Evolution of the workspace.

In the past few months at my company #Visionarea, there has been a deep transformation in the way we work and I thought this might help other small company owners like myself in their struggle for growth.

First of all, let me give you some key facts about who we are.

• 30 employees full time.
• At peak with freelancers some weeks, we almost reach the 100 mark.
• We are spread out in Spain in 4 locations, Madrid, Barcelona, Marbella and Mallorca, but have many international projects we need to support offsite.
• Our smallest office has 2 people working full time, the largest 20.
• We have a mix of open office, open workshop, open warehouse.

So, with this setup, our main challenges were and still are:

• Make people feel closer and share their day to day even though they only see each other a few times a year.
• Keep the vision and direction from me as the CEO fresh and present.
• Help middle management and I work together as a team.
• Get some metrics on the status of the different projects.

Ideally, all of this would happen within one tool, but I soon discovered there was nothing Ideal about software tools, we ended up with far too many whiles trying to get the jobs done the way we wanted. So eventually we were forced to cut things down in order to make a viable workflow.

Currently, we are still using many more tools than I would like but we have not found tools that can do more of the tasks we need. this is what our software tool kit looks like now.

• Flexrental: this is a tool specific to our industry which helps us manage our inventory, create pricing models and proposals and we also submit invoices within the platform.
• Email: no brainer, no need to explain.
• Google Calendar: we use for shared calendars for different locations and different colour codes for the status of each project.
• Dropbox: File repository and sharing platform.
• Asana: Task and project management, meeting memos and agendas. Assigning task remotely.
• Workplace: Sharing social events, getting or giving immediate feedback, best practice tutorials, giving loves and likes, sharing photos and videos of the day to day work.
• Whatsapp: we create different groups some internal and others external which include freelancers these groups where the freelancers are included are exclusively for ongoing projects on site.

Far too many I know, but we have a plan, before the end of the year we want to on board G Suite in order to cut down on the number of software we use, basically by onboarding g suite, our email, calendar and file storage will all be in one tool so our number of tools will drop from 7 to 5.

Also, looking at the way that workplace is developing it could well be that in the near future it might be able to replace the functionality we currently use in ASANA, that would mean dropping down to only 4 tools which honestly would be ideal.

This is how we are doing it right now, but obviously, I expect changes as new tools come to the market and the needs of our team changes.

I hope this little bit of insight can be of help to the community here on Linked-in, as I love to give back a little in exchange for everything I have learnt.

Daniel Pycock

CEO and Founder

Visionarea.es