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Streamline Your Creative and Digital Asset Workflows With Wrike
We’ve recently enhanced our offering for creative and digital asset workflows that we’re sure will level up processes for creative teams. We can’t wait to share these updates with you, so read on to learn about what’s new at Wrike for creatives.
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
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 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 Helps Yourbiz Earn 25% More Revenue With 10% Fewer Resources
“How do you Wrike?” It’s a common question we ask customers in our customer advocacy program Wrike Stars. As you can imagine, the answers vary across industries and use cases, but we love hearing the variety of responses! In today’s ‘How I Wrike’ interview, we meet Pietro Poli, the Chief Operating Officer of Yourbiz, a marketing agency based out of Treviolo, Italy. Get an inside look at how Pietro and his colleagues integrate Wrike into their everyday operations to streamline tasks, create order out of chaos, and deliver exceptional services to clients across the globe. “Thanks to Wrike, we solved many of our problems and generated 25% more revenue with 10% fewer resources.” How’d they do it? Let’s dive in to get the details. What does your company do? PP: My company Yourbiz works with manufacturing companies that produce in Italy and sell worldwide, especially in the B2B market. We help them acquire, nurture, and transform potential customers into paying customers via demand generation activities. What department do you work in and how is your team structured? PP: I work with two departments: marketing and content. The marketing team has two branches — demand generation and ecommerce. This department has two team leaders and six people who work alongside us. I'm also the team leader for the content department, which has four copywriters, two SEO Specialists, and two SEM specialists. What is your job function? Describe a day in your life using Wrike. PP: I am the Chief Operating Officer at Yourbiz. My responsibilities span three different categories: Collaborating with my colleagues to support their marketing or content endeavors, provide guidance on technical matters, and help them achieve their goals. Overseeing the entire team's workload through Wrike, actively assisting colleagues in resolving any bugs, monitoring incoming intake requests, and creating informative dashboards for efficient information retrieval. As a trainer, I frequently attend events and webinars and visit prospect and customer companies to educate them on demand generation and HubSpot, sharing valuable insights and knowledge. Which Wrike features do you feel most knowledgeable about? PP: Wrike no longer has many secrets for me as I'm becoming an onboarding partner. I especially love: Workload chart The ability to see in real time how much teammates are loaded with work and to be able to make forecasts on what can be sold to obtain an optimal load. Try Wrike free Wrike Analyze Even though I don't consider myself a true Wrike Analyze guru, having a background as a marketer and data analyst, I spend a lot of time creating new data visualizations and discovering trends that I never would have seen in other ways. Automations Coming from the CRM world, marketing automation, and CRO, being able to create automations to simplify and execute the work is a huge benefit for all our teams love. We save a ton of time and can focus more on impactful work for clients. Please provide 2-4 examples of processes you use Wrike to support. PP: As I mentioned in the Wrike Community, we use Wrike throughout all our business processes. Whether it's a website development, marketing campaign, or strategic analysis, we have implemented and continue to implement and maintain specific processes and blueprints to help us in the work. Example #1: Integrating other software The process I’m most proud of in Wrike is integrating TimeLog with our billing software. It combines information on the budget available for each project with the hours that we schedule (effort) and the hours used. This process lets us know in advance if we’ll "overrun" when entering the project. It's incredible! Try Wrike free Example #2: Customizing project workflows One of our web agency’s most important services is creating client websites. All departments are involved in these activities (sales, product marketing, content, developers, graphics, etc.). It took me three weeks to implement the process — designing a large workflow, defining all the dependencies, and all the possible activities (optional and otherwise). Only at that point did we create the blueprint. Every six months we do a review because things change quickly. Example #3: Wrike request forms We use Wrike custom request forms for a variety of reasons, but here are the top two. Request for quotes with new clients We ensure a seamless and efficient client onboarding process through a dedicated request form that our sales team utilizes when approaching new clients. This form contains a comprehensive set of interview questions that our salesperson can refer to during the client meeting. By using this form within Wrike, our team avoids the need to work with external files, and all the information gathered is conveniently stored within the platform. After the interview, if a quote is needed, a different form is filled out, specifying objectives, client budget, and analysis requirements. Wrike then automatically creates tasks and subtasks for each analysis. It’s a manual process, but our goal is to automate it in the future, ensuring more efficient client onboarding. Transfer of new contracts Every time a contract is signed, the salesperson must use a specific form to pass it over to operations, the administrative office, and the PM. The PM confirms the salesman's request, with an approval, and completes all the missing information in the created task using a custom item type. At this point, the operations and administration teams receive an approval. They create the job in Wrike and ERP software and kick off the tasks. Try Wrike free Which Wrike features or use cases do you want to learn more about? PP: Working with production companies that produce in Italy and sell all over the world, it would be very useful to know how other similar manufacturing companies have leveraged Wrike to communicate the value of the software even to more structured companies. What’s your story? Want to tell your Wrike story and be featured in a customer spotlight? Join our exclusive customer advocacy program where you can connect and network with other Wrike users. When you do, you’ll get your chance to earn points, badges, and rewards by completing fun activities, participating in the Wrike Community, and amplifying the Wrike brand.
