Many Americans today want to be their own boss and create value through their own business. In fact, according to a USSBA report, small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) make up 99.9% of businesses in the United States. With such a high saturation of SMEs, it’s important for brands to stand out and to establish integrity and authenticity. The obstacles that SMEs face in raising funds, recruiting quality talent, and maintaining and increasing client portfolios, have proven to be areas that most often lead to a SMEs failure.

There are several methods and strategies to employ when looking to raise funds, recruiting the right people, and managing client portfolios. One of the most powerful strategies is a strong networking system where contacts and their details are organized, up-to-date, and easily accessible.  Every job requires specific tools, and a personal CRM is one for SME growth. There are no “best CRMs”, but rather, CRM’s for specific purposes. As opposed to sales CRM’s that are focused on sales funnels and deliverables, a personal CRM is focused on building trust and nurturing strong relationships.

Finding the Right People

Leveraging a network to recruit quality talent and get the best market deals is something that many SMEs often overlook. In an article discussing why SMEs fail, Tom Eisenmann, an American economist notes that “without industry connections, they couldn’t leverage their professional networks to recruit team members or count on past relationships with factory managers to ensure prompt delivery.”

Business owners meet multiple people every day, some of whom could potentially join their team. A personal CRM tool enables business owners to efficiently organize their contacts’ details and notes about the contact, in a manner that encourages them to stay connected. Keeping notes about contacts’ interests, career journeys, and information about their personal life that they share creates opportunities to connect and re-warm past relationships which could lead to mutually beneficial outcomes.

Building Trust

Match-making VC’s with SMEs can prove to be a challenge, but by nurturing relationships based on trust, the process can be made easier for the entrepreneur. Identifying the right contacts in a business owners’ network and nurturing that relationship can grant access to high-value introductions, where a contact can make a referral on behalf of the SME.

Meeting people face-to-face and building relationships founded on trust are critical when looking to receive funding for an SME. A report from the OECD discussing the factors that influence financing for SMEs highlights that, “although these platforms can reduce information search costs for both the investors and entrepreneurs, they do not replace personal contact and face-to-face interaction, which are mostly needed in a financing model largely based on confidence and trust”.

A personal CRM tool is the medium through which a business owner can develop trust with their contacts by staying engaged with their interests. Features such as tagging specific interests on contacts grant insights that can be used to stay connected, making a contact feel that there is genuine care and diligence in every interaction.

It is not so much about the overall best CRM, but about the tools a business employs to achieve its goals. Sure, logging and tracking sales targets through a CRM is great, but what about the fundamentals of generating leads offline? This is where a personal CRM thrives, enhancing relationships by keeping interactions and contacts engaged, present, and consistent.

Get started with your personal CRM tool today to optimize and expand your business’ growth and network. A personal CRM tool such as Covve is free-to-test and easy to navigate and integrate into your professional and personal life.

The concept of remote work and the impact it could have on the productivity and motivation of employees, has been in discussion long before the COVID-19 pandemic. A 2013 Stanford University study with 500 employees in China showcased that employee productivity increased by 13% as a result of working remotely in quieter environments. 

The pandemic forced employers and governments across the world to adopt the remote work model. According to Statista, the global collaboration software market revenues rose by a whopping $15.9 billion in 2019 to $19.2 billion in 2021. These figures are expected to increase over the next few years, as digital transformation and remote work are here to stay.

Some companies believe that the best practice is a hybrid-first work model, while others are pursuing efforts to bring employees back to the office. In September 2022, Kastle Systems, a key-card property management company that monitors entries and exits from office buildings, reported that some businesses are close to 50% office capacity.

So, how has remote work impacted the relationships of employees? The way they connect on a professional level or even a friendly manner?

We conducted a survey in the United States across a wide age range, asking the participants about their experiences with remote and hybrid work models, and how it has impacted their productivity and their relationships with their colleagues.

The Participants

To understand the role of remote work in the internal network of employers, we included participants across 31 states who are either working entirely remotely, or with a hybrid work model. The survey sample included a diverse audience, as people of various ages and industries have varying preferences when it comes to the methods and tools they use to perform.

