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Emily Westbrooks

Emily Westbrooks

Emily Westbrooks is a Content Marketing Manager at Wrike. She brings over a decade of experience as a freelance journalist, editor, blogger, and author to the Wrike blog, where she writes about the latest trends in work management, what’s on the horizon for the future of work, and how work and life intersect in meaningful ways. Emily joined Wrike in 2020 at our Dublin office, and relocated to Houston, Texas, in 2022 with her husband and kids, Maya, Noah, Angelina, and Laylabelle. After spending over a decade in rainy Ireland, she enjoys being outside in the sunshine with her family as much as possible — hiking, running, walking, and swimming.

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Wrike Collaborate Recap: How Our Customers Drive Efficiency
Collaboration 7 min read

Wrike Collaborate Recap: How Our Customers Drive Efficiency

Here’s a recap of the customer panel from Wrike Collaborate 2023, which focused on streamlining processes, evaluating technology stacks, and consolidating tools.

Top 5 Highlights From Collaborate 2023
Leadership 5 min read

Top 5 Highlights From Collaborate 2023

Collaborate 2023 was a landmark event, reshaping the future of collaborative work and project management. This year’s gathering was a true knowledge hub — offering deep insights into the latest trends, tools, and methodologies that are shaping the modern workplace.  When you consider that 77% of business leaders now prioritize efficiency, and 52% of organizations believe they won’t survive a recession without efficiency measures, it’s no surprise that efficiency was a central focus at Collaborate 2023. Our speakers and Wrike experts paved the road to efficiency supported by impactful research, game-changing product updates, and hands-on Wrike tips you can put into action right away. As we reflect on this year’s event, one thing is clear: Wrike is not just a platform but a movement toward more innovative, efficient, and collaborative workspaces. Join us in this movement and redefine your organization’s collaborative endeavors with Wrike. Try Wrike for free Here are the top five highlights from this year’s event:  1. Welcome keynote: Driving modern work efficiencies Just in time for 2024 planning, Wrike Interim CEO Thomas Scott shared the latest insights on modern work challenges and the opportunities arising from those challenges. He covered this and more with Product Marketing Manager Molly Mixon, as they kicked off the day with a conversation on Wrike’s forward-looking vision and the role of AI and human resources in the modern workplace.  2. Efficiency keynote: Transformative trends of 2023 Wrike CMO Esther Flammer and President and CRO Brian Nourani highlighted the winning work management strategies that top-tier companies, such as Walmart Canada and Siemens Smart Infrastructure, are harnessing. These customer experiences offered tangible inspiration for teams looking to optimize processes using Wrike. We’re confident these insights and success stories will help you see significant time savings and a productivity surge at both a team and organizational level. 3. Customer-centric discussions: Unveiling impactful journeys A range of customer-focused discussions at Collaborate highlighted the transformative journeys of various organizations using Wrike. Kasey Schmidt, Marketing Technology Lead at Visa Acceptance Solutions, walked attendees through her team’s adoption of Wrike, including the major accomplishment of launching a new Visa brand in a short timeframe by using Wrike for project management.  4. Wrike’s product roadmap: Upcoming features and innovations Our product roadmap session was a highlight of the event, showcasing the upcoming features and innovations coming to the Wrike platform. Key developments include Wrike Datahub, designed to eliminate data silos, Intelligent Resource Management that will drive smart resourcing decisions, Next-Gen Analytics for real-time data visualization, and the AI-driven Wrike copilot for work management. These announcements created quite a buzz, and we’re thrilled to report that the new capabilities will be rolled out over the coming months.  5. Breakout tracks and sessions: A comprehensive understanding of Wrike’s capabilities The breakout sessions provided a deep dive into Wrike’s most impactful features and case studies, offering attendees expertise on features they will now take back to their teams for even greater results. In Workflow Automation: Your Shortcut to Productivity, Alina Kucherenko, Wrike Product Manager for Automation, and Ryan Candela, Wrike Senior Solutions Consultant, offered a comprehensive discussion and demo on Wrike’s automation features — showing off the efficiency users can achieve with only a few clicks.  Tomorrow’s training sessions will allow attendees even more hands-on opportunities to deepen their knowledge of Wrike’s features.  Join us on the road to efficiency If you missed Collaborate 2023, you can still get in on the efficiency action! All sessions from Collaborate 2023 are now available on demand, so you can catch up when you have time. Watch now Collaborate 2023 marked a significant leap for collaborative work and project management. Are you ready to take the leap into greater efficiency, too? Start your free Wrike trial and help your team level up for efficiency in 2024 and beyond. 

Wrike Paves the Way for Efficiency With New Intelligent Solutions for Work
News 10 min read

Wrike Paves the Way for Efficiency With New Intelligent Solutions for Work

At Wrike’s sixth annual Collaborate event today, we took the opportunity to release our latest suite of updates to our Work Intelligence® solution for the future of work. In conversation with Product Marketing Manager Molly Mixon, our Vice President of Product, Alexey Korotich, shared a selection of the most innovative advancements for the Wrike platform.  We’re excited to share these innovations with you, including Wrike’s copilot for work management, datahub, next-gen analytics, and user attributes. These new capabilities will enable teams to do their most impactful and efficient work, giving them better visibility and alignment on workflows and the ability to deliver measurable business outcomes.  Let’s hear from Alexey about the incredible product innovations announced at Collaborate today.  Question: We have more work than ever and more tools than ever to accomplish that work, but many teams are still struggling to actually work efficiently. Why do you think that is? A: Despite all the tools that we have to manage work and collaborate with our teams, it’s still harder than it should be. We have to juggle between different applications, multiple spreadsheets, and disconnected workflows.  Technology consolidation now plays a vital role in reducing noise and distractions employees face in their workspace. We’ve come a long way to make Wrike an intuitive, versatile, and scalable platform that can provide a single source of truth —  where different applications, workflows, and data come together.  You can experience this with one of the most recent innovations we delivered to the market: Wrike Lightspeed. It’s a whole new user experience coupled with powerful, no-code workflow automation and an infinitely scalable workspace. It’s the platform of choice for companies that are serious about efficiency and are looking to consolidate their tech stack.  Question: One of the biggest traits of AI is that it gets smarter the more you use it, which means millions of Wrike users will be able to work smarter than ever because AI is embedded right in the platform. Tell us exactly how our customers will be able to work smarter with Wrike’s intelligence?  A: Many of our customers tell us that lots of their data lives in spreadsheets or other databases that are siloed and not connected to the work that is managed in Wrike. This leads to inefficiencies and disconnected workflows.  Wrike's datahub is a game-changer. It revolutionizes how you manage the intersection of workflows and data. You can focus on making data-informed decisions instead of copying and pasting information from one system to another.  Our datahub allows users to manage and connect data directly to our platform. Additionally, Wrike can interpret that data, and derive insights and intelligence, helping you take action and make better decisions. With Wrike's datahub, there will be no more juggling between projects in Wrike and data in spreadsheets, unlocking many new possibilities for the Wrike platform.  The datahub serves as a data repository and allows us to track and connect all kinds of data — such as physical assets, inventory, digital files, client lists, purchase requests, and anything else that you need to do your work. So instead of pulling the information you need from dispersed tools, like spreadsheets, you have it close to your workflow and can make informed decisions without context switching.   Question: Imagine a world where you could intelligently match the right people to the right work based on specific requirements. Sounds like a dream, right? A: Not anymore. Our new capability brings this dream to reality: Wrike’s user attributes.  Project managers need to ensure they have the right people ready to do work, on time and on budget. This becomes particularly complex when managing large, diverse teams residing in different locations. These companies have a wide range of skills and experience to consider. By leveraging our new user attributes, you can set up and track detailed information about any Wrike user and leverage this data to make better planning and resourcing decisions. With this new capability, our customers can track employee professional skills, languages, locations, organizational relationships, hierarchies, and many other things. You can assign attributes to specific users and leverage Wrike’s resource management tools to find the right people for the right job, no matter how specialized the work might be. You’ll also be able to use skills management and resource management capabilities to understand where you have skill gaps or capacity constraints for talent planning. You can track organizational relationships, hierarchies, and equipment your teams use, and even set up automation. For example, you could @mention someone’s manager to escalate task assignments when that person is on vacation. Question: We’ve all walked into meetings feeling prepared, only to be asked about data points we don’t have at hand. Does Wrike have a way to easily access that information?  