“Common working method and better collaboration“

We have gained a significantly better overview

How would you describe your challenges at Elko before you started this training effort?

“We can really say that we faced two different challenges. Firstly, we have a fairly long background as a relationship-building organisation that primarily likes to be out and about meeting people and “doing business”. Here, we identified quite early on a lack of both documentation and structure around this, which needed to be fixed.”

“We also needed help to explore all the tools that are currently available in Microsoft 365 that can facilitate sales work. There we learned, among other things, not to work so much after the inbox, but rather with tasks and to-do lists in Outlook. We have received help to work more structured and be more organised in Outlook. Our organisation is still under construction in terms of digital maturity, but thanks to Effektiv Nu, we have still come a long way.”

 

How was your experience of the training?

“Very good! There are actually two different courses that we have taken. Partly it is the Work Smarter and Personal Efficiency training course that all employees have had to attend, which is about working more efficiently and more structured on a more individual basis. Here the employees learned how to handle our Microsoft tools better, as well as learning how to structure their own inbox. The second training course that we took was Internal Traffic Rules, which was more about how we would best handle the transition to Microsoft Teams as a new platform and storage location.”

“There are still a lot of people who work in the traditional way, but more and more of us have adapted the new way of working. We try to remind each other and we now have all our common tools and documents in different Teams-channels.”

“Before, we communicated internally both vie email, phone calls and text messages. Today, everything is more consolidated, and we have now set up guidelines for how our internal communication should be conducted. We also have greater clarity about where we save our documents, which makes it easier to find what you are looking for among shared files, something that has been very useful.”

 

What effects have you been able to see from completing these two training courses at Elko?

“Some of our employees absorbed the knowledge very quickly and work more efficiently today, while others find it a bit more challenging transitioning to our  internal traffic rules when it comes to internal communication and storage via Teams.”

“But I absolutely think that the majority of us now work quite hard according to the internal traffic rules that we have set up together with Effektiv Nu. Today, when we have more or less consolidated everything in Teams, we have gained a much better overview and it is so much easier to find among shared documents and quickly find answers to questions.”

 

How are you moving forward after the training?

“The training with Effektiv Nu was one of our many digitalisation projects that we carried out last year. Simultaneously, we are also working hard right now to structure our CRM system, where the combination with our new internal traffic rules makes it easier to manage all digital information. However, we still have a lot to learn, where the focus during this year will mainly be on repeating, updating and trying to stick to what we have decided. The most important thing now is that we don’t go back to our previous way of working.”

“Then I think that in the future, we may have to evaluate our new working methods and see if there is anything left to develop. It will probably happen more at the management team level where we review how things have gone and how we can get even more people to work according to our internal traffic rules and make everyone understand how excellent it actually is.”

 

What would you say to someone who is thinking about whether this might be something for them?

“Attending a course where you learn how to structure the way you work with the digital tools that are already in place and that everyone actually has access to today, is something that really makes everyone’s everyday life easier. That you actually get to know all the shortcuts and opportunities available in Microsoft 365. One example is that you don’t use Outlook as a mailbox.”

“We really only use a fraction of all the tools included in Microsoft 365, where there are incredibly large opportunities. We have essentially taken charge of Teams and made sure that all our documents have been moved over to the SharePoint cloud storage. We would have to get started with even more tools, such as Planner, but you have to take one thing at a time.”

“Together with Effektiv Nu, exploring all the possibilities in Microsoft 365 can result both in a common way of working and better collaboration.”