• 82% of the participants were aged between 25 and 44 years old
• 18% were aged between 45 and 55 years old. 

The majority worked across different industries including, but not limited to, finance, software, healthcare, and information services.

Remote Work and Productivity

71% of our participants claimed that their productivity has improved over the past two years. A further 21% stated that it remained unchanged and  8% believe that it deteriorated.

This came as no surprise. Removing the hours of commute, preparing food at home, and being close to the family are all elements that employees have appreciated. In the words of Allyson Zimmermann, Executive Director at Catalyst, “access to remote work increases employee well-being, productivity, innovation, and inclusion.”

Whereas, no one under the age of 34 found their productivity deteriorating.

Remote Work and Relationships With Colleagues

Despite the fact that remote work removes the boundary between work and home, people have been able to establish methods to communicate with colleagues without it becoming a burden. So much so, that for some, remote work has improved their relationships with their colleagues.

67% of our participants believe that their relationships with their colleagues have improved during the last two years. This figure was sufficiently higher among the younger ages, as 73.8% of the respondents between the ages of 25-34 answered positively.

This is in line with the findings of Dan Schwable, Managing Partner of Workplace Intelligence, who highlights that “over the past year their relationships have improved with their managers (32%), peers/colleagues on their team (25%), and peers/colleagues on other teams (21%).”

 “When people trust one another and have social capital, you get a willingness to take risks, you get more innovation and creativity and less groupthink”.

Methods of Interactions

No matter the benefits of remote work, employees can get lonely. Nancy Baym, Jonathan Larson, and Ronnie Martin from Harvard Business Review elaborate, “the spontaneous informal interactions at risk in hybrid and remote work are not distractions or unproductive. They foster the employee connections that feed productivity and innovation – these interactions are the soil in which ideas grow.” 

Our survey participants, however, have shared different methods that their employers promote in-person interactions:

• 26% said that social outings have been their company’s go-to method
• 23% of our participants stated their company does so through work retreats and off-site gatherings

An interesting point to note is that some companies encourage remote interactions with colleagues:

• 23% connect through digital Interactive Office Solutions
• 11% interact through online video game sessions. 

Admittedly, we have tried the last two points at Covve by hosting virtual game nights and online yoga sessions once per month with great success, connecting our teams. 

In addition to the above responses, we invited the participants to share other activities that would help them interact better with their colleagues at work. The most prominent responses were:

• The inclusion of outdoor activities and sports in the company’s schedule 
• Department-wide lunches or occasional dinners with colleagues. This  is a technique introduced at Google (and then the wider Silicon Valley) to encourage employees to eat together, connect, and share ideas for new projects
• The introduction of biweekly or monthly mentorship sessions
• Working together on volunteering activities and community service projects

Conclusion

The key message from our findings is that while remote work has increased employee productivity and improved their relationships, it did not eliminate the need for social interaction. 

Company networking and bonding is still heavily facilitated at company outings and gatherings. Although online interactions and even video games are novel and rising methods in connecting employees at the remote or hybrid workplace, employees still need to connect over drinks, food, exercise, or even volunteering.  This is well explained by a research-backed op-ed by Edward Glaeser and David Cutler from The Washington Post, which claims that “over the medium to long term, long-distance employment can’t deliver key benefits – including learning and new friendships – that come from face-to-face contact.”

Maintaining relationships with colleagues is key to forming what is known as ‘social capital, which can have a wider positive impact on the organization. According to Nancy Baym, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, social capital increases the employees’ willingness to take risks, which in turn leads to higher levels of innovation. 

In this manner relationships and productivity are interconnected and interoperate.

Leveraging your network to advance your career or grow your business can seem transactional. Say you have a contact that you’ve spoken to in the past and you’d like to pick their brain again, how would you reach out to them in a way that seems more personal? 

Doug Lester, a career strategist and executive coach for MBA students and alumni at a top business school and executives at Fortune 100 companies, has returned in a second Covve masterclass to highlight the impact of taking good notes about your contacts, and how those notes can help turn a potentially awkward conversation into a friendlier, warmer catch-up with a personal connection.

