10 inevitable digital tools we use to create freedom in our company
Written by Daan Dohmen and Joris Janssen, November 9th 2020
Working remotely
In 2019, Luscii co-founders Daan Dohmen and Joris Janssen were discussing the possibilities for their health tech company Luscii to change into a fully remote workforce. Luscii was rapidly growing, having over 40 people from 15 nationalities. This meant that a physical office in Amsterdam absolutely has its advantages, but is not the best approach for everyone.
Freedom
Since one of our core values at Luscii is Freedom sparks energy, we believe people should be able to work wherever, whenever and however they want. That doesn’t mean that everyone must be remote all the time; it means that everyone has the freedom to choose what is best for them. Some people like coming to an office a few days a week, others might be in their home country for a significant part of the year. Everyone should be able to choose what is best for them.
Coronavirus
We had prepared for an experiment. One team would go fully remote for three months. But when we were two weeks away from starting, the Coronavirus hit the Netherlands and the government decided to lockdown the nation. Not just one team had to go remote, but the entire company had to make the switch.
We made that switch instantly. And during our remote work the Luscii health app became a leading app in the battle against corona. We launched the Luscii health app in multiple countries in Europe and in Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana and tripled the company’s growth.
Digital transformation
How did the Luscii team achieve this? One important element was the use of new digital tools to support the Luscii teams to self-organize easily whilst maintaining full transparency in the company for everyone. This digital transformation made the workforce of Luscii highly efficient and effective. We group our tools in three domains Communication, Collaboration and Culture.
Communication
The first thing you need as a highly effective team is communication: fast, reliable and both off- and online. We use a set of tools that most might know but are invitable for any organization that is transforming digitally. For some of these tools there are great alternatives available as well, but we just want to share here what we use.
1. Slack
The first tool we use is Slack. This ‘whatsapp for business’ allows teams to easily communicate with each other via chat. We all have Slack on our iPhone, iPad and Mac’s so we can reach each other when needed. Slack is organized in channels which people can create themselves, like a channel for marketing, development or ‘deploy Nigeria’.
2. Zoom
Another tool that most people are familiar with is Zoom. We use it everywhere. For our daily standups where teams meet each other to discuss progress. For our demo’s where teams show each other their progress. But also for personal things, like employment reviews or helping people that feel lonely. Personally we love the monthly gatherings where everyone from the company comes together and we celebrate things. Of course we also do this physically and will keep doing that, but even during the lockdowns having drinks together via Zoom is better than nothing!
Collaboration
“The team makes the dream work” is a sentence we often hear. And we belief it is true. Digital tools can highly increase (or decrease, if you pick the wrong ones) productivity of teams and actually make it fun to collaborate. We use the following tools for it.
3. Notion
The first and foremost tool that we believe is really amazing is Notion. We simply love it! It is a sort of wiki where you can store, share and work together on any kind of information. It contains smart templates, like Kanban boards as shown in the example below (not real Luscii content). And it also integrates great with some other tools we use frequently like Google G-suite or Whimsical. We use Notion both for internal collaboration as well as externally using guest-users, including customers that we share information with such as project updates and progress. Also certain public information, like FAQ’s for customers or our People’s handbook, has been moved from public websites to public Notion pages so they are very easy to update by any team member. For an example of such a public use, find our people’s handbook on Notion by clicking here. We even did our 7.000 page Medical Device Certification documentation in Notion, which worked fabulously.
4. G-suite (and Keynote)
Google Drive is our company hard drive, fully in the cloud and always accessible by all team members. Google Docs replaced MS Word (and now slowly get replaced by Notion to be honest) and Google Sheet is used as replacement for Excel. An extra perk with Google G-suite is that a business Gmail account comes with it that you can use to login into almost all the other tools listed here. Very easy, secure, and cost saving, as you can ditch IT maintenance immediately (read about that later on).