A: We do now. Today we’re launching Wrike's next-gen analytics, which will dramatically decrease the time to insights across all workflows, teams, and data. Our next-gen analytics features are built to be easy to use and are available for any Wrike user. These features allow you to build customizable dashboards and get the insights you need, truly democratizing data-driven decisions. We built these capabilities based on a deep understanding of what our users are looking to do and incorporated dozens of shortcuts that help you get insights in seconds. Our dashboards are also uniquely designed to be versatile and serve all types of users, from managers, individuals, and all the way to executives across the org. No more Sunday night scramble of trying to get insights and slides together across a bunch of different data sources and spreadsheets. These next-gen analytics provide easy visibility across diverse data points and views from different departments and projects in one place, without all of the blood, sweat, and tears.   Another thing you’ll love is how effortlessly the data flows into your dashboards, capturing all the task and project details in real time. As a result, you’ll have a 10,000-foot view of all your projects, whether you’re tracking status, effort, or ROI. Question: Organizations have all this data sitting in their various systems, but it has become harder to make sense of all of it. Can you tell us about Wrike’s vision for solving this problem?  A: Yes, we are proud to announce Wrike’s copilot for work management. This new AI assistant will be able to digest massive amounts of data in seconds. It will converse with you in human language, surface insights instantly, and automate what used to be time-consuming and manual. And it will help you make informed decisions in record time. It’s kind of like having a personal assistant or information butler right in your Wrike account! Someone to help you find quick answers to all your burning questions, keep you organized and on track, and help you brainstorm new ideas.     The hardest part of any task is overcoming those mental blocks and starting from scratch, so using Wrike’s copilot for work management for those big daunting activities is like getting to leapfrog past the hard stuff so you can put all your brainpower toward making your work exceptional.  The latest iteration of Wrike’s copilot for work management, which I’m very excited about, includes AI-powered automation suggestions. One of the most effective ways to enhance efficiency is through automating repetitive work. At Wrike, we’ve been empowering you to achieve this for years using our automation engine.  However, here’s the challenge — When everyone is swamped with daily tasks and urgent fire drills, it seems impossible to allocate additional time to process improvements. This is where our automation suggestions become really useful. Our intelligent features support our customers every step of the way. Whether you’re working on a global project or a day-to-day deliverable, you can leverage Wrike’s copilot for work management to surface the insights you need and ultimately make the right decisions.  Question: In the current discourse on AI, in addition to all the good it can do, we hear concerns about the quality, accuracy, and implicit biases in AI-generated responses, as well as concerns that AI can potentially replace humans in the future. What’s your viewpoint on all of these concerns? A: I hear the same concerns, and they’re all valid. AI is a truly groundbreaking technology that continues to impact more and more spheres of our personal and work lives. However, Wrike’s AI philosophy is to always leverage it responsibly, and not to replace, but to assist the people behind the controls. AI helps you analyze and connect a significant amount of data and provides critical insights that help you make better decisions. But the decisions themselves are always made by humans. We also go the extra mile to make sure AI doesn’t put our customer’s data at risk. The way our AI infrastructure is built prevents customer data from being used for training third-party AI models. This means you can safely bring together publicly available and internal data with Wrike’s copilot for work management. We understand how important it is for some organizations to have a choice of which AI models to use. That is why the underlying architecture of Wrike’s copilot for work management is going to support custom Large Language Models along with their different hosting methods. And on top of that, we will also enable account admins to control which features employees will be allowed to use. Question: When can Wrike users start using these new innovations?  A: Wrike's next-gen analytics are available in Chart view already, and you can currently enable the new dashboard view in Wrike Labs. Automation suggestions will be available this quarter. Wrike's datahub will be available in the first quarter of 2024. Skills management will be available in the first quarter of next year as well, and resource management will be coming later in 2024. Generative AI within Wrike’s copilot for work management can already be enabled in Wrike Labs, with automation suggestions coming online this quarter, and other features coming in 2024.   Now that you’ve read all about our latest platform innovations, get more hands-on experience with Wrike. Start a free trial today.  If you’re a current Wrike user and you’re looking to dive deeper into how you and your team can leverage these new updates, reach out to your account manager or our support team today.  We’ll be updating the Wrike blog regularly with more updates from Collaborate 2023, including insights from our speakers, customer success stories, and more.  Try Wrike for free