In this video, Doug describes an anecdotal experience of reconnecting with someone he had already spoken with before to ask them for help, again. It could have been awkward and cold, but it ended up being the opposite.

Spoiler alert: The trick is listening carefully for personal details about a networking contact and capturing that information in your notes so you can recall that information in future conversations.

In business, we tend to focus on information that seems directly related to the task at hand. But when we do that, it’s easy to neglect personal details about our contacts that can help change the tone of future conversations for the better. The notes about personal details you gather today may not help you immediately, but recalling them in a few months’ time can prove to be invaluable when you reach out to a networking contact a second, third or even a fourth time.

In Doug’s story, he shares how by recalling something his networking contact had mentioned in a previous conversation, he was able to make his contact feel heard and valued as a person. As a result, what could have been a fairly; transactional and cold conversation ended up being more personal and warm; And Doug’s contact was more open to listening to him and helping him by sharing her knowledge and advice.

To keep track of notes that help facilitate relationship building while networking, Doug has abandoned post-it notes and paper and prefers to use Covve, a personal CRM. Covve’s note-taking features help him keep key information about the contacts in his network organized and easy to reference when he reconnects.

You can watch the entire masterclass for free in the video, download Covve for free to follow Doug’s tips, and receive a 15% discount for a Covve Pro account with Doug’s masterclass coupon.

Adding pictures to your contacts makes it much easier and faster to identify the person you want to reach out to. It also makes the whole experience on your phone more colourful and satisfying – it’s a communication device after all! We have a quick solution to add a face to those contact avatars.

Shannen Stewart, Founder and President of Heels and Handshakes, a 3000+ membership network dedicated to helping women in business and entrepreneurs, talks about how Covve Personal CRM has been a game-changer for her as a business owner.

In his first masterclass for Covve, Doug Lester, a world-class career strategist and executive coach for MBA students and alumni at a top-tier business school and executives at Fortune 100 companies,  shares the importance of abandoning the spreadsheet to take a more sophisticated approach to manage your contacts. The approach he recommends enables professionals to focus on the important things:  building relationships and advancing their careers through the strength of their connections.

In the video, Doug shares his personal experience adopting a robust system to keep track of his professional contacts, one that reminds him to stay in touch with them, and helps him effectively capture important information from each conversation and exchange. 

He discusses the complexity involved in trying to build a contact tracking system in a spreadsheet and the hard work required to maintain it. Doug then shares some tips and insights into automating this process, better managing your contacts, and keeping your relationships active and warm through a personal CRM (client relationship management software). Most importantly, he underlines the significance of setting realistic goals and expectations when managing your network of contacts.

You can watch the entire masterclass for free in the video, download Covve for free to follow Doug’s tips, and receive a 15% discount for a Covve Pro account with Doug’s masterclass coupon.

As Doug points out, “It will likely vary by the type of contact we’re talking about. Be honest with yourself about this one. Sure, it can feel good to say, ‘I’m going to reach out to this person every month or every quarter.’ But the demands of your work and life may only allow you to make that kind of decision for so many people in your network.”

It goes without saying that even master networkers balance the amount of time they commit to networking and value the depth of their relationships over the number of contacts they manage.

Your entire network, your credibility in it, and future interactions with others, all depend on trust. 

Although perceptions are shaped by first impressions, trust is harnessed in the long term. It is the foundation that makes the relationship last. So even if you make the wrong first impression, you can win the long game by making others like you, and building trust in your work and personality.

According to a 2009 OECD study, trust determines “which people in the community are perceived as potential partners rather than as rivals”. For this reason, trust is the social protocol that determines how relationships between people impact the overall progress in society.

The effectiveness of trust is particularly evident amongst professional networks. Take for example EY’s 2021 Global Alumni Survey, which highlighted that 74% of the company’s alumni felt a strong relationship with the company’s current employees, because of trust networks. EY’s former global CEO, Mark A. Weinberger, commented: “When I left the organization, I never left the people – we continued sharing insights and opportunities”.

