When you join a team in a bigger organisation you immediately get to work learning “how things are done here”. There is already a system in place. But for our team at Amy Who? Digital, 2022 has been about creating new systems and processes for a small team from scratch.
It’s been a challenge.
Ever felt like you have been dropped from a great height and demanded to hit the ground running? We felt like we were gangly and super awkward for the first steps of working as a brand new team.
Not long ago , it seemed like yesterday, we joked together at Amy Who? Digital about our
teamwork feeling like a baby giraffe being born. We were sort of wriggling on the ground for a bit while we adjusted to being born (sounds gross right?) .
It felt hard and we really need to support each other and not freak out.
A few weeks later we have overcome some of our small team growth issues and would love to share with you how we have achieved it. Our growth issues were initially around these key points and we are now wrangling them back into a more positive and connected workflow.
Briefing each other on shared tasks as a small team with Click Up
One thing that happens a lot in small teams is tasks that are shared or collaborative. A challenge this presents is communicating the goal and also the task not getting lost in one person's upstairs “brain hard drive”.
When we initially started assigning out work that had previously been solely Amy’s workload we realised stuff was getting missed in the complexity. Enter Click Up, a task management software which is a collaborative dashboard.
Areas of work can be separated into spaces and linked via zapier with other programs we use to draw tasks in automatically. So far it’s going okay in Click Up although of course we all had to learn a new program which also took a while and was clumsy initially.
Being nimble with timely tasks in Slack
Need something urgent to get done in your pipeline and it can't sit on a to do list for any time? Okay so we recently tried to collaborate on a client project and it needed to be worked on as a team. Most of the conversations about quick stuff or stuff that’s urgent would happen for us in Slack.
Using Slack with channels based on our clients has helped to target our communication to each other and keep our conversations ordered and searchable. Sometimes we forget and post something about our lives in the wrong chat but it’s been super helpful to be able to search back up a detail later and keep the task moving. Where was that bit we said about that thing?
Keeping our documents ordered with Dropbox
There have been moments as we started to form this small team that felt like someone had thrown a deck of cards up and said “52 pick up!”. We all have our own way of storing and filing our documents and this becomes a challenge when everyone needs to access the same information.
Moving into a team setup meant we needed to find a nice easy place for everything and Dropbox has fulfilled this for us. We can keep all of our clients documents organised and filed in this system and it can be accessed from a phone or computer anywhere. Dropbox is where we keep completed documents and assets. We use Google Drive for ‘works in progress’. We find Google Docs, Sheets and Slides are great for collaboration with their inbuilt tools for tracking changes, adding comments and editing.
Organising ‘a million’ passwords with 1Password
Initially the task of getting three people working securely across three locations on sometimes different devices was a total hassle to be honest. We spent a few weeks using a pretty rudimentary method of sharing passwords until we installed a program called 1Password.
Being a digital company it was super important to ensure our clients logins were securely stored and that we had two factor security enabled.
1password has a browser plugin and it can store multiple users' passwords within a company profile so you don't have to keep sending yourself emails when you forget!
Juggling meeting time with Calendly
Getting three busy remote workers people on a call at the same time can be challenging. Calendly lets us see each other's schedules and book a mutually agreeable time without wasting time on back and forth meeting time negotiations. The best thing is that when we book a meeting the Zoom link is automatically created and sent to all attendees.
Calendly is also great for sending to current and prospective clients who want to book a time with us for consulting and training. There is even a payment integration so consulting clients can easily book and pay for one off consults or training sessions easily.
Calendly integrates with:
Google Calendar and iCal making meetings visible for everyone.
Slack to help with scheduling
All the popular video conferencing and email clients
Facebook pixel for track engagement with booking pages
Salesforce, Hubspot & LinkedIn messaging
Weekly wins, challenges and goals meetings with Zoom
Saving the best till last here.
We have initiated a really important part of our weeks together sharing our wins, challenges and goals. This quick session over Zoom means that face to face we can check in with each other and be transparent about any work or personal challenges we might be facing. We each have five minutes to talk through our current situation and how we went last week.
It has proved invaluable to bring up areas we need to grow and to form some solid goals together.
It’s also really important to build our connection as a team and to remember that we are all human and manage families, dogs, cats, birds and lives outside of work.
Amy Who? Digital specialises in creating audits and marketing data analysis on websites as well as implementing the techniques needed to improve their reach and conversion rate. If you would like to chat to us about your website click here >>