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Are you rarely communicating with people across functions in your company, except for at the occasional Christmas party? Then it might be time to collaborate with cross-functional teams.

Bridging the gap between different teams is important as you can achieve better results and widen team expertise.

Collaborating across functions allows employees to resolve issues and produce projects with perspectives and knowledge.

What is cross-functional collaboration?

Cross functional collaboration involves teams with different priorities and responsibilities in an organization working together for a common goal. This can entail joining forces on a specific project or collaborating long-term as an ongoing process.

Permanent collaboration tends to be more successful, according to the Harvard Business Review.

Implementing cross functional collaboration can be challenging, particularly in a remote setting. It takes a shift in the entire business culture.

Due to physical distance, your product marketing team can’t just walk down the hallway to ask the social media team a question. So why go through all the trouble?

Benefits of Cross Functional Collaboration

Cross functional collaboration eases chaos by building harmony across business functions in a team. According to Forbes Advisor, cross functional team collaboration allows employees to efficiently tackle problems by working with various viewpoints and expertise.

When different teams collaborate, innovation and productivity increase. It fosters new relationships between teams that would have never crossed paths. This creates an innovative environment and space for fresh ideas.

The common goals of an organization are promoted through cross collaboration. Without it, a team just focuses on particular issues related to their role. It allows teams to see the big picture, rather than having tunnel vision. For example, customer success issues with clients might not feel like a priority to the marketing team that wants to launch a new product.

Nevertheless, both projects might see improvement if teams collaborate to include key customer pain points in the communications for the product launch. Working collaboratively on projects means that the goals of the organization are all aligned.

Working in isolation is often inefficient, restricts innovation, and is time-consuming. Along with hitting those KPIs, the well-being of team members in a remote setting improves by avoiding such a business culture.

How to Improve Collaboration: Cross Functional Teams

Bridging the gap across teams can be difficult, particularly in a remote work setting. Cross functional partnerships must be deliberate in such a setting. Let’s take a look at how you can improve collaboration in cross functional teams in a remote setting.

Here are our five main tips to collaborate cross-functionally:

1. Foster personal relationships first, get to know employees across departments
2. Find cross collaboration meaning and value with shared goals across departments
3. Develop clear collaboration plans
4. Send a weekly loom to increase collaboration
5. Introduce a sub-space for communication within different teams

1. Start building company-wide relationships

The first step is to break the ice and encourage everyone to get to know each other. This is a lot more intuitive in a physical setting. Nonetheless, it can still be successful when done remotely with the right tools.

Without a sense of trust and communication, different departments are unlikely to want to work together.

Book some old-fashioned team bonding time, but across departments. Schedule short 1:1 coffee chats where employees from different departments can take a break from work and meet a coworker. You can also look into opening virtual coworking slots with tools such as Gather if the team is looking to connect more.

Transition to more work-related events such as company-wide “show and tells”.

Employees present projects they are working on and other teams from different departments can provide input with their expertise and knowledge. It could potentially lead to useful feedback or an innovative new project emerging from discussions.

2. Establish a new set of shared goals

A major challenge you might face to promote teams to collaborate cross-functionally is a misalignment of priorities.

If you assign a collaborative project, team members of a particular department might feel like that task is not a priority. Find shared goals that benefit all involved to avoid the feeling that departments are working toward opposite ends.

A common goal could be a user-focused goal that all departments benefit from. This collaborative approach allows all departments to be focused on the user, whilst bringing in a diverse expert point of view.

At times, it might seem that departments are working towards opposite goals, but this is not the case. The entire business structure is carefully considered and risks assessed by providing different perspectives on a project.

For example, the product marketing team is looking to set up a new help center, but SEO and content is only focused on increasing traffic. Value of the help center also depends on how easy help material is to find for users, which is where the SEO team can provide value to the end project.

Both teams can share a metric in the project to work towards the same goal: creating seamless education flows for users.

3. Set up a collaboration plan

Assign a project that lies at the intersection of two different functions and set a clear plan. Think outside the box. What business functions rarely work together but could generate an innovative project? Business functions that often clash in their way of thinking could be your best bet.

For example, the marketing and IT departments. Putting distinct types of people together leads to cutting-edge ideas that would otherwise never occur. The key to setting a collaborative project in a remote setting is to present clear proposals. Identify a shared goal, timeline and time commitment.