So what are the factors that can empower your trustworthiness as a professional? 

According to Jeffrey Hayzlett, author of “The Hero Factor: How Great Leaders Transform Organizations and Create Winning Cultures”, the components that build trust in organizations, and in our case networks, are: Competency, sincerity, and relevancy.

• Competency is about being reliable, and efficient in what you do. 
• Sincerity is about being open and honest. Being sincere about your work, and achievements always increase the level of trust in a relationship. Dishonesty and hiding of things can result in exactly the opposite. 
• Relevancy is about being connected to relevant interests, messages, and values of like-minded people in your network.

So remember. In your professional network, be honest and don’t exaggerate, deliver on your promises, and stay true to your values. These very simple principles can go a long way in establishing your trustworthiness among others. 

In the words of the business author, Lance Secretan, “Authenticity is the alignment of head, mouth, heart, and feet – thinking, saying, feeling, and doing the same thing – consistently.”

Covve suggests: When you meet someone new, add a note in Covve on how you met; jot down common interests and opinions, common friends and info about their family to ensure you stay relevant and personable. Add an auto reminder to follow up with them at least once a month to build your relationship. Help out where you can and offer relevant introductions. Be valuable to your relationships, while you stay true without overpromising.

Similar to other social interactions, networking is now majorly conducted via online means. We often connect and stay in touch with other professionals whom we’ve never met in person before. As a result, platforms like LinkedIn have grown multiple times over the past decade.

This digital transformation process was further accelerated during the pandemic. One of the most important adoptions of the ‘new normal life’ was remote work, which according to McKinsey accelerated 43 times faster than expected.

So we can’t help but ask, are in-person meetings still a thing or is it better to meet through a screen?

Not long ago, an expert article in Forbes highlighted that face-to-face interactions could make a stronger impact on relationship development. The article went as far as to point out that technology could never replace in-person meetings, unless absolutely necessary. Online interactions, it stated, must be limited to occasions where a business is “too dependent on long-distance, digital and impersonal meetings”.

The article’s premises were not unfounded. Dunlap and Murtagh’s 2016 research suggested that “behaviors—such as facial expressions, the placement of head and shoulders, the use of hands—can deliver information, regulate the interaction, and express feelings and intimacy”. This is in line with Dr. Mehrabian’s research in the 1960s, which described that 55% of our communication is visual – known as “body language”.

Nonetheless, this notion may as well get challenged in the future, as social norms and body language are simulated virtually.

Consider for instance that new social norms have emerged because of virtual meetings, but people are still adapting to them. A  2021 research paper by Katherine A. Karl, Joy V. Peluchette, and Navid Aghakhani on the “Virtual Work Meetings During the COVID-19 Pandemic”, actually concluded that the sudden shift toward a remote work environment, found employees being unaware of the virtual meetings’ social norms and etiquettes.

To add, according to research by Covve, users expect that important communication elements such as body language and eye contact will be simulated effectively through digital meeting points, like the metaverse. 

The above leads us to two important points. 

Firstly, in-person meetings matter. Although online meetings are easier, faster, and more efficient than in-person ones, meeting in person can be more effective in important situations, such as negotiations, where body language and communication have an important role in the conversation.

Secondly, body language and new social norms are established and evolve as the frequency of online meetings increases. 

Therefore, in the future, the paradigm of online vs in-person meetings will naturally shift towards the former, without of course undermining or eliminating the importance and usefulness of the latter.

Covve suggests: Setup your reminders for the upcoming week to catch up with your relationships. With the ones you usually text, try to have a call this time and even turn the camera on. If it’s been long since you last met, arrange a physical get-together. After your meetings, note anything new you found out about them, e.g. her twins turn five next week, and she’s pescatarian. This is relationship gold!

“Networking is linked to many measures of professional success — including getting promoted, having influence, earning more money, and feeling more satisfied in your career”, writes Rebecca Knight, Senior Correspondent for Insider and Contributor at Harvard Business Review. 

