How Two Customers Cultivate Cross-Departmental Collaboration
You want to develop a more collaborative atmosphere in your organization, get the smart, highly capable people you've hired to interact with one another, despite being on different teams. But how do you motivate your people to peer over their silos and interact with others, despite personality clashes, conflicting priorities, and miscommunication? We look at two Wrike customers who, when faced with the challenge of cultivating cross-departmental collaboration, absolutely crushed it.
The sharing principle in Wrike
Most of the questions and debates between users and the support team come from the sharing principle. Let me explain it again. Example Every user has its own workspace in Wrike, and its own structure of tasks and folders. He can share any task or a folder with other users. In this case the shared item is visible, accessible and changeable for both people (or for more people if necessary). For example David and I share the only folder “New features”. Other folders we have are totally different, and actually I don’t know if David has any other folders. But I decided to include “New features” into two other folders for my convenience: “System features” and “Wrike Development”. In turn, David has no idea about my actions, because these two folders are not shared with him. If the task is shared with you, but its parent folder is not shared with you, such task is single and placed in "My Folders." I hope this example is descriptive enough, and you understand how to give access to tasks and folders while keeping your structure at the same time. View of the shared list by default Since the shared list for the task is inherited after the parent folder (if it is), it’s not visually changeable anymore. We have changed the view of this list to avoid any possible confusion. So if you want to add people to the task shared list, write their e-mail addresses in the field “Also shared with” (in the parent folder details). On the other hand, if you want to delete anyone from this list, you need to change the parent folder properties.
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Why Collaboration Within Creative Teams is Key for Success
Creative teams work like no other, but when multiple projects are in flux, times can be hard. Check out Wrike’s top collaboration tips for creative teams. Creative collaboration tools help teams succeed. You may not be an expert in how to manage creatives, but teams everywhere use Wrike as their go-to creative collaboration platform.
5 Ways to Save Your Team from Communication Breakdowns
Part of what makes a team great is the mix of different personalities and perspectives each person brings to the table. But those differences also mean that misunderstandings and miscommunications are bound to happen at some point. And when they do, it can put a real strain on your team, jeopardizing the success of your project—and possibly even your organization. When team communication starts to unravel, what do you do? And how do you minimize the number of mishaps along the way? Here at Wrike, one of our main goals is to make it easy for teams to communicate and work together. Add in the fact that we're a distributed team, and we’ve had our share of communication breakdowns. Here are the team communication strategies and solutions we’ve picked up over the years through first-hand experience. Set Goals & Expectations Up Front Collaboration runs a lot smoother when you all start out on the same page. So don’t leave kickoff meetings or brainstorming sessions assuming that everyone is clear on roles, action items, deadlines, and objectives—or you’ll more than likely end up hearing, “Isn’t Jeff supposed to do that?” and, “I thought this wasn’t due until next week.” Record action items, assignments, and deadlines during meetings in writing. At the end of each meeting, summarize who’s responsible for what and when, and send a follow-up note so that everyone is 100% clear on what happens next. Better yet, assign tasks from within your work management software. The Monterey Bay Aquarium uses Wrike to document priorities at the start of every project, so that team members can easily refer back and see exactly what they need to accomplish. Katy Scott, Digital Learning Manager at the Monterey Bay Aquarium says, "The clarity of knowing what the expectation is and then coming back is integral in terms of moving forward at a steady pace." Quit Working Out of Email... Too many messages, too many attachments, too many vague comments without clear context… email is a breeding ground for communication failure. Besides, all that digital clutter is unnecessarily stressful! Move team communications to your work management tool, where you can discuss work and attach related files right on the task. Or switch to team chat apps like Slack or HipChat where you can create department- or project-specific channels to discuss work. "Without Wrike, it becomes threads and threads of emails. With Wrike, we have a central location for stakeholders and content creators to communicate; work out the timeline, content, design, or copy issues together." - Brian Lam, Marketing Operations Coordinator at Hootsuite …Or Make Email More Productive For some teams, scaling back on email communications just isn’t realistic. But simple tweaks to your email etiquette can go a long way towards improving team communication. For one, keep subject lines short and to the point. If the person only read the subject line, would they know exactly what you want them to do? This allows