Is Your Photo Team Ready to Respond to COVID

1. Is Your Photo Team Ready to Respond to COVID-19? As the coronavirus has spread, working life has changed for many people, with the majority of people working from home. For eCommerce businesses, this may seem as though it’s not much of an issue, however, departments such as your photo team or the whole photography industry may be dramatically affected. Working from home makes getting the right images,creative photography, and new product photos much more difficult and puts a new demand on them. This means it could be time to reevaluate your current photo team and also consider how you can upgrade your imagery support to respond to Coronavirus. (COVID-19) Re-evaluating Your Photo Team Prior to the outbreak, 29% of employees had the option to work from home, but, now people have been forced to work remotely or even search for more remote work because they have lost their jobs. You need to think carefully about how you can support your existing photo team as well as thinking about utilizing other remote workers. It may be much more difficult for you to get the images that you want; you might want to consider options like sending your latest products out to your photo team to photograph at home. Estimate Teams Capacity You should look at how your existing team has been working and how they are working now. It’s most likely going to extremely different which could have a major effect on productivity. Think about the difference in how many photos can be taken daily, weekly and monthly, and establish your expectations through this time. If this isn’t going to meet your needs you might want to look at expanding your remote team. You should also have a think about the future and when things start to get back to normality; this is a great time to relook at the way you are working. Review the Current Plans Of course, the way that product photos are taken is going to change, especially if you usually shoot outdoors. A lot of improvising may be needed. Look at your current shooting schedule and anything that can be delayed, do so. Prioritize the photos that you need and get your team to work on these first, coming up with new ideas for shooting at home. If you can, try to predict your photo demands at least a month in advance and make a plan before you dish out the work. Create a schedule for future work that is going to be needed.

2. Account Provisions for Future Expenses Businesses should look more carefully at budgets, making sure we can squeeze every penny of profit out of our investments, and looking for the most cost-effective way to deliver products and services. You should start to think about future expenses such as studio hire, looking for new employees/labor costs rising after the pandemic and whether you are going to need any new equipment or props. Here are some useful tips to maintain healthy cash flow during Coronavirus. Upgrade Imagery Support COVID-19 has certainly forced businesses to make sure they are supporting their employees and have highlighted if the support hasn’t been there. Have a think about the ways you can support your current team and any additional team throughout this time. Do you have a back- up plan, in case things don’t work out? •If anything good such as product photography come from this crisis, it could be the opportunity to optimize your current team and changed the way you support your team in the future. You could start looking at things like: •Optimizing your current team by providing remote training, supporting them through this crisis and constantly keeping in touch with updates. •Creating a new working schedule that could allow people to work at hours that suit them through this time. •What can you do to make it easier for people to work remotely, and could you offer this as an additional option in your team for the future? •Think about future recruitment, you could create a new list of requirements that includes things like the ability to be sensitive to information/new policies, being able to work closely with the marketing team and sales teams, being able to thrive in a fast- paced environment and the ability to work independently in a remote setting.

3. Always Have a Plan B No business was expecting to have to tackle a crisis like this and it has had a massive knock-on effect to many eCommerce businesses that weren’t prepared or have had to make quick changes at the drop of a hat. It always pays off to have a plan B in place, even if you don’t expect something like this to happen. If you need to you may need to source additional brand style guide photos from elsewhere, especially if your team can’t provide you with the pictures that you need. Think about looking at things like photo vendors. They have professionals and they can continuously support your imagery need in a timely manner.