Starting a new project, especially when it involves various stakeholders, can feel like a time-consuming and scary task. With a clear collaboration plan, both parties have a clear understanding of the task at hand and are more likely to be eager to collaborate.

Having a set plan is especially important if you are an employee looking to collaborate with someone from another department. Employees are not always welcoming to the pitching of new projects. Be respectful of them by outlining their workload and role honestly.

Define each individual activity in the project, where ownership lies, and how it all concludes in a common goal.

4. Replace standups with weekly looms

Another easy way to foster collaboration remotely is to plan an asynchronous weekly standup that is open to all departments. Instead of the traditional weekly standup you can share short-form videos through Loom with information that might be interesting to the whole team.

A virtual loom actually makes it easier for people with different roles to add their thoughts and feedback. People can add comments at certain timestamps, and the author of the loom receives a notification that someone has added new comments.

People can be more thoughtful of their feedback when done asynchronously. Instead of being limited to a 20 minute standup every morning they can add a comment to a loom or watch a new standup when they have time.

Maybe someone from customer service or finance makes a point you had not considered and offers solutions. You might even find that they are willing to connect and get involved in the project to help you out.

5. Sub-space for communication

While a weekly loom goes a long way, having a set sub-space for communication fosters a long-term open environment for employees in different roles.

Back in the office, people with different functions were likely to bump into each other in the hallway or during their coffee breaks. They were likely to talk about their ongoing projects and the roadblocks they were facing. In a remote setting, introducing a digital sub-space for communication that replaces these moments is imperative.

Instead of having a single chat for the product marketing or SEO team, collaboration should be more centered. For example, set up a sub-space for all employees to discuss new projects, goals and objectives under the marketing umbrella.

Sending a message to pitch a collaborative project or asking for a different point of view will become an intuitive part of the workday.

Using Rock for Cross Functional Collaboration

The lack of effective cross functional collaboration can negatively impact the growth of a company, even in “normal times”. According to Accenture, this can prove disastrous in times of economic downturn.

While improving collaboration is more easily achieved when a common workspace is shared, there are plenty of technological solutions to mitigate remote collaboration issues.

Rock’s all-in-one functionality makes collaboration with cross functional teams a walk in the park. Rock empowers remote teams to be more productive with full-fledged project management in one place.

Change how you collaborate remotely with multimodal communication that allows you to collaborate in different ways through structured documentation, communication and project management.

While employees will not be running into each other at lunchtime, Rock’s features still foster an environment of open collaboration and communication.

Collaboration with Rock: Task Management and Organization

Task management is highly organized on Rock and makes collaboration simple. If you want two employees of different functions to collaborate, you can assign a task to both. You can also filter through all tasks to see which ones have more than one assignee to track their collaborative progress.

If you find that some employees have no converging tasks, think of ways in which these could collaborate through their distinct areas of expertise. Remote collaboration is also more organized than in the traditional workplace as everything is highly documented.

When two employees collaborate on a task, they can document details with attachments, statuses, and descriptions of each task. This makes it easy for a third party to join in the process at any stage and nurtures the ongoing collaboration.

A third employee can figure out what still needs to be done and then go on to document their progress on the task. With asynchronous work features that aid in communication and task management, Rock fosters cross functional collaboration.

From real-time messaging, video looms, and more, Rock mitigates the collaboration challenges that arise in a remote setting.

Time is lost when you spend most of your day tracking down information or finding documents. These best practices for staying organized at work will be key if you're looking to organize your day-to-day activities and maximize productivity.

Your current projects have moving parts that you need to stay on top of. Organized work allows you to keep all pieces together. Whether that’s a variety of stakeholders, clients, and team members to work with. Your project may also have multiple stages and phases that should be properly managed.

Being more organized streamlines your activities, allows you to focus, and reduces your stress levels. You should spend time on things that maximize your productivity so you can be confident in a job well done.

Save yourself time and keep deadlines at bay by following these simple tips. While staying organized looks different for every person, these best practices shed light on how to organize a project. Make sure to follow them and set yourself up for success in any remote work environment.

1. Use asynchronous communication as much as possible

Relying on asynchronous work makes it easy to reference past conversations or decisions. Asynchronous communication, like messages or tasks, allow you to document information. Work becomes a relay race instead of a sprint. Pass over work when you’re done with it or get started with new tasks without depending on others.