people to scan their inboxes and prioritize work efficiently, without having to click into each message—and it makes it easier to search for the email later on. Another tip: if you’re replying to a long email thread or adding in a new participant, summarize the key points at the beginning of the email in bullets or a numbered list. This makes it easy for new recipients to quickly get up to speed and understand exactly what you need from them. Learn Your Team’s Preferred Communication Style Some members of your team will want to hash things out verbally, or bounce ideas off of a big group. Others will prefer to listen and reflect on what others have to say, and then record their thoughts and ideas on paper. Learn how each member of your team prefers to communicate and accommodate them whenever possible. Doing so will allow them to share their thoughts more effectively, so that their colleagues can truly hear what they have to say. Set Up a Knowledge Base Maybe you’re bringing on a new team member who needs to learn the ropes fast. Or perhaps you want to capture lessons learned to improve the way your team works. Or you just want to head off miscommunications by giving your team access to accurate work information. Whatever the case, making it easy for your team to record and share knowledge is a tried-and-true way to improve communication. Here at Wrike, we use an internal knowledge base to give everyone easy access to up-to-date information, accurate instructions, and time-saving templates. Here's how our internal knowledge base works: Each bit of knowledge or lesson learned gets loaded into a task and included in the Knowledge Base folder, which is shared with the whole company. These tasks are unassigned and set as backlogged (there's no due dates associated with them), so they're always available when we need to reference them. We include each item in subfolders for departments or projects. Since tasks can live in multiple folders at once, we don't have to search through every folder to find the item we need, or miss out on helpful information that's hidden in another team's folder. For easy reference, related files are attached directly to tasks, with clear versioning so information and instructions are always up-to-date. Techniques + Tools = Better Team Communication You don’t have to be a mind reader to have great communication with your team (although it would certainly help). Using these simple strategies, paired with the right communication and collaboration tools, will help build relationships in your team, promote the sharing of new ideas and best practices, and improve the process (and results!) of team collaboration. Sources: Inc.com, FastCompany.com
Wrike Joins the Top 25 Great Places To Work
Ping-pong tables are great, and snacks are nice to have. Competitive salaries and comprehensive benefits packages are wonderful. But what really makes a workplace great? There’s no one tried and true recipe, but there are a few commonalities that great places to work share. One is a mission you can get behind. Another is being surrounded by people who bring out the best in you, and you from them. For short we’ll call this, culture. The value of culture can’t be overstated and for many of us, a good cultural fit is a driving factor in whether or not we’d like to bring our talents to a particular organization. Once you join an organization, feel part of the team, and enjoy the work, you want to tell others so they can enjoy the benefits, too. That’s where the Great Places To Work index comes in handy. And, by the way, Wrike recently received its top 25 Great Places To Work®! Wrike is one of the top 25 Great Places To Work® for 2021 Great Places To Work® is the definitive source to gauge company culture and employee engagement. Their annual survey uses the Emprising™ employee experience software, trusted by thousands of the World’s Best Workplaces™. The results of an independent survey determined which companies made it to the list. Here’s what Wrike employees say: When compared to the typical U.S.-based company, the survey results tell the story: Wrike is a great place to work and to start or advance your career: We’ve come a long way, and our team and product have grown tremendously since our founding in 2006. This year is already on pace to be our best yet as we accelerate our mission to be the leading platform for the enterprise, bringing all departments together into a single digital workspace. On a bit of a winning streak Along with the Great Places To Work® certification, last December, Forrester honored Wrike as a Leader in collaborative work management (CWM) for the third year in a row. Then, 2021 went off to a roaring start with GetApp naming Wrike a category leader for CWM. Next, Capterra put us on the shortlist for project management software, followed by Software Advice tabbing Wrike as one of the five most popular project planning tools. Everything capped off last week in the biggest moment of our company’s history with Citrix completing its acquisition of Wrike! Why work at Wrike? Lots of reasons! Our team continues to innovate and push the boundaries of what’s possible in collaborative work management, and that passion starts with having a cohesive, global team focused on shaping the future of work. To begin, this year’s survey showed that 93% of employees felt welcomed when joining Wrike: Wrike employees’ comments summarize what it’s like to work with our fast-growing team. Culture, people, fun, and leadership all top the list: Aside from the high marks and team members’ pride in their