Get to Know Brian Nourani: New Wrike President and Chief Revenue Officer
News 7 min read

Get to Know Brian Nourani: New Wrike President and Chief Revenue Officer

Earlier this year, Wrike caught a boomerang. No, not the wooden kind, the type where a much-loved employee comes back after taking another role. Brian Nourani previously served as Senior Vice President, Global Sales at Wrike where he grew the business in North America, EMEA, and APAC. This included building our global enterprise business from its inception and participating in two successful exits in 2021 and 2022.  Recently, Brian rejoined Wrike as our President and Chief Revenue Officer, and we’re excited to have him back. Brian has over 13 years of senior sales leadership experience providing strategic and operational guidance for revenue generation. In addition to his time as CRO at Khoros, Brian served as VP of Sales at Tealium and held regional sales roles at Oracle. He returns with a deep understanding of the Wrike business and the enterprise selling motion, both in the areas of expansion and customer acquisition. We knew a Q&A would be the perfect informal format to help our customers and the general public get to know Brian and learn about his experience, his goals, and what makes him tick.  Q: Let’s hear why you’re here!  A: I’m thrilled to be back at Wrike at a time when the company is looking to expand its business to more verticals. I couldn’t pass up the chance to join a high-energy team in a competitive space and help drive Wrike’s go-to-market strategy and meet the growing market demand for work management software. We’re going to make this an incredibly successful next chapter for the organization and our customers. Q: Tell us about three critical career moves you’ve made.  A: Making the move from fintech to tech, which gave me the opportunity to join a great company like Oracle, helping them open their new hub in Los Angeles. I had the opportunity to work with several executives and learn from highly talented individuals through my time at Oracle, specifically seeing their transformation from on-premise to cloud. Next would be my career change, moving to Wrike in 2019 after the Vista Equity Partners acquisition, building the global enterprise business, partnering with countless Fortune 500 customers and seeing two successful exits. Third, would be re-entering Wrike in 2023 as President and CRO.  Q: What brought you back to Wrike? A: The new ownership through Symphony Technology Group, the vision, and new leadership through Tom Scott were all very exciting to me. Coming back to Wrike gives me the opportunity to work with so many great people, including customers I built relationships with in the past. I’m excited to take the reins leading our go-to-market organization and influence real change across the business.  And I would be remiss not to say, my fellow Wrikers and the culture of innovation and camaraderie at Wrike played a big part in my return. Previously, I had the opportunity to work in the San Diego office with so many great people. Then COVID hit, and we transitioned to remote work and worked through so many challenges. It brought all of us closer together and helped build strong, lasting relationships. I also enjoy visiting Wrikers in other offices. We had a company kickoff in 2020 right before the pandemic, and I got to meet our international teams in Galway, Ireland, and then our AMS employees in San Diego. That event was a blast, and something I will always remember. Q: As Wrike’s new CRO, what are you most excited about? A: The demand has never been greater for a versatile, collaborative work management platform like ours. Wrike will continue to accelerate innovation that’s focused on solving dynamic workplace challenges and meeting the needs of the modern workforce. I am excited to work closely with Symphony Technology Group, my fellow ELT members, and the full team at Wrike to continue to deliver value to our customers and employees globally.     Q: What are some of the most impactful changes you’ve made since returning to Wrike?  A: Building out a new “pod” structure gives our customer-facing teams the ability to work more collaboratively and serve our customers in a more efficient way.  We’re already developing and implementing company-specific sales methodologies, territory and team structures, and new quotas and commission plans, as well as more sophisticated pipeline management and reporting. All of these changes are designed to improve the customer experience. Q: What are areas for potential growth for Wrike? A: I would like to see Wrike continue to lead the way in the collaborative work management space as the most innovative solution in the market — standing at the forefront of artificial intelligence. I believe AI empowers teams to streamline their processes, eliminating time-consuming manual tasks. This enables team members to shift their focus on to more strategic and creative aspects of their work, promoting higher levels of engagement. As a company, we have a great opportunity to be a leader in our space, actively helping our customers streamline work processes for maximum efficiency, empowering teams across all departments to collaborate, manage projects, drive strategic initiatives, and achieve goals. A few rapid-fire favorites:  Favorite book? Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t, by Jim Collins. I love this book because you will learn what it takes to be a top leader, why building the right team is so critical, and why “stop doing” is as important as what you should do. Favorite quote? “Leaders get out in front and stay there by raising the standards by which they judge themselves — and by which they are willing to be judged.”  Frederick W Smith, CEO of Fedex Favorite country? England London, England is so culturally rich and such a diverse city, with centuries of history, not to mention amazing tea! There is so much to see and do in London, from the markets, to the food and architecture — it’s impossible not to love!  Favorite Wrike feature? Request forms and automation. Brian will be delivering a keynote at our sixth annual virtual Collaborate event in November. He’ll be sharing impactful customer success stories you won’t want to miss. Save your spot today!  Register for Collaborate

Championing Change: Casey Shew on the Secret to Perfecting Processes
Wrike Tips 5 min read