Synchronous work, like messages or meetings should be kept for more urgent or creative matters. As a rule of thumb: if communication is very urgent or requires creative input, go synchronous. Everything else, communicate asynchronously.

2. Reduce the number of meetings

Keep your meetings for when you need to have important, complex conversations. When you have meetings, make the most of them by sharing an agenda ahead of time to ensure a defined plan and objective.

If you’re feeling lost, check out this meeting agenda examples article for some tips on getting the best agenda prepared ahead of your next meeting.

In addition, you should summarize the meeting at the end. Reiterate any action items to confirm that everyone understands what they have been asked for. After meetings, make the notes available to your team and add them to project documentation and weekly to do list template as needed.

3. Start organizing projects with tasks

Wondering how to organize multiple projects at work at once? With task management, you can organize your to-do list template so you never miss a thing. Assign a task to a collaborator and rest assured you’ll be able to track their progress.

With tasks you can make sure things get assigned to the correct person with sufficient background information and deadline for the task. Rock offers multiple task views so you can switch between lists, boards, and calendars for free. Use labels to categorize tasks in a more visible way.

You can also filter by labels to get a subset of tasks in your task view. In addition, you can sort tasks by priority level to make sure that new team activity is organizing projects by priority rather than anything else. Feature rich task functionality is essential to properly organize project goals.

Get a high-level overview of project progress, and resolve any roadblocks on the horizon with a visual work management system that is with you in every step of the way.

When you have a new project, you can create a space for and bring everyone who needs to be included—like product managers, designers, and engineers—together. Unlimited spaces and invites mean that no one gets left out.

Once everyone is in a space, you can create a project list with all required tasks and discuss with everyone.

4. Use a good file management system

File management is important to consider when thinking of how to organize work projects. A file management system standardizes how information is organized. This familiarizes everyone on how to upload new files and where to find stored documents.

Instead of separating file management by individual practices, a shared system will save you time and keep everything organized. With a file management system in place, you can spend less time looking for things. This can help keep your team on the same page, especially with asynchronous work.

If you’ve already got a system in place, remember to optimize it so that it works for you and your collaborators. It should seamlessly integrate with your messages, notes or meetings.

5. Communicate transparently with your team

Make sure to be upfront about your experiences, workload, and feelings with your team. Especially when working remote and asynchronously, it can sometimes be hard to keep in touch with everyone in the team.

This way no one will be surprised if you ask for help getting tasks done or offer to lend you a hand when experiencing downtime. Having work organized with tasks and an asynchronous by default workflow also provide flexibility to switch responsibility.

If your task load is too big, other team members can easily filter by your name and see where they can jump in to help.

6. Organize your project with everything in one place

With these best practices in mind, you need to figure out how you are going to be organizing project management steps. Rock provides messages, tasks, notes, files, and meetings centralized for this exact reason.

Teams can document information, share files and manage tasks without having to leave the platform.Cloud storage providers like Google Drive, Dropbox, One Drive are seamlessly integrated within the file, note and task functionality. Once you add an integration, your docs, sheets, and presentations will be just a click away from any message, task or note.

Video conferencing (when done right) is also helpful to teams which is why Rock integrates with Zoom and Google Meet in every space. So when you need to meet, it’s easy and painless.With all your information in one place, you can more easily access important information across spaces.

You can even Set Aside information from different projects in a dedicated panel for follow up.

Use a multi-modal tool to stay organized and get work done

Looking into how to organize projects at work? Rock combines multiple ways of communicating so you spend less time switching between tools.

Everything in one place also enables in-product synergies. @mention tasks and notes in the chat, attach cloud files to tasks or convert message strings into comments under relevant tasks or notes.If asynchronous communication is what you need, you can use tasks, notes or topics.

If you need to switch to more synchronous ways of communicating, you can send a message or start a meeting right from within the space. All without leaving the app.

Getting (and staying) organized will help you focus on what needs to get done. These best practices allow you to keep work at bay. Reduce your stress, and streamline your workflow so you're free to work on what matters.

As an all-in-one tool, Rock can help you share documentation, communicate, collaborate with task boards, and manage your to-do list.

In this case study, the founder and creative director of the design studio/creative agency New Aesthetics, Maximilian Helldörfer, talks about his company’s experience on transforming the way they work by using Rock.

