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Do you already work modern? (Part 3 of 5)

Do you already work modern? My home-office tasks in a modern world (part 3/5) In this blog series we are talking about modern working style on M365

Sebastian Schneider

Sebastian Schneider

During the last two blogs we talked about working modern and some examples of how this can be achieved with skybow. Today I do not want to talk about some specific features of a modern workplace but rather about my own workplace. I do not want to claim that our way of working is modern, and everyone should do it but rather give you insights of how we do it. Especially for this I am interested in your feedback, so feel free to comment below or in our social media channels.

I will highlight three aspects of my work today. I am going to talk about my tasks as a Sales representative, my work as a team leader and the things we do in the finance department.

Sales tasks

My guess for the most used and well-known business app is a CRM. Everyone must manage contacts at some point but with very different needs. Some large consumer-oriented companies need to have huge databases and must use big data programs to get useful information from their databases. We on the other hand bet on deep relationships with partners and customers. For that also the CRM needs are very different. The CRM that I use is skybow built and 100% customized to my needs. I have running tasks on every contact that I communicate with, so I do not forget to stay in touch. To prepare for a meeting, I usually create a short document summarizing the last main elements from previous meetings. Sometimes I flag certain elements as crucial so that get highlighted in my reports. My challenge is to use the least amount of time to prepare while still having every information that I need. With this I get to an average of 11.2 external meetings per week. Me personally I get highly motivated by numbers and statistics like this and I want to make the number go as high as possible. For others, numbers like this can be extra pressure so we keep those features optional.

Team leader tasks

This leads me to my next part about being a team leader. Motivation and purpose are in my opinion main driver for employee satisfaction. The tricky thing though is that people get motivation and purpose from very different sources. Every three month all skybow employees must think about their personal goals for themselves and for skybow and how they want to achieve them. We determine steps that are necessary to take to achieve these goals from skybow management and from the employee. We also assess what gives the employee a feeling of purpose and real meaning so that everyone has an intrinsic motivation to do their work every day. To track this, we use an Employee Management app build on skybow technology. The app sends reminders that an exchange is coming up. It has an overview of everything that was agreed on during former sessions and gives the opportunity to review the process of every given goal. This makes it easy to communicate about what was done and what needs to be done while still being flexible to adjust if necessary.

Finance tasks

Last but not least I want to talk about finances. From a finance perspective there are basically only two things that matter: Revenue vs. costs. All of it is tracked by a custom build skybow based finance application which is connected with Power BI to have a better overview and Zuora which is handling our subscriptions. Let us first talk about costs. To manage costs, it is vital to have budgets and to stick to those budgets. Every cost that we have gets flagged with a budget so that we have a live overview of current costs. If a budget gets exceeded an email will be send to every manager responsible for the budget and we can evaluate as a group, why the budget is exceeded and if we need to act on it. Luckily, this happens very seldomly at skybow because I believe that with a well designer overview it is much easier to stick to your budgets. Lastly, I would like to talk about revenues. Logically we also forecast revenues and we have a similar system in place but this time it goes both ways. If the revenues in a region are lower than expected, we get notified and think together what we can do to change it. If revenues exceed expectations, we have a re-invest system where we take the extra money and invest it into projects that will grant us benefits in the future.

I could keep this blog going for 8 more pages but I will leave it for now. If you are interested in more examples in how skybow is integrated into everyday working situation do not hesitate to ask and if you want to see a live example book a demo here.

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Sebastian Schneider
CEO, skybow

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