Championing Change: Casey Shew on the Secret to Perfecting Processes

Welcome back to another episode of Championing Change, our blog series designed to give you an inside look into the project management processes of real Wrike customers.  The goal of this series is to highlight the ways Wrike users are leaning on specific Wrike features to increase adoption, improve efficiency, enable transparency and visibility, and move their organizations closer to their business objectives. That’s a wordy way of saying we’re nosy, and we love learning how other people use Wrike — it’s one of the best ways to pick up new Wrike tips and tricks.  We hope this series opens your eyes to new ways you can use Wrike to improve your own processes or make your life that bit simpler. If you missed the inaugural edition, you can catch up here with Jennifer Mariotti, Global Head of Creative and Design at media company Circana.  This week, we sat down with Casey Shew, who serves as Online Learning Solutions Architect and Project Leader, as well as Technical Solutions Lead, at eCornell. eCornell is Cornell University’s external education arm, offering online professional and executive development to students around the world. eCornell has over 100 professional certificate programs in a variety of disciplines, including project management, marketing, finance and business, and leadership. Casey has a complex role that involves mastering processes for eCornell. He spends his days identifying and implementing novel technologies and techniques within learning programs, collaborating with course development and program delivery groups to enhance efficiency, recommending creative solutions and plans for using new tools, and helping create reusable templates in the company’s project management system.  In his quest to improve efficiency at eCornell, Casey has become a natural proponent of a critical platform, Wrike, which he uses to design and implement effective processes across the campus.  Try Wrike for free Migrating to Wrike was “a breath of fresh air” eCornell previously used Jira for project management, but migrated the course development team to Wrike to align better with their processes.  “Given that this team’s project management processes were more aligned with traditional Waterfall project management methodologies than Agile methodologies, by and large migrating to Wrike was like a breath of fresh air for their use case,” Casey explained.  He also credited the smooth transition to having several admins onboarded into Wrike first, giving them a head start on adapting processes having already familiarized themselves with the platform. “There’s almost always skepticism when a new piece of software is introduced to solve a difficult problem — and rightly so! Software is often a shiny new toy that can be used as a distraction from complex challenges.” Casey said that within the admin team, it helped to ensure that several people were “versed in taking a business analyst approach to adapting processes to software.” He explained that Wrike’s capabilities are typically able to adapt and absorb a team’s workflows, but “the roadblock is often less about the capabilities of the software and more about the difficulty of understanding and translating processes into the software effectively and, most importantly, holistically.”  From his experience, he learned to ensure that teams take a thorough approach to setting up projects. “Do not skip the requirements gathering stage of bringing a new process or team into Wrike — this is where you can set the project up for success.”  Features that increase visibility Every Wrike user has favorite or most-used features. Personally, I’d be lost without my dashboard telling me what’s my most urgent task every day. Well, eCornell is no different. Casey specifically called out the tools that allow individual users to manage their tasks at scale more efficiently, such as dashboards, reports, and calendars.  “These tools enable us to set up views that centralize and organize tasks from a variety of projects into one place, for easy visibility and triage,” Casey said. “We manage many projects at once so these tools Wrike provides are critical in managing at scale across projects.” eCornell’s teams also rely on Wrike to help them cut down on time spent in meetings or updating stakeholders by including critical information about a project in fields with shared visibility.  “Task descriptions, comments, and custom fields definitely reduce the need to reiterate that information as frequently as would be needed otherwise,” Casey explained. This visibility also reduces the risk of duplicative work while building a broader shared understanding among teams. Using Wrike’s additional resources While Casey has incredible knowledge of how Wrike can help the wide variety of teams at eCornell, he knows where to head when he’s looking for more information. “I leverage the help center regularly both to educate myself and provide educational resources for others on features we are utilizing,” he said.  When an issue arises, he heads straight to the top — of our customer service, that is. “The request submission process is also very smooth and I appreciate how quickly I get responses to issues that might arise,” he explained.  Casey also pops onto the Wrike website regularly to stay abreast of any new features or use cases being released or highlighted. “I always check the release notes each week for relevant features that may benefit the various teams I work with that use Wrike,” he said.  “I’ve been very pleased to see the enhancements coming to the native automation engine in the recent months as well, and look forward to seeing that engine becoming more and more powerful in the coming years.”  And we look forward to delivering more powerful features, from AI to workflow management and beyond, in the coming years.  If you’re interested in bringing Wrike to your team, start a free two-week trial and take a few of Casey’s tips on board to promote efficient processes and improve your change management process for wider adoption.  Try Wrike for free