Maximilian shares tips for marketing teams facing challenges related to remote work, having too many tools, and deep work.

An all-in-one approach helps New Aesthetics document information and manage communications without constant platform switching

New Aesthetics journey on Rock started around one and a half years ago. Before that, the agency was mainly using Slack for communication and Trello for task management. In addition to that, the company's clients would often come up with more suggestions for tools, like Microsoft Teams or Google Drive.

Maximilian describes the point in time when the agency decided to look for a solution which would help to keep all their communication and documentation in one place.

‍‘We realized that we can’t use so many different tools based on our clients as it gets all over the place. That was the moment when we decided that we need to look for a new tool which has an all-in-one approach.’

Having all their work centralized in one tool has improved their efficiency and given more time to focus on deep work.

Tasks + messaging in one place to bring order to the chaos of multi-channel communication

New Aesthetics shares that the biggest challenge before using Rock was information management across platforms.

‍‘If you use many different tools and send emails around, it’s inevitable that some information falls through the cracks. Also, it might happen that things are more up to date in one place which can cause confusion. This can be avoided only by having one tool which offers everything you need. Somewhere where you can store information and communicate, and this is exactly what Rock offers.’

An all-in-one approach means teams don't have to juggle apps and update work on different channels. With everything in one place, one update is more than enough.

The agency found that Rock replaced the combination of Slack and Trello and allowed them to keep everything in one place, which was their main challenge before discovering Rock. With functionality that natively switches between mini-apps, one can save time and easily jump, for instance, from tasks to messages or notes.

Leveraging tasks to collaborate more asynchronously, document information and organize work while working remotely

The Tasks mini-app quickly became a crucial part of the New Aesthetics workflow. The agency uses different labels to track the status of a task, for example, 'awaiting for client feedback'.

Maximilian shares that tasks helped them to save time by indicating the statuses instead of constantly chatting or meeting to share progress. The time which is saved can be used for deep work which is the key for making good progress.

Their team also loves the Activity panel feature: ‘It gives such a great overview of what the team has been working on’. One more unique feature which the team enjoys is the Set Aside panel. Set Aside allows users to store relevant tasks, messages, and notes in a dedicated panel.

‘Whenever a person says they can’t answer or do something straight away - I always suggest to set aside and do it later. It’s so nice that there’s a feature which you can refer to in those ‘I can’t answer now’ moments!’ - shares Maximilian.

Collaborating with clients on Rock to reduce inbound emails and platform switching for new projects

It was easy to get clients on board, too. Maximilian shared that the agency does not accept emails anymore and tries to bring their clients on Rock to collaborate. Even though some clients do not know about Rock at first, it does not take long for them to get used to it and start opening their own spaces.

We were curious about what New Aesthetics would suggest for creative teams who are looking for an all-in-one solution.

‘Just get started, experiment and find what workflow is best for you. Rock gives all options to find a way that works best for your specific case. Especially if you are a creative agency, you don’t want to make a burden for yourself by over organizing! Rock gives you the opportunity to create your workflow in an easy way’.

4 tips from New Aesthetics on getting started with Rock as a creative agency

Switching platforms can be a big change for teams. It often comes with transferring tasks, restructuring everything and getting used to new workflows. Here are some suggestions from Maximilian for creative teams looking into getting started with Rock:

• Try out different workflows: Rock provides teams with resources to find a way that works best for your specific case. Give yourself some time to think about how you want things to work.
• Experiment with features: Rock is flexible and provides different ways of customization. Experiment and find a way to organize your work the way you want.
• Start at your own pace: In the first weeks you might not need much complexity and depth. When you get more familiar with Rock you can incorporate more and more features.
• Fine-tune task management: focus on task statuses, assignee statuses or labels, or all of the above, to organize your tasks.

New Aesthetics’ story shows us that constant platform switching and scattered client communication can be avoided when communication is centralized. Tasks + messaging provides the foundation for more productive teams. Deep work is prioritized with asynchronous work, leading to a more productive team.

After the widespread adoption of remote work, work performance metrics that used to be relevant for in-office work have become outdated or harder to track. This leaves many with the question on how to improve work performance for remote environments.

It no longer makes sense for your performance to be graded based on who is present or speaks up in meetings. These are less relevant in workplaces where you and your team are in different cities, countries, or continents.

This leaves many wondering: how can I improve my work performance?

