Some of our users have asked us for tips on how to onboard the rest of their team. Here’s a best practice guide for how to onboard your team onto Sendtask:
#1. Motivation
Start with why you want your team to use Sendtask and move away from Email (or other non-task means of communication).
Why will we use Sendtask for tasks instead of email going forward?
Some of the reasons that we frequently hear from our users are:
- Tasks in emails can easily get lost within a conversation.
- Tasks in emails aren’t trackable and there’s no way to see which tasks you’ve assigned to someone else.
- It takes a lot of time and effort to update your collaborators if your schedule changes. You have to manually email them when the due date shifts. In Sendtask, this is taken care of as soon as you update the due date on a task.
Also, keep in mind that your teammates can still use email to create tasks on Sendtask through our email integration.
What are the alternatives to email?
Sendtask definitely isn’t the only alternative. But we think it’s the best mix of functionality, flexibility, and simplicity.
You could do with Post-Its but that becomes messy very fast and doesn’t allow you any kind of overview or automated communication.
You could also use very sophisticated project management tools like JIRA but there’s a very steep learning curve and everyone needs to have an account first.
We believe that Sendtask is the right mix of both worlds. It combines the simplicity of Post-Its with many of the features of more complex collaboration software.
#2. Functionality
Then, it’s best to give your teammates a tour of Sendtask’s features. If you’re ready to convince your team to use Sendtask, you probably know most of these. However, we’ve linked all of them to their page in our tour if you would like some additional reference.
The Layout
-The list view and task detail view
–Filters and Sort options
Task Functionality
–The view for a received task for signed-in users and users without an account
Projects
We’ve seen that it is helpful to create a project together with your teammates during this session to give them a very clear idea of how projects work.
Miscellaneous
-Mobile App
#3. Rules And Workflow
Now that your team knows why you are going to switch to Sendtask and how Sendtask works, there are two more important questions:
- What to use Sendtask for?
- How to use Sendtask?
What to use Sendtask for?
A lot of our users replace all email communication that calls for an action with Sendtask. They only allow communication via email that doesn’t expect a feedback. An example of this is “Please note that the elevator is being repainted today”. Everything else that expects an answer (“Can you please send that report?”, “Please let me know the dates you’ll be on holiday”, …) goes into Sendtask.
Our users tell us that it took them between two and three weeks to get everyone to switch to Sendtask but once they got used to it, everyone became more productive.
How to use Sendtask?
Sendtask is a tool and is flexible to adapt to your workflow. This framework is one example of how to use Sendtask. It’s in use successfully by many of our users:
- Each task needs to have a due date and assignee set. If not, the task might get lost because it will not show up in anyone’s ‘Assigned To Me’ view.
- At the end of the day, there should be no tasks left with overdue due dates. Everyone must change the due date of incomplete tasks to a realistic due date. This is important to give everyone an accurate idea of when they can expect feedback for their tasks.
- If a task creator is likely to do something with the results of the task (e.g. they will further process a report they have asked for), then the task should not be completed by the assignee but it should be re-assigned to the task creator.
These three basic rules have helped many of our users to get very good visibility on their team’s progress.
#4. Q&A And Next Steps
We recommend that before you finish the meeting, you get everyone onboarded on Sendtask and exchange some tasks. Ask everyone to copy over their tasks from wherever they tracked them previously – could be from their inbox, a written note or other.
Clarify who the right contact to ask is for questions. Typically, questions about the workflow and how to use Sendtask will be answered by someone in your team. If questions about Sendtask in general arise or something doesn’t work the way it’s expected, use the blue Intercom button on our site or our Help pages to find answers.
We wish you good luck and a very productive meeting with your team! Let us know if you have amendments for this guide!