Do More With Less: How To Boost Employee Morale
Project Management 10 min read

Do More With Less: How To Boost Employee Morale

If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a million times. It’s the era of efficiency for businesses around the world. We even published a study delving into current efficiency trends, and it confirms that 77% of business leaders are prioritizing efficiency.  Our Do More With Less series delves into the practical ways actually doing more with less affects employers and employees, and the ways they can thrive despite a challenging economic climate. In this installment, we’re looking at how this era of efficiency is impacting employee morale — and what leaders, managers, and employers can do to combat drooping morale in the workplace.  In reality, striving for efficiency can really impact employees’ experience in the workplace. The focus on efficiency means budgets have been cut across the board, discretionary spending has been reined in, and employees are likely feeling the stress of having to produce more with less, every single day. Even if employees are reasonably confident they are safe from layoffs, the office vibe can feel quite different than it did in years past.  Employers and business leaders have a vested interest in ensuring that employee morale is as positive as it can be. Employee engagement is one of the keys to employee productivity, as well as a key indicator that turnover will remain low. Therefore it makes sense for executives to keep a close eye on employee morale and make every effort to improve it, especially in the current economic climate that constantly requires asking more of employees. How can employers keep their employees engaged and positive in the era of efficiency — without breaking the bank? We’ve pulled together a host of ideas and examples that can work for in-person or remote teams, and we’ve even created a handy infographic you can send to your manager or HR team as a little hint at what could improve your company morale.  Try Wrike for free Efficiency data reveals employee burnout Let’s look more closely at the research around the current situation for businesses and the ways employees are being affected. The era of efficiency means companies are being tasked with increasing productivity while lowering costs. In order to achieve those goals, companies are mainly taking three routes: reducing staff numbers, cutting budgets, and raising prices for their goods and services.  Those strategies may alleviate the financial pressure teams are facing, but employees are feeling more pressure than ever. Our Efficiency Report noted that employees are reporting their workloads have increased by 43% in the last year. And business leaders agree, estimating that workloads have increased by 45% in the last year.  Our research also showed that over half (56%) of workers have taken on the work of colleagues who have left their organizations. Of the workers whose companies have reduced staff, budgets, or raised prices, 67% of employees are worried about the number of staff members being reduced and 60% are concerned about budget reductions.  Those worries have begun to take a toll on employees, with 71% of those surveyed admitting feeling burnout in the last six months. When we released our Dark Matter of Work survey last year, we revealed that 85% of employees surveyed had either experienced or witnessed a colleague experience burnout. And that was before the era of efficiency kicked in, arguably adding to those experiencing burnout.  Low-cost ideas to boost morale Boosting employee morale requires more than a quick fix. We’ve probably all heard stories about companies ordering a dozen pizzas for their employees, hoping to stick a band-aid on a larger problem. Imagine an office that’s been hit from all angles through this rocky economic time: a big chunk of employees have been laid off, budgets for team lunches or after-work drinks every quarter have been eliminated, they got rid of the smoothie machine in the break room, and you’re constantly wondering if you’re going to be next in line to clear our your desk. It’s going to take more than a pizza party to get the morale train back on track.  In fact, improving employee morale requires an attitude shift from the top down, shown in repeated small ways. It takes time and concerted effort. But the good news is that a company doesn’t necessarily need a big budget to start to turn the tide.  Here are four low-cost ways for companies to improve employee morale.  Increase leadership engagement: Our 2023 Efficiency Report revealed that not only did many workers feel burnt out, less than a quarter of them felt like they could speak to their line manager and make a plan to address the problem. As a result, 5% quit their jobs instead.  Instead of having workers quit, increasing leadership engagement directly with employees can start to rebuild relationships where employees can communicate more honestly with their managers and employers about their workloads. Including questions about workload overwhelm in a weekly one-to-one meeting, without fear of judgment or retribution, can go a long way toward building trust and improving morale. When employees feel their managers or executives will help them meet their goals with creative solutions, employees won’t feel unseen or unheard. Seeking employee input on projects is another way employers can reinvigorate employee engagement, especially when their suggestions are put into practice and given proper credit.  In times of stress, employees often see less of executives, which can add to the stressful environment. Employees often think executives are too busy putting out fires to engage with employees, and seeing more of those in leadership roles can be reassuring to employees.  Express gratitude:  Gratitude is another top-down element that can drastically improve employee morale. Our Dark Matter of Work survey showed that many employees feel their employers or managers don’t understand how hard they work. Changing that narrative could be the key to improving morale.  Starting a practice of directly thanking employees for their roles in successful projects or ongoing work can begin to shift the perception that employers aren’t aware of the work employees are completing. Similarly, creating a process for employees to recognize each other can help remove tension employees might be feeling amidst a rocky business climate.  Employers should be wary of useless gifts or empty thank yous — these can take your morale in the other direction. Instead, simple and direct thank you notes or an unexpected gift card can make an employee feel recognized for a particular role played.  Create connection amongst staff   Employee morale is often greatly impacted by how employees feel supported by each other. When employees are laid off, support systems break down and take time to rebuild. Encouraging employees to get to know one another, trust each other, and appreciate one another can make for a much more enjoyable workplace — and can lead to better collaboration between and within teams.  Forcing employees to participate in activities they don’t want to do — taking them away from their desks while work stacks up or making them feel more stressed — should be off the table. Unless your company sells adventure gear, stay away from the ropes course during this time of rebuilding relationships.  Instead, keep the activities simple and encourage practices that create a culture of helping each other. At Wrike, we have a kudos form that every employee can fill out each week, recognizing a colleague for a job well done — or simply for being a kind human. Kudos are sent out in a Friday email, creating a culture of recognition and increasing visibility into the great work our teams are doing that might otherwise go unnoticed.  Ease the load The most popular ways for employees to attempt to recover from burnout, as highlighted in our Efficiency Report, were practicing self-care at home, switching off notifications outside of working hours, and taking PTO days. Now, offering more PTO days might not be in your budget at the moment, but allowing and encouraging employees to turn off notifications when they’re at home can help ease their load and rebalance their home life.  However, it’s important that executives and managers are doing the same: arriving back at work in the morning to 57 emails that were sent late into the evening hours can make employees feel as though they should have responded outside of office hours. Respecting office hours is another practice that needs to be recognized at all employee levels.  One of the ways employees cope with ongoing burnout is to seek therapy, which is often offered through company programs. However, it can be hard to schedule appointments with meetings throughout the day. Allowing employees time to meet with a therapist or take care of their mental health helps employees feel that their employers value them beyond just their productivity.  Interested in specific examples for each of these categories? We pulled them into a handy infographic: Giving employees tools that make their work easier Of course, many of these suggestions could make employees feel more pressed for time if their workloads remain the same. But we have a few ideas for reducing that as well: use Wrike. It’s a selfish plug, but we’re serious.  Our work management software will give your teams hours back that they used to spend duplicating work across different platforms, sending updates to multiple stakeholders, and fiddling with annoying admin tasks that both waste time and cause frustration.  Wrike’s work management software will allow your employees to automate repeated tasks like sending approval notices or sending project updates. Our platform allows teams to have greater visibility into projects, reducing stress that they’re missing a critical piece of the process.  Giving employees appropriate tools that help them do their jobs more effectively and efficiently is great for productivity and engagement — and great for creating more time to implement these simple, low-cost ways to boost employee morale.  Looking for more ways to do more with less? Catch up on the previous posts in our Do More With Less blog series here:  Wrike Is Ready to Help You Thrive How To Cope With the Hidden Cost of Layoffs How To Consolidate Your Martech Stack