You do not want to waste your time and energy on performance metrics that you are no longer being evaluated on. Many of the opportunities to demonstrate your skills and work ethic aren’t easy to do with remote work. Since you and your team aren’t in the same location, it’s not as easy for them to see your workload, attitude, and capabilities.

With coworkers who may be located around the world, managing relationships will take a different set of skills than when you could catch up in the office on a daily basis. These quality tips will get you started off on the right foot.

8 Ways to improve work performance

While workflows and relationships to team members are different, you will also be evaluated on different performance metrics. This doesn’t mean you have to rethink the way you work, but you should remember that some rules might not apply anymore.

To figure out how to improve work performance in the world of remote work, you need to adjust your mindset and implement new strategies. Here are some improvement ideas to get started with.

1. Make sure your work is visible

Although “butts in chairs” is far less applicable in remote work, it’s still important to make sure that your work is being noticed. When your projects and work are more visible, it’s easier for you to point your successes out to managers and leaders. Using tasks is a helpful way to ensure that your work is easy for leaders to see.

Task management makes it easier for you to organize your workload and clearly illustrates what you are doing and what you’ve already completed. For metrics, you can track how many tasks are completed, what type of tasks you typically work on, and how long it takes you to finish them and your projects.

These numbers will provide a useful and easily quantifiable demonstration of your work—to both you and your team leader or manager.

2. Use asynchronous work for performance improvements

Because asynchronous work treats work like a relay race instead of a sprint, daily workflows are different than they are for in-office work. Asynchronous work empowers people to be more independent and impactful. This empowers you to work at your own pace; it’s also easier to focus on the task at hand.

Typically, there are fewer meetings when a team uses an asynchronous approach to work. When you have meetings, you can make them more impactful. Make sure that your meetings are necessary, short, and planned out. Meeting agendas can help your team prepare for any topics or questions.

With these things in mind, you can demonstrate your effectiveness, even if your team members are in different places.

3. Get the hang of documentation and file management

Working remotely entails managing a constant flow of information, projects, and feedback. The biggest pitfall of remote work is that details can be siloed or fall through the cracks. To stay on top of your work, stay organized and store information where it’s accessible to everyone who needs it.

Mastering the art of documentation and file management comes in handy for this. With these skills under your belt, you can record details and ensure that you and your team have the information you need, right at your fingertips.

For example, when a new team member is being onboarded, it’s easier to provide them with resources and training materials that can answer their questions and help them learn. If your team has outdated or unclear documentation, volunteering to clarify it can be beneficial when looking into ways on how to improve on work performance.

For evaluations, you will be able to point to your organizational skills and the many benefits that they bring to the team and company.

4. Master the art of communication

It’s important to have your communication strategies well-defined when thinking of how to improve work performance. Being a good communicator will help you stand out. Making sure that your asynchronous communication is effective is key.

Avoid overwhelming coworkers and team members with a constant stream of information that they need to sort through. Make sure that messages, tasks and notes you create on the daily are well thought-out. They should provide the recipient with all of the information they need to make a decision, complete a task, provide feedback, or take the next step.

If you’re overwhelmed, delegating work can help take things off your plate. Knowing that a team member may be better at a task or type of work is a strength—use it. Delegating tasks can save you time and stress.

It also highlights your strength as a team player who puts your work first; what matters is that projects get done, not who does them.

5. Focus on strategies for improving performance

Cut out distractions. Working asynchronously can prime you for “deep work,” a term that Cal Newport uses to describe the ability to work intensely and without distraction. Instead of partially focusing on tasks, with deep work, you purposefully incorporate limited spurts of intense focus.

With asynchronous work, people are free to be more independent and effective. This makes it easier for you to maintain the deliberate focus that deep work requires. Knowing how to prioritize tasks and projects is a vital skill when looking into how to improve work performance.

Complete your most important work first, then move on to the second-most important thing on your to-do list. Prioritization demonstrates you can be counted on to get hard things done.Ask yourself if something is absolutely necessary.

Don’t waste your time on low-level priorities or things that aren’t essential. Those types of tasks or projects can be dealt with when you’re not busy.

6. Build a strong remote work culture

Work culture in remote work settings is crucial to team cohesion and collaboration. For example, if you start a new role with a new team, you may not interact with your team members in person very often.