While this is very true, it all boils down to the people you network with. Connecting to individuals that cannot contribute to your professional development, have dissimilar interests to yours, and do not understand your aspirations or goals, will probably limit your prospects of building a meaningful and productive relationship with them. 

According to London Business School’s Professor Raina Brands:

“When you hear the word ‘network’, you might sigh inwardly at the prospect of introducing yourself to people for the sole purpose of making contacts to further a goal. But this is an outdated view of a social network, and networking in this way doesn’t usually produce results”.

It’s all about finding like-minded people to connect with. Similar to you in your area of expertise, line of work, and interests. Quoting Professor Brands “Birds of a feather flock together: people form relationships with similar people”.

So how can you meet like-minded people? There are plenty of ways.

1. During a networking event learn how to read the room. Find out who’s on the guest list, their line of work, and their interests, if those are explicitly provided. Alternatively, walk around, listen to conversations, find one where you fit in, and politely introduce yourself without interrupting.
2. In general, look for like-minded people on social media, who have interests that are aligned with yours. You can discover them via their line of work, posts, or even hashtags they follow. LinkedIn even offers the “Talks About” section on its users’ profiles. In this manner, the users can be identified by others with shared interests.
3. Attend events, meetups, or instances, which are attended by like-minded people. It may be a video games conference, like E3; it may be a meetup for UI/UX designers, or it may be a place of common interests like the gym. As a matter of fact, “sweatworking” is a popular way to connect with others. It has been done traditionally through sports like golf, according to Brigid Sweeney of Chicago Business.

There you have it! Connecting to the right people can make your relationships, and thus network more meaningful and effective. In the words of actor Robert Redford, “Problems can become opportunities when the right people come together.”

Covve Suggests: Add like-minded people from your address book as relationships and tag them with what you share in common, e.g. “Programming”, or “Art”. Search online for any upcoming event that you would both be interested in and set a reminder to invite them to go together. Make them feel free to invite a couple of like-minded friends and offer to do the same.

We deliberately find comfort in our inner circle. Our family, group of friends, a cluster of professional contacts. People we already know. People who can potentially protect us from a financial or emotional downfall.  This is what research from Northwestern University on “How Socioeconomic Status Impacts the Way We Network”, suggests. 

Nonetheless, although our inner circle feels like a safe space, it may actually do more harm than good. The research goes on to warn that our inner circle may become a limiting factor to our network’s future development. 

As it points out, ‘new opportunities and novel information’ can only come from our wider network. For this reason, it is important to expand our network, meet new people and get outside of our comfort zone. 

Therefore, how can we unleash the power of our current and future networks effectively? London Business School’s John Dore recommends a  4-step process.

Step 1: Filter and prioritize your contacts

Who do you keep in touch with? Who matters to your career? Not just for now, but also for the future. It may be a classmate, a former colleague or a friend. Dore recommends creating a list and assessing how accessible each contact is.

Step 2: Reach out to them

Reach out to people, to the people you have marked as accessible, your inner circle. Even if you haven’t talked to them in a while, they can still be classified as accessible. Dore highlights that even “if you’re hesitant about their likely response, consider how you’ve responded to a suddenly revived contact from the past? Perhaps a former colleague or an alumni contact from University.”

Step 3: Power up your relationships with them

Spend time learning more about these contacts. To catch up with their most recent updates. What are they working on? What are the things they are interested in? Then start contributing. Do you have something to share or offer that may be of interest to them? In this manner, you will strengthen your active relationships and rewarm the dormant ones.

Step 4: Use your current network as a ladder

Start reaching out to people who are two degrees away from you. The contacts of your contacts. Ask for an introduction from your network. This is the best way to reach out to someone. As a Harvard Business Review article points out, references may be the best way to validate someone’s professional credibility.

In a nutshell, get outside of your comfort zone, scout for new opportunities in uncharted territories, and do so by using your inner circle as the first stepping stone.

Covve Suggests: Add the people of your inner circle as relationships with an auto reminder once or twice per month. Add a note for each of them about any referral you seek but also any introduction they would be possibly interested in. Use the news topics to find extra discussion points. After each talk, note down recent updates and next goals.