Introducing Thomas Scott: Wrike CFO Moves to Interim CEO Role
News 7 min read

Introducing Thomas Scott: Wrike CFO Moves to Interim CEO Role

This summer, Wrike CFO Thomas Scott took on the role of interim CEO, as founder and former CEO Andrew Filev stepped into a board advisor role after 17 years as the head of the company. We’re in good hands, though. Thomas has all of the expertise and business acumen to take up the mantle as Wrike’s leader.  As Thomas assumes the Interim CEO position, we thought a Q&A would be an appropriate way for our customers, partners, and the general public to get to know his leadership style, his goals for Wrike moving forward, and his thoughts on current tech trends.  Q: Why don’t we start with your Wrike journey, how did it all start?  A: My Wrike journey started over a year ago; my one-year anniversary was in March of 2023. I had sold my prior business in the middle of 2021, and right as I started to consider my next challenge I had the good fortune to meet Andrew. I had been working as a financial and operating executive for innovative technology businesses for over 17 years, and was looking for the combination of a great product, team, and opportunity to make an impact. Wrike offered this chance and I have never looked back since taking this challenge. Q: What does it mean to be Interim CEO at Wrike?  As Interim CEO, my role is to guide Wrike forward on the next chapter of our story.  Part of this includes maintaining continuity on the things that brought Wrike to this level of success and part of it includes fostering innovation and change as we adapt to a new economic environment along with our customers.. Q: How is Wrike planning to thrive in a challenging climate? A: As we look to grow our business, it’s important to note that the environment has changed. Our customers are focused on efficiency and productivity and we’re really no exception to that. We’re doing the exact same thing, looking at how we can be more productive as a company and how we can take advantage of this shifting situation in the overall economy, and within IT spending in particular. If you think about the Wrike customer journey of going from teams to department to the overall company, I think some of what’s going on in the industry as a whole is going to help that journey. We just have to be very prescriptive about our strategies, staying focused on winning with our product, winning with our core customers, and ultimately winning with enterprise organizations to take advantage of some of these trends. I’m preparing to discuss some of these strategies at Wrike Collaborate 2023 in November, and we’re welcoming our VP of Product, Alexey Korotich, to the stage to discuss platform innovations that will get all of our customers excited about what’s to come. It’s a thrilling time to be in this industry and to be at Wrike, specifically. Innovation is in our DNA, we’re pioneers in AI for CWM, and you don’t want to miss the news at Collaborate.  Q: What is your take on trends like AI? A: AI is both fascinating and concerning at the same time if you think about the number of different use cases where it could be applied and the speed with which it could cause disruption.  For me, it is an interesting trend to follow externally in terms of what other companies are doing, but it’s also really interesting what we’re doing with it here at Wrike because there’s an enormous amount of use cases that we can apply both within the product as well as within our different functional areas. AI is going to allow us to create efficiencies in how we best serve our customers and tailor our message to them.  Again, tune into Collaborate – we have some incredible announcements to make on this front.  Q: What sets Wrike apart from its competitors?  A: The scalability of the product is a key differentiator. This product was built for scale and a lot of our competitors were not. Another differentiator is the work that we’ve done over the last year with Wrike Lightspeed that has made the entry-level point for this product really compelling. Teams now have the ability to adopt it earlier on, and that’s transformational.  From a use case perspective, our own teams have really increased their usage of Wrike and their ability to free up time by automating workflows. We know from experience that once you’re using Wrike for simple use cases, you start asking, ‘What else can I do with this?’ It opens up other possibilities, it brings in other users, and that gives you an idea of what that customer journey can look like on the outside as you’re watching it develop internally.  Q: What does Wrike’s financial future look like?  A: We have a great opportunity ahead of us given macroeconomic trends, their impact on business today, and Wrike’s inherent ability to improve efficiency and productivity – which is what every organization is focused on right now. As an STG portfolio company, I’m not able to share financial information; however, Wrike’s executive team is very much focused on understanding the growth rate in our market, where opportunities lie, and how we can invest in products, people, and processes to be able to increase the value of the business.  Q: How would you describe Wrike culture?  A: Wrike has a culture that drives change. This business has successfully navigated a number of really transformational milestones. From COVID to the Citrix acquisition and, subsequently, the demerger from Citrix, there are a number of big changes that we have been through. The resilience of this culture and the willingness to continue to find ways to innovate is something that I’m proud to be a part of here.   Our employees have a lot of grit. They can come into a challenging situation and are able to problem-solve and persevere through it. They are also intellectually curious, as well, and you have to be to work in such a fast-paced space.  Q: What makes Wrike a unique place to work? A: We truly are a global company spread out across a number of locations. I think that is a real strength for us and something that we should continue to invest in. Our resilience and ability to change is a key aspect of the culture and that’s something that I want to see us continue to invest in as well.  Q: What are the most exciting projects being developed at Wrike?  A: There’s an exciting opportunity for us to continue to expand how we use technology within our own business, whether that is to continue to drive more use cases internally with Wrike, or by investing in the tech stack that we use that we’re not fully utilizing today, or even bringing together different data sources.  Additionally, we’re looking to more than double Wrike’s business over the next few years. In order to do that, we’ve got to develop the next generation of leaders that will help this business scale and I view that as one of the more important things that I do in my job. Q: What’s the most rewarding part of being Wrike’s Interim CEO?   A: By far the most rewarding part of what I do is being able to travel around and talk to customers and our employees. That has been the best thing that I’ve done here. I’ve taken dozens of trips since I’ve been here over the last year, and I very much believe in forming relationships with people across our global footprint. Q: How do you spend your spare time? A: I am probably not the best role model for work-life balance, but I have a 14-year-old daughter so I both watch and coach a fair amount of youth sports and I love doing that. I also enjoy outdoor activities myself, like skiing, hiking, and mountain biking. I try to live as active a life outside the office as I can. Thomas will be delivering a keynote at our sixth annual virtual Collaborate event in November. Make sure to save your spot so you can get even further insights into what’s to come for Wrike.  Register for Collaborate