Without the relationship that coworkers are used to building by sitting side-by-side or in offices, it can be difficult to know who to go to with questions or when you need help. That’s why intentionally building a good and supportive work culture is so critical for teams who work remotely.

Though it may be awkward initially, you will learn more about your team, develop relationships, and get a better sense for personalities and capabilities. This helps when looking for work performance improvements since you can ask coworkers for feedback or additional training.

Helping to build a stronger remote work culture can also demonstrate leadership skills and that you’re a team player. Volunteer to do more tasks and projects to demonstrate your go-getter attitude. Offer to start a series of virtual “coffee breaks” to catch up with your coworkers and stay in touch.

This will increase your visibility and your team members will know that they can count on you for help.

7. Maintain a healthy work/life balance

While it might seem logical to stay online for hours after everyone else logs off, or to log on when you’re sick, it’s not worth the cost to your mental health and well-being. Work-life balance is important because it enables you to recharge and enjoy your other priorities.

Without boundaries, it’s easy to burn out, which harms you in the long run. Not only is it bad for your health, but it can also negatively impact your performance at work. While you might feel like staying online longer is a sign of your dedication, it’s not sustainable.

Log off and spend time with friends, family, or your hobbies to keep your stress levels down. Set dedicated hours for working and stick to those. Prioritizing your projects and tasks can help you figure out what’s essential and what can be done later. Remember: Your personal life is important too.

8. Make sure you have the right tools

Rock is a project management tool with many features that can help boost your work performance. With tasks, notes, messages, files, and meetings in one place, Rock offers a multimodal tool that you can use anywhere.

It also structures your work to keep it streamlined and help you document important information. You can get all of the project management or work functionality your team needs without ever leaving Rock.

Rock is also an asynchronous work tool, making it a perfect fit for remote work. Here are some specific features that can help with improving your work performance metrics:

• Set Aside: keep messages, tasks, notes, files and topics close with a dedicated panel
• Board view in the Tasks mini-app: manage workloads and get a high-level overview of what needs to be done.
• My Tasks panel: get started on your to-do list sort tasks by priority level, due date, or label.
• Messaging and file sharing: mention folders and documents so everyone knows what you’re talking about.
• Google Drive integration: connect your files and folders for seamless sharing and communication with your team.
• Zoom integration: get together for virtual happy hours or meetings when really needed.

Rock empowers you to adapt to all of the changes that come with remote work. Easy-to-use communication features make it easy to stay in touch so you can stay updated on task and project changes.

Task management and documentation are all centralized in one place with Rock, making it easy for your work to be visible and accessible to your coworkers and team leaders. With the right tool and updated strategies you can improve your performance at work and prepare yourself for the future of work.

With work often moving quickly, tracking all of your goals, projects, and tasks can be difficult. Having a reliable weekly to-do list template that works for you is key to staying on top of what needs to get done.

You might find yourself looking through different remote work tools to manage your to-do lists. Thankfully Rock has built-in functionality to replace creating weekly to-do list templates and tools. If you need daily to-do list ideas or if you aren’t sure which things to put on a to-do list—read on.

You can also update these to do lists ideas daily so information is always up to date.One of the most common ways of keeping track of everything on your plate is the to-do list. The to-do list meaning is simple, if it is on the list, then it needs to get done.

These lists can be as simple or complex as you need or want them to be. But success doesn’t mean you just make a to-do list. You will need more than a few organized lists. While the first step is just recording and prioritizing what needs to get done, you shouldn’t stop there.

To level up, you need to figure out how to optimize your task management. First, think critically about the best way for you to start formatting lists. If you need to-do list ideas, Rock offers different ways for you to organize your different activities.

Pick and choose how to organize your to-do’s right in the app, so you never have to switch tools to track your to-do items.

There are different ways that you can organize daily to do list ideas through tasks on Rock. Mastering the art of managing your to-do’s enables you to stay productive and focus on the work that makes an impact.

Everyone organizes their work differently. Here are five to-do list ideas to keep track of all your responsibilities.

All your to-do’s across projects with the My Tasks panel

The My Tasks panel of Rock helps you organize your work so you don’t need a separate to-do list anymore. This feature takes all the guesswork out of planning, so you know exactly which things to put on a to-do list. You can keep working in Rock and update task statuses without switching to different apps or platforms to track your progress.