The thing that some people don’t know, is that Google G-suite is fully GDPR compliant and runs smoothly on Apple’s Macs, iPads or iPhones. You can edit Word and Excel files natively within G-Suite, and everything is always at your disposal as long as you have an internet connection.
The only thing that is still irreplaceable… Apple’s Keynote. For making amazing presentations, we use Apple Keynote because we feel it is simply the best in class (and includes great collaboration using iCloud sharing as well).
5. Whimsical
Sometimes you don’t want to write a lot of text but you want to draw pictures, like flow charts or diagrams. Everyone remembers MS Visio? Yes, very expensive and not in the cloud. Now welcome Whimsical, a very easy to use tool to make flowcharts, mind maps, diagrams and other pictures. It also integrates very well with Slack and with Notion so can be embedded using shortcuts. Find an example below. It is so powerful yet simple that you will never want to switch back again.
6. Miro
Every (tech) company knows it and might miss it these days: colored sticky notes on the wall. Well, we have good news. Your digital sticky notes are here and they are amazing (and comes in the same colors as the paper versions): Your new sticky notes are called Miro. A great thing we recently did, was having a brainstorm using Notion, Zoom and Miro. Preparations, such as the goal of the brainstorm, was shared on Notion on forehand. All team members were prepared well and we energized the session via Zoom. Then, using Zoom break outs, everyone got into breakout rooms and used Miro to brainstorm on the topic. Once ready, the groups ended the breakout rooms and discussed the Miro boards and grouped them for further use.
Culture
The team is key; and nurturing our culture of Freedom sparks energy, Courage for integrity and Grow to last in a remote setting is more important than ever. That isn’t something that can be handled by tools, but they can certainly help.
7. Donut (a slackbot)
Sitting behind the computer and only being effective’ all day can be boring and lonely. Since we are in a lockdown again, we cannot have physicial meetings anymore (we used to have phyisical all hand meetings organized by our culture creators once a month). So we’ve introduced Donut, a slackbot that connects people randomly for a cup of coffee.
Every week, Donut creates (automatically) a group of two or more people and invites them for a coffee break using Google’s G-suite calendar integrated into Slack. Once you accept the Donut, you have a nice Zoom call (Zoom is also integrated into Slack so will start automatically). Just discuss the weather, play a game together or chit-chat like you would do at the coffee machine!
8. Tinypulse
When you really believe the people in your company do make the difference, you want to know how they feel and how they are doing. We use Tinypulse for that. Every week, a Tinypulse question is sent to all Lusciians via Slack, e-mail or in the Tinypulse app. It asks one simple question such as “How happy are you at work?” or “Are you able to recognize and manage the things that can cause stress?”. The great thing about this is that every Lusciian will answer the question truly anynomously.
Tinypulse helps us to have a thermometer in the company every week while it gives Lusciians the ability to share their feelings in a safe manner. Every month in our General Company Circle meeting we discuss the results together. See an example of a Tinypulse dashboard below.
9. Glassfrog
As said before, Luscii is organized following the principles of Holacracy. This means we have a fully decentralized organization without hierarchy (e.g. we do not have a CEO nor managers). Holacracy makes it possible for anyone in the company to act upon tensions he or she sees and make proposals to change the company for the better. It goes too far to explain the details in this article, but having so much change in company structure, roles and policies means you might want a tool to track it and to be able to share it within the company. And this is amazing, since it allows everyone to continously improve the company whilst everybody can follow it and read it in realtime.
So, forget about meeting minutes, explanation sessions and re-organization plans. It just happens in real-time and everyone has influence on it. From founder to secretary. From developer to sales person. From marketeer to board member.
To enable this, we use Glassfrog. A simple tool that keeps track of our holacracy and all roles within it. Every Lusciian knows what is expected from them, what roles they have and how meetings are structured following the holacracy principles. In the image below you’ll find our organization structure at the day this article is written.
