Workflows & Team Structure

Set up core company teams to help people get work done.

Why

Teams are the heart of Peerbie, where teams gather to get things done. Ensuring core teams are set up before launch helps drive immediate value and educates people on how they should be setting up their own teams for their day-to-day work.

Strategy/ Approach

1. Top down – bottom up feedback

Organizations communicate top-down to broadcast messages to employees, but communication should never be a one-way street. Creating a feedback loop helps ensure opinions and ideas from everyone feed into how the organization is run, and that employees feel valued and heard. With Peerbie, employees can engage with company announcements and provide open and valuable feedback through comments Start building your two-way communication strategy by moving company-wide email communications to an FYI group.

Examples of these teams include ‘All Employee FYI’, ‘London Announcements’, ‘UK Social’

2. Team communication

This is where the day-to-day work gets done. Think about each team in your organization and create a team for that team with the manager as an admin. Encourage your champions to create teams for each of the projects they’re leading as well. Next time someone goes to send a lengthy ‘mass email’ put it into the team or project team on Peerbie and collaborate much more efficiently. 

These teams should have the “To-Do List” option turned on with a frequency of collaboration posts set to daily. So that teams have a daily home with this post with auto-comments on how the team is working together.

Examples of these teams include ‘Marketing Team’, ‘Western Region HR Team’, ‘Website Relaunch Project’

HULUSI – Team Collaboration post 

3. Cross-functional collaboration

One of the more challenging communication flows for organizations is the ability to collaborate across regions, languages, and teams. With Peerbie, you can grow and develop collective knowledge through open discussion or team Peerbie, helping to bring the whole organization together.

Examples of these teams include ‘Bright Ideas’, ‘Customer Experience Ideas’, ‘IT Helpdesk’. Also, think about having a feedback team for each team so everyone knows exactly how to reach out to them. Some examples include ‘Marketing Feedback’, ‘IT Feedback’

4. Working with people outside your company

Peerbie is not just for your internal employees. You can work with external collaborators like agencies, vendors and volunteers in Peerbie using External Teams. For more information on External Teams, check out this guide

Pro Tip: Adding ‘EXT’ to the name of External Team will highlight to your internal team members that this is a team with people outside your organization.

Tactical how to

When creating your teams make sure you think about:

Privacy settings

Who is the intended audience for the team and how useful is it to people in the organization?

• Open – Anyone can find the team using search and see the content (Note: content from open teams can appear on anyone’s newsfeed)
• Closed – Anyone can find the team and see its description using Peerbie search but only members can see the content
• Private – Only members of the team can find the team and see the content
• External — For external members outside the organization. They are by default private (invisible) to everyone else 

Service permissions

Who do you want to be able to post on the team? Think about the importance of the content (e.g. you might only want select people to post in an all-company team)

• Service permissions
• Anyone can take action with services

Team membership

There are several ways to control membership to teams

• Individual invite – Invite colleagues one by one (good for small team teams)
• CSV  invite – Invite people using a list of email addresses (perfect for large groups 25+)

Key takeaways

• Define your team naming convention.
• Define and create your launch day team structure and then create your teams for launch ensuring you have admins and a content strategy in place.
• Bring repetitive or common workflows into Peerbie (HR/IT Helpdesk for example).
• Make sure announcement teams are moderated to control content quality.