With this feature, you can see every task in Rock that's assigned to you. While centralizing your tasks in one place helps you locate to-do items, it can be more information than you need. That is why the My Tasks panel lets you filter all of your tasks by different spaces, labels, and assignees.

Important work kept close at all times with Set Aside

The Set Aside feature can function as a shortlist of high-priority or important to-do list items. This makes those items easier to manage, enabling you to focus on them.

If you get busy and need to focus on high-priority items, you can store them into the Set Aside panel. This puts any information into a separate place, easily accessible. You can move tasks, notes, messages, and even cloud files into Set Aside, so they’re right at your fingertips.

Time your projects and to-do’s with Sprints

To keep your weekly to-do list template on a timeline that works for you, create sprints in Rock and add the tasks you want to be done within the week.

Sprints allow you to group tasks by time cycles (pick any timeline such as weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly). This way you can rest easy knowing that everything you need to do in that period is in your sprint.

Manage your work and never worry about missing a deadline by grouping tasks by a given time period. You can reference your sprints when you need to suggest tasks to complete next.

Sprints are available in the PRO and TEAMS plan on Rock. If you don’t have a paid plan, you can still organize your tasks by the due date with labels—just add the sprint as a label on the task, and sort your tasks by their label in the Tasks mini-app or My Tasks panel.

Discuss to-do’s more in-depth with your team with Topics

Ask all of your team members to write their weekly to-do’s on topics in Rock. By including all of the things that need to be completed in a centralized location, such as the topic, you can stay in the loop with the rest of your team.

Including the team’s to-do items also enables you and your team to align on priorities and keep everyone informed on what you are working on. By communicating goals and objectives, your team will have an easier time collaborating and meeting expectations.

Everyone on the team can stay in the loop on daily tasks and to-do ideas. You can use the @ mention feature so people can directly access the different activities in the to-do list shared by each team member.

Keep activities not related to a project or workflow organized through your personal space

We automatically create a personal space for you when you make an account. You can use your space for daily or weekly tasks that are just for you. Organize and store information however works best for you—and that includes your weekly to-do list template.

If you want to have different spaces for personal and work-related to-do items, you can create group spaces just for yourself. That way, you have somewhere to track any type of item on your to-do lists. With this approach, you can have unlimited spaces and organize unlimited to-do lists however you want.

Manage your weekly to-do lists and so much more with Rock

Gone are the days of unwieldy Excel sheet lists or endless Word documents that are easily and quickly outdated. Gone are the days of pen-and-paper lists that never seem to be around when you need to reference.

With Rock, you can keep track of what needs to get done without switching between different tools. You don’t have to interrupt your workflow or sort through files and papers to find what you need to do next. Your to-do lists are built into the same platform where your documents, files, and messaging are stored.

You won’t have to wonder which things to put on a to-do list, because your tasks, files, and folders are in Rock where they can be easily incorporated into a list.

Managing your tasks with a list helps make your action items more visible to you. This helps you better prioritize those items so you can deliver for your team, your collaborators, and clients. With an effective way of organizing your work and formatting your to-do lists, you can put your energy where it belongs—actually getting things done.

We know that productivity is key to workers and their teams. That’s why Rock offers different ways for you to keep up with your to-do items. Stay organized however works best for you and your team.

A hybrid working model blends remote work with in-person work. At its core, hybrid work enables companies to offer more flexibility while continuing to enjoy many benefits from in-office work.

You might be asking yourself, what is a hybrid working model policy exactly? With hybrid work—the beauty is that there is not just one ‘right’ hybrid work model to follow. Companies can implement hybrid work in an approach that suits their needs and goals.

Over the past few years, hybrid work has become more common than ever. It’s a new but vital way to attract and retain employees, who are placing greater value on flexibility.

What is a hybrid workplace model and how can it be tailored to your needs

Implementing a hybrid work model, or even considering it, shouldn’t be taken lightly. Getting the model right is essential, especially during the transition. You want to be able to continue running your company efficiently without needing to invest more time and effort than necessary to handle the change.

It is important to evaluate your current work environment. Do you work in the office or is your team completely remote? Many companies still prefer the in-person office environment but understand that they need to adapt to retain and attract workers and stay competitive.

Consider if having your team in the office is the main priority, or if a fully remote team is preferable. If you want an approach that offers the best of both worlds, then a hybrid work model may be the best fit.