work, Wrike offers a comprehensive benefits package plus the following items to those who join the team: Welcome box with company swag Monthly social events (even during the pandemic) including movie nights, chocolate tasting, virtual escape rooms, virtual cooking and mixology classes, fitness classes, trivia night, and many more Monthly snack box deliveries 401k with company match Department swag boxes Beyond the perks, Wrike celebrates diversity. Within our offices, we’re committed to celebrating the various identities and cultures of our staff through dedicated groups and events. We’re committed to creating and maintaining a diverse and inclusive space where our employees can thrive. For example, we’ve hosted events to celebrate Black History Month and International Women’s Week, and established a community titled “Wrikers of Color.” At the end of the day, we aim to make work fun and continue to push the industry forward as the leader in collaborative work management. Join Wrike and help shape the future of work Our team has an aggressive, ambitious product roadmap and we’re excited at what lies ahead. That’s where you come in! Wrike is hiring across the board in all locations — Prague, Dublin, Tokyo, Dallas, San Diego, and our company headquarters in San Jose, California. Of course we’re open to remote team members, too, especially in this hybrid work environment. Open opportunities range from customer success to sales to marketing, engineering, and many more. Check out all of Wrike’s open positions here.
First-hand Experience To Succeed with a Distributed Team
This is exactly the case of Avi Cohen, CEO of Pacific54, who successfully manages the five offices of his company, spread around Latin America, the Middle East, Europe and the U.S. "We run multiple projects on online marketing strategies, and the main challenge for us was establishing a healthy workflow for all of them," Avi says. "As we managed to do it with the help of Wrike project management software, now we are able to reach markets of clients and employees that we never thought would be possible to maintain virtually!" Avi has shared with us the rules that helped him efficiently manage his remote team in order to attract more customers. If you are ready to see your business grow, take a look at these great tips: 1. Make sure all team members keep up with the deadlines Plans may change, and when the team is decentralized, it's tricky to ensure that everyone always stays up-to-date with the new schedule. Things have become much easier for us with the interactive Gantt chart that instantly provides all team members with a current project schedule wherever they are. When I create new tasks or reschedule existing ones, they always stay in the loop, receiving e-mail notifications about the changes. Also, on the online Gantt chart, I can instantly see who is responsible for which task and whether it will be completed on time. 2. Always stay on top of your team’s agenda When you manage several projects split between a numbers of remote workers, you need to focus on the most important goals one step ahead. That’s why I customize the widgets on my dashboard to show tasks and projects I am currently interested in and eliminate the others. With custom settings, I always concentrate on the most important items of the work, be it overdue tasks, tasks to do this week or tasks assigned to a particular person in the company. 3. Create a collaborative online environment Enthusiastic collaboration and idea exchanges are behind every successful project. When your team is separated geographically, you need to provide them with a convenient space for project-related discussions. For our team, that place is the Activity Stream. Here, we oversee all the recent updates and share our news, comments and files. And handy avatars make our communication more personal! 4. Dedicate enough time to each client Good customer relationships are the key to your flawless reputation! As all Pacific54 team members keep their time logs in Wrike, at the end of the month I can easily create time reports to see how many hours were spent on each client. Analyzing this information helps us assure that all customers are satisfied. 5. Let your customers see the project progress themselves! To make your relationships more productive, provide your customers with the full or read-only access to the project. This way, they will always have the most recent data available, while you will no longer spend a minute on keeping them up-to-date. A win-win situation! The viewer license feature alone saved me so many sleepless nights. Nevertheless, your team members' personalities are also important for success, so simply maintaining an efficient online communication isn’t enough. What can be better than a phone call when you need to talk over an emotional issue? Why not try some virtual team building games activities? Or how about occasional face-to-face meetings with your colleagues that will definitely help you build strong team relationships? You will be surprised to see how even one such meeting improves your team’s virtual collaboration! "Having tried many different project management tools, I was a bit skeptical about all of them. However, I was surprised by the ease of use and control over the projects Wrike immediately gave me. Now we leverage Wrike in our business in a way that saves us ton of time and money!”Avi Cohen, CEO at Pacific54 Pacific54 is a boutique online marketing agency that specializes in effective Search Engine Optimization, Social Marketing, Pay-Per-Click methods and much more.
