people had at the beginning of the pandemic has mostly been replaced with a drive to be efficient and succeed, despite the unique situation. (Adam Pivko | DFO Global) Click To Tweet
We’re an eCommerce company, so we know what it’s like to ensure that information travels effectively across great distances. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that good communication and a culture that promotes transparency makes remote work digestible, and I daresay even fun (if you’ve got a way to entertain your kids, that is). The uneasy feeling many of our people had at the beginning of the pandemic has mostly been replaced with a drive to be efficient and succeed, despite the unique situation.”
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Stanislau Litvinau
CEO & Founder at Affise
Affise is a performance marketing platform for advertisers, agencies, and networks to manage, track, analyse and optimise online advertising campaigns in real-time.
One even calls it a benefit, as scheduling online meetings became more flexible: you don’t need to check whether the meeting room in the office is available 🙂 (Stanislau Litvinau | Affise) Click To TweetAdapting to “the new normal” work-wise wasn’t that difficult for us. We have offices around the globe, so we are used to online communication within the teams, Zoom meetings and so on. Remote work is not a completely new thing for our employees as well. Instead, it is a routine and mechanism we worked out from the very beginning. Our employees have always been mobile and equipped with all the tools for efficient remote work: starting from laptops and ending with task management systems, knowledge bases and communication tools. We still have one-to-one and team meetings on a regular basis, we onboard new employees using Affise Academy, but now we do it entirely online. One even calls it a benefit, as scheduling online meetings became more flexible: you don’t need to check whether the meeting room in the office is available 🙂
Working in digital marketing and having clients worldwide made us moving communication with our customers online long ago. Talking with our clients via text messengers and video calls is a usual practice here. But of course, the pandemic cut out the chances to meet customers in person occasionally at conferences. And while it didn’t influence the business processes and any work-related discussions, it of course left us without some interpersonal communication. We love to become friends with our customers and this is much more complicated to maintain online. So we can’t wait to see everyone again.
What remote work did really influence is the meetings with the Board of Directors. Held in-person previously, now we had to move them online as well. On the bright side, such meetings turned out to be more productive while consuming less time. Overall, the quality and the planned volumes of work don’t suffer. But we all miss being able to share a joke within the team or have a coffee break together.
Henry Whitfield
Global Head of Supply at ClickDealer
The coronavirus pandemic has certainly been a new challenge for our team at ClickDealer and we like many have had to make adjustments to how we manage both our own team and our external partners.
Rotating the team member leading the call has increased participation and breaks up the daily routine of the same thing over and over again. (Henry Whitfield | ClickDealer) Click To TweetFor those that are not aware, ClickDealer launched in 2012 and has a global presence – with offices located in Asia, Eastern Europe, Central Europe and North America. This set-up positioned us well to transition into more remote work, while also creating new obstacles to overcome.
With the spread of coronavirus forcing social distancing and quarantine restrictions we focused on two main areas of our business:
- Taking care of our team; including both their mental and physical health
- Making sure our changes did not negatively impact our internal and external business practices
We tackled these two areas with a multi-point plan that focused on creating a structure for our team that helped them succeed and provide the best foundation for long-term changes.
- Introducing Daily Rally Calls: While common between our regional offices, we introduced a daily rally call within each region to connect, update and keep the team on board. Avoiding miscommunication by being proactive with communication reduces stress, creates social interaction and keeps our team informed. Rotating the team member leading the call has increased participation and breaks up the daily routine of the same thing over and over again.
- Emphasising Work / Life Balance: One of our first activities was rolling out dynamic training on how to work from home; including ways to create a routine at home, build out a productive work space and how to take care of your mental health while isolated at home. Working smarter, not harder is how we’ve managed to succeed the last few months.
- Promoting Social (Distancing) Activities: Whether it’s creating a theme for our daily call, encouraging virtual ‘water cooler chats’, playing trivia, enjoying a beer or giving an extra afternoon off – we’re encouraging social activities that break up the monotony of social distancing but keeps the team happy and focused.
While the last few months have not always been easy, we at ClickDealer continue to work daily to provide a world class experience to our partners and continue to be there to help them grow their business.
Jarno Balvers
Affiliate manager at REBLL
The corona-virus made quite an impact on how we are working together. Before the corona virus we were always at the office together, discussing things, solving issues together and making sure each of us performs the best.
We are slowly getting back to the office though, only 3 people at max and distance are kept at all times. (Jarno Balvers| REBLL Network) Click To TweetObviously the corona thing changed a lot of things for us. The first weeks of the so-called smart-lock down in the Netherlands nobody was allowed to go to the office. Therefore, everyone was working from home.
Everyone had set up their home office so they were good to go. We had team meetings via zoom and people called each other either individually or in small groups on skype to discuss projects, issues and to help each other out.
We found out that it works quite well for us; business is growing. We are slowly getting back to the office though, only 3 people at max and distance are kept at all times. Needless to say, it is allowed by the Dutch government to do this.