With the worldwide pandemic bringing an abrupt halt to many traditional office environments, teams must adjust to remote work. But how can a team adapt to such a sudden shift in a working environment and still maintain communication and achieve their ambitious goals? That’s the exact problem one of our customers, Telligence faced in the beginning of 2020.
Telligence is an Australian company that has, over the last 15 years, grown from building and managing custom websites to launching Member Jungle – a membership software system that makes it easy to manage membership databases and online presence. They have around 10 people working for them.
We talked with Michael Barwell, CEO and Founder of Telligence. Michael is the one who implemented Weekdone in their team. And he had to deal with moving their company from working in the office to working from home. So he can share first hand experience on how they found Weekdone and why they decided to use it.
Telligence looked for OKRs but also found Weekly Planning
They started looking at OKRs as a way of setting goals more than half a year ago. And during the process evaluated many OKR softwares. Around that time, the Covid pandemic also forced them like many other companies to start working remotely.
While they already knew that they needed to set and follow goals, when working from home, sharing their weekly plans and accomplishments became paramount. “We found out that Weekdone, in addition to managing OKRs, actually makes the daily and weekly tracking transparent,” said Michael. On choosing Weekdone he added that: “both the app and the interface were far more beautiful than the other options we looked at.”
Adopting Weekdone
Michael said that implementing OKRs and weekly planning went smoothly for them.
During their trial they familiarized themselves with the help materials and learned how to use Weekdone from our video materials. . “And right at the start we had an introductory session with Weekdone’s Customer Success.” says Michael.
“From the OKR perspective, because we had used similar methods before and were in the rhythm of having quarterly goals, the team took it up really well. We had a few sessions where we went over the specifics of OKRs and the tighter focus on goals. He added that as they are a tech company, looking at examples of how OKRs are used in Google and other similar companies made it easy to get people on board.”
Using Weekdone for Remote Work
As OKRs need constant attention, they use Weekdone every week to make sure that they are on track with everything.
As they are working remotely, they have a daily Google Meet call to go over everyone’s daily priorities. To keep focus on OKRs, they also have a weekly meeting with team managers. “Every Monday morning we have a review of what people have done and we look at our goals.” said Michael: “the weekly reports we get from Weekdone bring clarity to these meetings.”
Weekly Reporting
Weekly reports or weekly check-ins are a status reporting feature for tracking your weekly plans and achievements. It helps you:
- Organize and report your weekly plans and connect them to your OKRs;
- Receive reports on team and company activities and progress’
In Weekdone, you have a personal page – “your form” – that you fill in daily or at least once per week. You should write out 3-7 plans that you want to get done by the end of the week. It lets your co-workers and manager know what you plan to achieve this week. And it showcases your last week’s accomplishments, and the challenges that you face.
More Transparency, Less Confusion
When it comes to the benefits Telligence has gotten from using Weekdone, Michael said, it offers team transparency in a beautiful way. “I would definitely recommend Weekdone as not only does it help you track your OKRs, it helps to set a weekly focus towards these OKRs.“
If you would like to know more about OKRs, you can get a free ebook called “Step by Step Guide to OKRs”. Or, you can sign up for Weekdone and learn how to implement it in your team.