What Makes a Great Team? (Work Management Roundup)
Welcome back to the weekly Work Management Roundup where we collect the best links to articles on work, productivity, teams, and management. This week hasn't been a good one for local review site Yelp/Eat24, what with explosive open letters from ex-employees and then some poor social media decisions from the company. But the situation has ignited a larger conversation around not just work-life balance, but also what makes a great team at work. Read on for more: What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team (The New York Times): Author Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit) pens a lengthy piece on how Google's Project Aristotle delved into data to figure out how its best teams behaved and worked. It all starts with understanding the group's norms, feeling psychologically safe to be yourself within your team, and being able to communicate clearly. A must read. 30-day Trial? 14-day? Freemium? Here’s Why it Probably Doesn’t Matter (MadKudu): Some good insight here for SaaS companies. Turns out it takes about 40 days to get 80% of SaaS conversions — no matter how long your trial period is. 61 Powerful Examples Of Conversion-Driven Website Copy You Need To See (LeadChat): Here are 50 examples of website copy that persuade visitors to convert into leads by taking a specific action. Get inspired to update your copy! 11 Apps to Help You Find Your Focus (Product Hunt): A useful roundup of productivity-enhancing tools, segregated into sound-based and distraction-blocking apps. Deep Habits: Write Your Own E-mail Protocols (Cal Newport): Brilliant tip: when first replying to an email thread, include in your message a “protocol” which identifies the goal of the thread and outlines the least number of steps to accomplish that goal. For example: when replying to schedule a supplier meeting, why not propose 3 possible times to meet right off the bat? More Work Management Reads Think About This: Why Stores Place Candy by the Checkout Counter (And Why New Habits Fail) (James Clear) Everything You Need to Know to Boost Employee Productivity (When I Work) Go Try This: 31 Steps To Work Smart, Not Hard [With Infographics] (Multipotens) How to Generate 10,000 Leads from LinkedIn in Less than 10 Minutes: The 10X-Ray (DocSend) Browse The Work Management Roundup on Flipboard If you use Flipboard on your mobile device, then you can check out these links via The Work Management Roundup magazine. View my Flipboard Magazine.
