Supernova Award Category
The Problem
As our mandate has grown since our inception just three years ago, so does our team. In addition to a number of outsourced service providers all working virtually, we have a core team of 6 individuals, 3 Working Groups (about 48 individuals who volunteer their time and are supported by Partner organizations), and an esteemed Board of Directors (10 individuals), all who work across Canada. It was a significant challenge for our small secretariat to manage this a large virtual team. In addition, Canada's top experts were willing to join our secretariat, but were not willing or unable to move from their established communities in order to set up a traditional office. In order to attract these experts, with a large number of projects on our plates, and given the need to communicate frequently with our team, we ran the risk of overwhelming our email inboxes and losing track of communications, shared files and therefore, losing efficiency, cohesion and orderliness in our work.
The Solution
The issue was identified very early on with the rapid growth of the secretariat staff. While use of email and phone worked to a manageable degree between a few people, the dynamic would change quickly with a larger and growing staff. The Executive Director recognized the need for exploring other options to better organize our files and communications and researched a number of platforms for virtual work. Glip met all of our immediate needs in terms of offering a joint platform for sharing documents, important links, keeping track of our communications and organizing our work by team or project for easy reference. It combined the assets of Dropbox, email, instant messaging and Skype in one user-friendly platform allowing us to streamline our work and conversations.
The results
Prior to using Glip, the staff primarily used e-mail and phone to communicate, and Dropbox and Google Drive to share files. While this was manageable, it did lead to work being spread among various platforms and conversations being broken between different e-mail chains. Most notably, this way of operating was satisfactory for a staff of two; however, with a growing team of virtual staff it would quickly become disorganized and could lead to losing track of conversations, disorganization of files and information, duplication of effort and overall loss of efficiency and orderliness. Since using Glip, it has become our go-to platform for all team communications and file sharing. The use of email among staff members has significantly reduced and conversations are archived in Glip for easy reference. All conversations and files are organized based on specific teams or projects, centralizing the relevant information in a single space and ensuring that the staff can follow all pertinent conversations or projects whether directly involved or playing more of a secondary role. The use of task-setting has been very helpful in keeping projects on track, sticking to deadlines and being aware of each other’s workload and expectations. Overall, Glip has contributed to the greater inclusion of staff members and team cohesion, as well as improved efficiency and convenience in the organization of our work.
Metrics
Our organization has only been using Glip for 3 months and already we have shared more than 400 files, more than 100 links, dozens of notes, divided among some 30 sub-groups/ files and have shared thousands of instant messages. All of these exchanges are centralized on one platform rather than being scattered throughout email exchanges. It is easy to search files, links, notes and go back in past conversations to find any necessary information.
The Technology
Glip is fully searchable, real-time group chat & video chat, task management, file sharing and more, in one easy-to-use app.
see https://glip.com for more info - and its free for anyone to use!
Disruptive Factor
Firstly, our Board and our funder were reluctant to support a virtual team environment. Overcoming a mindset of needing to 'be in the same office' in order to get work done was a major hurdle for the secretariat. In order ton convince these bodies that we could execute, we knew that we needed the right tools.
Learning to use Glip required minor adjustments to our individual organizational style and habits – turning to Glip to send a message rather than email, taking the habit of setting up tasks and referring to these rather than pen to paper “to-do” lists, using the Glip calendar to track meetings and events, etc. - but it caught on quickly. Overall, Glip has complemented our individual organisational styles in ways that work for each of us and the user-friendly interface made the transition to Glip easy and encouraging to continue to use for months to come.
Shining Moment
Our shining moment as an organization was being a partners with the Government of Canada in the landmark funding announcement in May 2014, when Canadians committed $3.5 billion to work towards ending preventable deaths of mothers, newborns and children globally. We are grateful for the tools that allow us to work virtually, to travel to the communities in Canada that contribute to this effort and to work from the communities in the hardest to reach areas of the world.