Introducing Our New Customer-Focused Series: Championing Change
Project Management 3 min read

Introducing Our New Customer-Focused Series: Championing Change

What we hear time and again from our customers is that they love to learn how other people use Wrike. While we’ve shared hundreds of organizational use cases and customer stories that give you a macro perspective of how Wrike can help your company thrive, we know our customers also want to know the nitty-gritty details of how Wrike will affect their team’s day-to-day workflows.  So today we’re introducing a new series called Championing Change, where we get an inside view into the specific ways Wrike impacts people’s daily work. We’ll highlight the features each user relies on to increase productivity, eliminate roadblocks, and create processes that make their work lives easier.  Whenever I’m on a Zoom call with a colleague and they offer to share their screen to show something they’re doing in Wrike, I’m fascinated. Watching someone else in action using Wrike is simply the best way to imagine how you can use it to your advantage. Even working at Wrike, we benefit from gathering ideas for new use cases from our colleagues, and we’re excited to share the ways you can too.  To kick off the series, we get a peek inside Jennifer Mariotti’s Wrike processes. Jennifer is the Global Head of Creative and Design at Circana, a media company with around 5,000 employees. She did considerable research into work management platforms that would work best for her creative teams. When her team doubled in size, she was able to easily onboard new team members to Wrike — an experience that left her impressed with the platform’s ability to scale when necessary.  In her day-to-day work, Jennifer leans hard on Wrike’s dashboards to create seamless workflows with high visibility into her teams’ workloads and progress. And as part of a creative team, she uses Wrike’s in-app proofing tools so she doesn’t have to download files, mark them up, then re-upload to send them on for approvals.  We encourage you to read the full infographic to learn more about how Jennifer uses Wrike’s project management tools to help her creative team deliver results.  And check back regularly for more insight into how our customers use Wrike in our new Championing Change series!

Wrike Delivered 396% ROI Over Three Years to Boost Efficiency for Organizations
News 7 min read

Wrike Delivered 396% ROI Over Three Years to Boost Efficiency for Organizations

The Total Economic Impact™ of Wrike, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Wrike, demonstrates the benefits of using Wrike, as customers increased profits and eliminated low-value work.

5 Tips to Help You Power Through a Recession
Leadership 5 min read

5 Tips to Help You Power Through a Recession

Whether we are in a recession or not, anxiety can be crippling. Here are five ways to deal with ongoing uncertainty in the workplace.

Do More With Less: How To Consolidate Your Martech Stack
Project Management 7 min read

Do More With Less: How To Consolidate Your Martech Stack

Your martech stack is probably costing you more time and money than it needs to. Recoup those wasted resources with our consolidation tips.

How Quiet Hiring Can Help Companies and Employees Weather Economic Uncertainty
Leadership 7 min read

How Quiet Hiring Can Help Companies and Employees Weather Economic Uncertainty

Quiet hiring is a key work trend for 2023. Learn how it’s affecting companies and employees as they weather economic uncertainty.

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