Aivar Kisel is responsible for international relocations at Adduco, a moving services company. In 2017, Aivar realized that Fleep could become the central pillar of their company’s communication. He believed Fleep had the potential to make internal communication faster.
Aivar’s instincts proved correct. Today, Adduco enjoys a central platform for its team’s communication resulting in 2X faster responses and transparent communication.
Seeking a Better Way to Communicate
Adduco has established itself as a professional moving service. With more than 10 years of experience in the field, they offer moving services for individuals and businesses, heavy duty moves, furniture assembly as well as storage services.
Coordinating a relocation relies on communication — coordinating 1000 relocations a month requires well-organized, effective communication.
The company has a team of project managers in the office, and moving specialists who are constantly on the go. Aivar explains that the company has come a long way in improving its internal communications:
“Our internal team communication used to be disorganized. We had one Facebook group conversation for all the office workers, and a mix of text messages, calls, emails and random Facebook Messenger conversations on top of that.”
The main downside of this chaos was that any piece of information was difficult to track down later.
“Often, you’d have to skim through all the different channels to find that one piece of information you were looking for.”
Another major bugbear for the company was that everyone was included in the one group conversation. So everyone was involved in every discussion — when that was not necessary or really helpful.
At home, Aivar heard how his spouse’s company uses a centralized team chat platform to organize their work communications. So, Aivar decided to introduce Fleep to the company.
Introducing Fleep for Organized Communication
Moving services involve a lot of coordination One of Aivar’s favorite features of Fleep is the possibility to set up several team conversations around different facets of the business. This allows focused conversations around the topics.
“We set up separate conversations around the different topics. We use them for discussion as well as for managing tasks related to the topics. In this way, information is well-organized and our internal communication is systematic.”
So, for example, the team that stays in the office has organized their internal communication around the following topics:
- Car fleet & its upkeep
- Team & hiring
- Meetings coordination
- Mishaps and accidents on-site
- Lunch
- Offtopic
- Warehouse
The communication between the office workers and the movers happens primarily in the following channels:
- General info & updates
- Project managers & Drivers
Fleep is also great for sharing information quickly, when it’s necessary. Every mover has a 1:1 conversation with their direct manager, where information is shared.
“When the movers run into any obstacles on-site, they can send a picture to the project managers in a matter of seconds. Before Fleep, this was done over email, which is a way clunkier channel for such quick communication.”
For the Project Managers, Fleep provides an overview of the current relocations, allowing them to coordinate the logistics around them.
“They share and receive the details of different relocations on Fleep, so they have one place where they have an overview of all current jobs.”
The movers also use Fleep to coordinate their own communication.
“The movers use Fleep to agree on the time and place for when they meet on the day of the move. Earlier, this happened over several text messages and calls.”
Read more: How to Improve Team Communication
Dedicated Conversations for International Relocations
Adduco’s project managers also share all guidelines and information related to international relocations in Fleep. Everyone who needs to know the details is included in the conversation, and can access the details whenever they need to.
“Most local relocations do not need a dedicated Fleep conversation, as all the details are simply shared in a detailed Excel sheet. However, all bigger projects that span weeks, and all international relocations do get a dedicated Fleep conversation. There’s a lot of information that needs to be exchanged.”
Previously, the details instructions for international relocations were written in the form of a Word document, and shared over email. Now, the guidelines are shared in Fleep, and pinned to the conversation’s pinboard.
So, everyone involved in the relocation can easily access it, ask questions and give feedback in the dedicated conversation.
“In this way, we avoid getting the same questions from different people, as the conversation around the move is transparent. Communication does not happen in silos and information does not get stuck.”
Moving Beyond Communication: Collaboration
In addition to team-wide communication and cross-team communication, Adduco also makes use of Fleep’s collaboration features — tasks and pins.
Tasks are mainly used by the office workers, who create and assign quick tasks to each other, and mark them as fulfilled when appropriate.
“When a Project Manager has to send a car for repairs, this is set up as a task for him or her on Fleep. When the car has been repaired, they will mark the task as done. Similarly, this is used for client calls. So, you can create a task with a phone number and details, assign it to the appropriate person — and then it will be their responsibility to make the call.”
Pinned messages are used for highlighting important information, or whenever there are guidelines that should be easily found.
“For example, the guidelines of an international relocation will be pinned in the respective conversation, where they can easily be found. Other times, details about an event everyone’s welcome to will be pinned in the general conversation’s pinboard.”
Efficient, Fast and Convenient Team Communication
Before using Fleep, Adduco spent at least twice as much time on communication, as it was scattered around different channels that are not well suited for work communication — email, text messaging and Facebook Messenger.
“Sending and reading emails is time-consuming and burdensome for team communication, especially when it involves pictures and files as attachments. And there’s no way to tell whether the other person has seen the information you sent over via email. Making a call is quick and easy, but it’s a very intrusive way of communicating and there’s no way to make sure that the other person also remembers or takes action on the information you gave them over a phone call. Text messaging and Facebook Messenger are private communication channels, making them inappropriate for work conversations.”
Adduco’s team was skeptical that Fleep would help them with all of these communication challenges. But a trial of Fleep showed them how the right tool can help make internal communication faster and more efficient.
Since it started using Fleep, Adduco has seen a massive boost to its internal communication.
“We did a little survey about our internal communication before starting to use Fleep and once we had been using Fleep for 1.5 months. All of our team members agreed that our communication became faster and more efficient after we started using Fleep.“
To conclude, Aivar says:
“We’d recommend Fleep to all companies that wish to improve their internal communication and the efficiency of sharing information internally.”
Further Reading:
