This year raised a lot of questions. Like, “How long have we been breathing in each other’s air droplets?” and “What’s a murder hornet?” As we look back on a year that shook us (literally, thanks to a few earthquakes affecting our Salt Lake City crew), we reflect on how our team addressed some of the most pressing questions of 2020 in our weekly blogs.
The unemployment rate in the US hit an all-time high at 14.7 percent in April 2020, and thousands of workers found themselves polishing their résumés. This felt like the right time for me (Paige Frame) to share tips from my I-wish-applicants-knew-this list on how to write an intriguing résumé, a compelling cover letter, and extras to get noticed as applicants searched for a new beginning.
Many who weren’t affected by unemployment had a different challenge—suddenly working from home for the first time. As a virtual company since 2010, McMul had many tips to share on productivity at home. Morgan Summers focused on Place, Pattern, Purpose, and People in her research-backed article about thriving in a home office, while Steven Clark presented 7 Tips to Navigate Microsoft Teams More Efficiently as a crash course for employees now relying heavily on messaging and video calls instead of in-person meetings.
With increased virtual work came more individual problem-solving. Many employees used their quarantine (and recouped commute) time to invest in professional skills development. If becoming more proficient in Microsoft Word was on your to-do list for 2020, look to our resident desktop publishers for Paige Frame’s Tips from a Word Nerd and Nolan Williams’s Revenge of the Word Nerds.
The amount of information coming at us in 2020 was overwhelming, and we can’t help but wish that more of it had been clear, accurate, and actionable. How do you do that? Follow Ethan Trunnell’s tips on readability. If you haven’t read his five-part series, start with his readability wrap-up, which outlines and links back to the other four blogs.
And how do you write marketing copy to help your organization stay afloat in these unprecedented unique challenging bizarre times? Jessie Hackford’s blog on Marketing Writing is the blog most referenced by our own team—cheating off an old, proven formula to create compelling copy.
If your training is also feeling stale and uninspired, try using Russell Lowe’s piece on Storytelling to Make Learning Engaging. Surely this year will at least provide us with some interesting anecdotes.
This year has been a journey, which reminds us of Jennifer Pennington’s blog about the McMul Process being the road to success. On projects, we create a plan up front to guide us, but we always build in and plan for flexibility.
While 2020 certainly didn’t go according to anyone’s plans, we are grateful for our team and community that flexibly pivoted and realigned expectations to finish successfully with a positive outlook for 2021.