Step-By-Step Process How To Build a Wrike Request Form
Work requests can be big, or small, come in via email, direct message, conference call, and of course, the most dreaded — the "pop-in" request. With a variety of channels, it can be chaotic and difficult to keep track of everything and what projects are high priority. Not anymore with Wrike’s custom request forms. What are Wrike request forms? Wrike's request forms help you automate your work intake, route all requests to one place from internal and external customers, and ensure requesters provide the information you need. Translation: you have more control and can kickstart work immediately. Request forms don’t just streamline work intake, they also enable you to create tasks, workflows, and entire projects automatically — saving you and your team hours of time. Wrike request forms can also launch blueprints, which are templates for new work items and are designed to replicate recurring tasks such as writing a new blog post or press release. During this process, all necessary tasks, owners, and due dates are automatically created as well. When you create a project from a blueprint via the request form, project progress settings are preserved, along with the date and custom field rollup settings and the statuses of any subitems. In the end, request forms and blueprints both increase efficiency, helping you save time and eliminate admin work so that you can start focusing immediately on more impactful work. How to build request forms in Wrike Step 1: Navigate to the space where you want to create a request form Step 2: Click the gear icon in the top-right corner Try Wrike free Step 3: Select Request forms Step 4: Click ‘Create a Request form’ if it’s the first request form in the space, or + Form if the space already contains existing forms. Step 5: Insert form information Enter a name for your request form (Optional) Provide a description for the form to help users understand what it’s for and when to submit it. Move to the right-hand panel and specify: The space your form should belong to Who should be able to see the form (everyone in your Wrike account, specific users and groups, or nobody in your account) If the form should create a new task or project, duplicate a task or project, or create an item from a blueprint Note: to create an item from a blueprint, first select ‘Duplicate task’ or ‘Duplicate project’ from this dropdown, then select ‘template task,’ and finally, the ‘blueprint’ tab. (Optional) Designate whether you want to enable a public link to the form (for non-Wrike users) and if it should trigger email notifications or contain a CAPTCHA security feature (Optional) Select the folder, project, or space where the items created via the form should be placed Note: If you don’t select anything at this step, the item created via form submission will be placed in the ‘Shared with me’ folder (Optional) Select a status for the task or folder that will be created after form submission. If you don’t select a status, tasks and projects created via request submission will have the first active status of the workflow applied to the folder, project, or space where they’re created. (Optional) Select a user to assign the created task or project (Optional) Set up an approval to be created via the request form (Optional) Add a prefix. You can set a prefix for tasks and projects duplicated via a request. The prefix will be a specified answer and is added to all associated subfolders, subprojects, tasks, and subtasks upon submission. Step 6: Customize form inputs After completing the steps above, click + Add question Select the question type you’d like to add from the dropdown menu Try Wrike free Step 7: Customization continued Enter your question and available answers (depending on the question type) (Optional) Enter ‘helper’ text to add additional information about the question. This information is visible to requesters but won’t appear on the resulting task or project. Click ‘Required’ to make a given question mandatory to complete and submit the form. You can also make questions and answers in your request form conditional, so requesters are redirected to different questions based on their form inputs. You can also map responses telling Wrike how to use certain answers in the created task or project Publish or save your new request form How will you use Wrike request forms to organize work? For more details and to learn more about Wrike’s request forms, visit our help center. To set up an approval process in Wrike, please take a look at this how-to article.