Our essential WFH tools

If there were such a thing as a ‘best mate’ agency, Idealogy’s would be our good friends at Dialect in Bath. David, their Global MD, has just written a useful piece on the tools and processes that power the WFH culture that they, like us, have been cultivating for the last few years. As our agencies use almost identical tools, (David and I drinking together and ‘agency tools’ being one of our ‘rock n roll’ topics of conversation might have something to do with that), I thought I’d share his post.

A couple of weeks in to most companies and teams seriously working from home, this is a useful checklist if you and your teams have had any teething problems with cloud-based remote working so far. Over to you David...

“I am sure there are better tools and better processes, but if you are looking for an understanding of what approach you need to help your team WFH, you might find our experience of some use.

We have a particular culture and a set of principles which will have influenced the choices we have made when it comes to tools. We are all adults with responsibilities and the expectation is that we deliver regardless of where we happen to be. We also have an open and transparent culture: so information is shared rather than kept secret, people are encouraged to share problems and to question anything.

GSuite: used for email, calendar, drive (and sheets, docs, slides). In terms of WFH benefit, basically you can sign in from any computer and still access the full suite of tools and all of the shared drives.

Slack: by far the most important tool when it comes to internal (and some external) comms. Email is banished internally, and therefore all comms are done in an organised way (by #channel) and with an open and transparent way. Some of our clients also use Slack, so it is easy to set up a shared channel for projects we are working on together. Slack integrates with all of our other tools.

Zoom: it is critical to enable face-to-face time with clients as well as with your own team (especially when WFH). There are other videoconference systems out there, but we have found Zoom to be super reliable and it is also pretty standard amongst most of our clients. Added benefit to Zoom is we use it for internal Lunch n Learns (webinars) which we can continue to do when everybody is working from home.

TimeTastic: this is used for booking time off. It is super easy to use and integrates with Slack (telling you who is away every morning) and with Google Calendar (so you can see who is away in any given day/week). Before today, we also used this to let people know when individuals working from home!

Airtable: a very powerful cloud-based database tool which we use for a number of things: (i) to manage and track media campaigns, (ii) to manage and track content assets, (iii) to create project plans and timelines, and (iv) to manage and track all of our projects from an admin point of view. It has a familiar and user-friendly UI with a very powerful database engine and you can create multiple views of the data (including external views for clients which is particularly useful if you need clients to sign off assets or to be kept informed on status of various elements of a complex campaign).

Frame.io: for all our video work, we use frame.io to share videos with the team and clients to aggregate all feedback in one place (and on the video timeline). Essential tool for any video agency. Our clients love this!

DocuSign: for all paperwork that needs multiple signatures. Way easier to manage than using scans or photos of signed docs sent via email.

There are a few other tools that we use for sales pipeline management, social media positing/scheduling, data visualisation, etc... and even though some of these are more specialised, these are still all tools we can use in the cloud from anywhere and on any machine.”