10. Recruitee
The last tool we want to highlight here is Recruitee. Having a strong culture and striving to be the best in your field (in our case remote patient monitoring) means you need to find the best people for your company. In order to do so, we use Recruitee as a simple tool to support our hiring. Recruitee makes it possible to write and share vacancies and have a standardized workflow for selecting candidates with roles for different members of the Luscii team. You can share experiences, schedule tests or interviews and keep a very transparent and easy to use overview of your hiring process. We use it for development roles and recently also to organize our IntroductionDay as an open day to meet people.
More…
The tools we’ve mentioned are only a selection. We think they are amongst the most important 10 ones for general use to improve communication, collaboration and culture. Some others we use are Figma (design), Zeplin (design), Things3 (personal productivity), Moneybird (accounting), Clicdata (accounting), Mailchimp (marketing), Wordpress (marketing), PandaDoc (legal), 1Password (password manager) and a lot of technical tools for our development team. And the great news is: most of them integrate amazingly well so even though it looks a lot, it feels like one digital work environment!
Some good questions to end with
You must have a huge IT department, organizing all this?
Haha. Good question. No we haven’t. We exactly have one person, Roy Pereira, in a role called “Toolset General”. He takes care of all hardware maintenance, software support, and administration of users. And this is done in a maximum of half a day a week (and oftenless).
What hardware do you run on?
A lot of these tools (or actually all we think) are available on different platforms, like Apple, Android and Microsoft. Still, we have chosen to standardize on one platform within Luscii and that platform is Apple. So all Lusciians get a Macbook and an iPhone (and if needed an iPad). We do NOT have central maintenance on the hardware, so this is just deployed by our partner Amac out of the box (and only contains a few mandatory things that are controlled centrally, such as a security layer and Password manager).
We deliberately choose to give people good and new hardware since we think it is really strange that in some companies the senior roles have iPhones and all others are given crappy, budget phones. We believe everyone should have good tooling to do their work effectively and efficiently.
Great story but… all this is very expensive right?
Haha, good question. No it isn’t. We only have less than 0.2 FTE for IT maintenance. All devices are leased and automatically renewed every two years. And our tools do cost money but are cheaper than legacy systems, have amazingly high uptimes and don’t require IT infrastructure nor maintenance. And maybe even more important… they make people happy instead of frustrating them.
How about security and privacy?
Good question, especially in an environment Luscii works in (healthcare). Within Luscii we have a very strict policy on what tools can be used for what work, where personal data can be stored, and how data can be shared. We also have a thorough selection process in which tools are tested and DPA’s (Data Processing Agreements) are signed. Our entire IT landscape is fully GDPR compliant and sensitive data is only allowed on certain tools.
If you care about this, another tool for you might be Kolide. It gives real time insights in all your employee’s endpoints and their security. A simple and super effective tool to maintain endpoint security.
Isn’t it hard to use so many different tools?
You would expect that but it isn’t. Of course, new Lusciians need some work discovering the tools but since these tools are very easy to use and most often integrate very well with each other, this is just a matter of time. Most people pick up these new practices in no time — especially when the tools help them to be productive and … do not frustrate them but increases fun.
Conclusion
We hope by sharing our experience, you can improve your work as well. Especially during these strange times. But also after corona. To be clear, we have no conflict of interest in any of the tools mentioned. We are just enthusiastic users.
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About this article and the authors
This article was written by prof. Daan Dohmen and dr. Joris Janssen, both co-founders of Luscii. Besides his work at Luscii, Daan is professor in Digital Transformation in Healthcare at the Open University and holds a PhD (cum laude) in behavioural science. Joris is the architect of Luscii’s holacracy and ways of working including the introduction of most of the mentioned tools. He holds a PhD (cum laude) on Human Technology Interaction from Stanford and Eindhoven University of Technology and is an inventor on 4 patents. On Medium the two co-founders will share experiences on their journey in creating a company that is not only successful from a business point, but also creates sustainable societal impact and strives to be a really great place to work and grow for individuals. More on Luscii can be found by clicking here.