Product Launch Success: Using Wrike to Connect Marketers and Developers
Launching a new product is a huge undertaking, with the future of the business often riding on its success. You need every team pulling together to coordinate efforts and prevent costly mistakes. Efficient collaboration is essential, especially between two key teams: developers and marketing. Developers to listen to customer feedback and build the ideal solution, and marketers and their marketing program manager to speak to customer needs and capture their interest. Yet getting these two very different teams on the same page can be extremely difficult. They have different processes, priorities, and oftentimes, communication preferences. And if these departments aren’t in the same office, things only get more complicated. Enter Wrike’s project management tool. Breaking Down Barriers Between Teams With a major product launch on the horizon, marketers and developers are both hard at work. The development team is putting in overtime building features, testing code, and squashing bugs, and marketing is tirelessly preparing campaign materials and ensuring they have an accurate, up-to-date picture of the end product. Both teams are sending a volley of emails and files back and forth, and attending a slew of meetings to share status updates that are often out of date as soon as the meeting ends. It’s inefficient, important emails are easily buried, and teams waste time working with outdated information until the next status meeting. Instead of scrambling to stay up to speed, give your marketing and development teams a shared, real-time workspace where they can collaborate without so much time and effort. With Wrike, each team can see what their colleagues are doing and where in the process they are without sending emails or attending time-consuming meetings. Everyone has access to the information, resources, and people they need in one spot, so nothing stands in the way of the best possible product launch. 4 Ways to Get Your Team on the Same Page 1. Shared Custom Dashboards Clear priorities are a must for delivering products on time. Set up a custom Dashboard for your product launch and share it with everyone involved. It's easy to keep tabs on where critical tasks stand and who's responsible for what by glancing at your widgets. 2. Subtasks Link interdepartmental tasks for better organization and coordination between teams. Create a subtask for a press release or brochure that's attached directly to the main feature task so your marketing team has the latest details and can always see its current status. Or, use Wrike’s Zapier integration to automatically create a new task whenever an issue or feature is created in Jira. Your marketing team will always have the latest updates and accurate details without having to interrupt developers. 3. @Mention User Groups Use the @Mention feature to send instant notifications with requests for feedback, instruction, or approval to individual teammates or entire user groups. A developer can @mention the entire marketing team to notify them of a delayed release or an important new feature in a matter of seconds. All @mentions and new assignments are collected in each user's notification center, so nothing gets overlooked. 4. Custom Workflows Every company has its own optimal processes, which is why it's important to use a flexible tool that supports how your teams work. Create custom workflows in Wrike to take tasks and projects all the way from initial development to launch. Handoffs between developers and marketing are as simple as a few mouse clicks, since teammates can simply update a task to pass it on to the next stage in the workflow. Keep Teams Connected with Wrike Wrike makes it easy for all your teams to work together to launch products faster, decrease time to market, and increase market share. With a real-time, collaborative workspace, everyone can see what their teammates are doing and can easily align efforts for improved communication, greater efficiency, and ultimately, a growing business. See how Wrike can tap your team’s potential by starting a free trial.
Letting Users Take the Lead in Choosing their Tools Can Benefit the Whole Business
Recently I came across an article about how hard it can be to introduce new enterprise business intelligence technologies to a company. This article reflects an important corporate phenomenon: “mandating and forcing users to adopt a standard practice or technology will often create resistance and political backlash.” The author underlines that transforming and changing the way people do business is never easy, and she advises the heads of IT departments on the best ways to implement the changes.Why is it so hard to make users adopt the new software introduced by IT departments? One of the reasons is that sometimes the choice of software is made levels above the actual users. In these cases software is adopted without taking users’ opinion into consideration. Often users have no budgets and little decision power, and that is why all software vendors’ marketing efforts are targeted at top management and heads of IT departments, who make the final choice of software. Many experts agree that this fact is convenient for the IT departments, because they get as much control as possible over users’ operations. Top management sometimes may not know the specific character of their employees’ work. That’s why the managers’ choice for software may become an additional barrier for effective collaboration, instead of being a helpful solution. As a result, people can be forced to adapt to the imposed tool that does not answer their requirements and can be hard to master. They may have to spend weeks or even months on training. Still, after all the training efforts, the IT-introduced solution might turn out to be ineffective for successful team work. Information can often be hard to find, as it is kept in disconnected files. Sometimes lack of built-in collaboration vehicles in an IT imposed solution can slow down the whole business. Change in enterprise management software adoption All these factors are making the top-management of many companies change their views on the IT department’s role in the adoption of a new business solution. Now there is a strong tendency of transformation in enterprise software adoption due to growing user sophistication. Social networks, blogs, wikis and other Web 2.0 technologies people use at home help them find similar tools for more effective work in the office. People find new ways to work together and collaborate without any help from IT departments. These ways are Enterprise 2.0 technologies, and they turn out to be more efficient. Why? An Enterprise 2.0 online collaboration platform can make team-work frictionless, as it is more flexible. Second-generation software is designed with user needs in mind. Team members can customize their collaborative space and make it specific to their own needs. The new-generation software is easy to use. Simplicity has become a key driver of technology adoption, especially in the last 10 years, as advanced technologies have developed simpler user interfaces. For example, blogging can be called a revolution of simplicity. To blog, all you need to do is write a title and, some content, and then click publish. It is that simple to share your ideas with the rest of the team and get their feedback in the comments. Collaboration software can do even more for business productivity. It may be the key for streamlining the work process and may help companies avoid unnecessary paper work and phone calls. Everything is kept in one place – a collaborative space that can be accessed by all the team members. Many companies today realize these benefits and take advantage of them by letting their employees choose the software, which will correspond to the end-users’ needs. As an example we can take SightLines Consulting – a consulting company where employees had lots of complaints on complexity of their CRM software. The application was chosen by the top-management. The tool was stable, but end-users kept saying that the application is inflexible and hard to use. The sales people - the end-users of the software – tend to spend most of their working time out of the office, on the road. The major inconvenience was that the application was impossible to access any other way than through their internal network. However, “sales people are motivated to produce” says SightLines Consulting president Thomas Foydel. This means, that they are motivated to find ways and tools to be more productive. The end-users turned to Enterprise 2.0 technologies. When they found a solution that adds actual value to their everyday job, they adopted it. The result was doubling the speed of sales team work and improved customer satisfaction. The whole business became more successful. The top executives at SightLines Consulting are now sure that they made the right decision by letting the sales team choose their tools. Enterprise 2.0 software brings new ways of collaboration and is adopted according to different standards. It’s easy to use, effective and flexible. This software is brought to the enterprise the bottom-up way, and very often is suggested by end-users themselves. It’s no surprise that the second-generation software adoption and usage are more thorough than those of traditional software. Peter Coffee, a recognized software-as-a-service advocate, said that the software that end-users had before might have been stable, mature and predictable, but “it was not transforming people's ideas of how they do business”. I would add that it was not giving them enough space for implementation of their ideas. IT-departments should not ignore this fact. Changing IT-staff altitude towards the new-generation technologies will benefit the whole organization. IT departments need to learn to evaluate the new opportunities. In particular, IT needs additional competency in evaluating and administering service agreements. Enterprise 2.0 is not just software. It represents another way of managing IT. This means that IT departments should now shift their focus toward managing Enterprise 2.0 vendor relationships, as operational responsibility over the actual hardware and software moves to vendors. Some CIOs have already begun to move in this direction. For example, Alastair Behenna, CIO of Harvey Nash, says that their IT staff is looking into emerging technologies and trying to stay in the loop. “We have a lab where our team—from the help desk to the Web folks—is encouraged to spend as much as 10 percent of its time figuring out if there is commercial benefit to something [new] and doing a proof of concept if so,” - Behenna confirms. Of cause transformation of the software adoption process will be different in various companies. Some enterprises will still preserve the old ways of choosing software without taking the end-users’ opinion into consideration. Others have already realized the benefits of letting their employees take the lead in selecting their tools and making teams more productive. Examples of companies like Shell, Harvey Nash and many others, prove that allowing end-users choose the software according to their needs can make the whole business performance better.
Our CEO's Guest Post on Inc.: Why Collaboration is Integral to Success
Do you follow Inc.? Make sure you haven't missed our fearless CEO's latest contributed article on the site! Just to tease your tastebuds: Andrew shares his thoughts on why collaboration, crowdsourcing, and collective wisdom are integral to any organization's success. He also describes how companies that successfully introduce collaboration into their culture ultimately produce successful — if not groundbreaking — results. Andrew's guest article can give you some insight into how everyone from 3-D printing hobbyists to amateur DJs, and Kickstarter companies to large corporations, have thrived using collaboration as a key ingredient to craft their success. "Is collaboration essential to growth? Yes, now more than ever. The lack of recent hype merely suggests that the concept of collaboration has been absorbed into the philosophy of many organizations. And if yours hasn't done it yet, make the change. It should be an integral part of every company's DNA in order to survive and thrive. There are two reasons for this..." To learn more about those two reasons and the companies "doing it right," read the full article on Inc.com.