It offers a compromise for those who prefer the office setup while enabling workers to enjoy a greater degree of flexibility. In addition, a hybrid work model can be a helpful stepping-stone if you are transitioning to 100% remote work.

Hybrid work can sometimes offer the best of both worlds

How will your team divide their time and work? Whether everyone is in the office, at home, or something in the middle, each situation has its own advantages and disadvantages.

An in-person office setup can sometimes offer a working environment that fosters collaboration, fast decision-making, and spontaneity. However, commuting to and from the office daily can be draining and time-consuming.

In-office work models also come with more distractions, like long coffee breaks, random chatting or unnecessary meetings.

A fully remote model can help people focus on the task at hand and provides greater flexibility. Workers can get their work done with fewer interruptions while often enjoying a better work-life balance.

In addition, being fully remote helps reduce overhead costs, which can help your company grow and diversify fast. The downside is that 100% remote work can sometimes make collaboration difficult, harm organizational culture and silo information if communication strategies are not properly implemented for the change.

A hybrid model might allow companies to leverage both models. It enables workers to take a break from their commute while fostering team building in the office.

The hybrid work model enables people to complete their work remotely and then come to the office if their role really requires so for culture building, communicating with clients, or other things better done in person.

While this model allows you to tailor your approach to fit your needs, it can require intensive planning and software integrations to handle change management, especially when it comes to scheduling and task management. Once those logistics are in place, the rest is smooth sailing.

Get your communication right

Finding the right balance between remote and an office-based team is integral to a successful hybrid working model. Success often comes down to the final component—communication.

A crucial element of modern workplaces is meetings, which allow teams to stay on the same page, share information, and talk about complex or high-priority topics. For many of us, virtual meeting best practices are something that still needs to be mastered.

For example, you don’t need to wait until everyone is in the office to have an all-hands meeting. Add a virtual meeting element so team members can join from wherever they are, ensuring that everyone gets information when you need them to.

These hybrid meetings give teams the opportunity to share information that was picked up casually, over coffee or just passing by while catching up with a coworker. This prevents important details from being siloed with only those who are in-office.

For inspiration on managing hybrid work, look no further than slow-moving corporations that have historically had significant operational change issues. In recent years, however, they have often seemed to be some of the fastest adopters.

Here are some hybrid work model examples, where corporations kept their revenues healthy, employees busy and the company growing.

American Express: a flexible hybrid workforce model

American Express has had the idea of flexible office working conditions for some time. They experimented with different working styles and decided to use them all in their model. As a result, some American Express workers can take advantage of hybrid work, a few can enjoy fully remote work, while others need to be onsite for work due to the nature of their roles.

The American Express hybrid approach requires workers to be in the office for at least 2 days per week. Teams can decide ahead of time what the remote work looks like to help facilitate optimal collaboration. Some workers can work fully remote, this is a growing portion of their workforce.

The remaining number of American Express workers are in roles that need to be onsite, and they still come to a physical office at least 4 times a week.

Overall, the American Express approach is comprehensive. With their hybrid approach, American Express can reap the benefits of remote and in-office work. Collaboration can be smoother, and meetings and information sharing can be more intentional. With clear expectations and effective leadership, American express is harnessing the power of the hybrid approach—while offering their workers flexibility.

American Express also offers a benefit enabling most employees to work anywhere for four weeks. This can increase employee retention, productivity and provides flexibility for team members across different regions to cowork for short periods of time.

Citi: the classic hybrid working model policy

Citi has become a pioneer for working remotely. As one of the oldest banks in the U.S., this is an excellent (pleasantly surprising) move toward a 21st-century strategy.

However, some roles can’t be done remotely, mostly impacting onsite tech security or physical branch staff members. Nevertheless, Citi continues to incorporate hybrid work as much as possible, even for those positions.

Citi adopted a type of hybrid work that enables almost all positions to work remotely for at least two days a week if they choose. While there is a significant push for Citi to commit to fully remote work and eliminate their physical office, it’s not a current priority. They want to keep using their existing hybrid work model, which still offers many remote opportunities.

Citi implemented more changes as part of their hybrid working restructuring. First, no more video calls on Friday — a rule that applies to the whole company. They have also worked to reduce phone calls after-business hours end. In addition, on May 28 every year, the whole company takes the day off work. This means no phone calls or meetings, and everyone can take a breather.

Amazon: a limited offering

Not all companies fully embrace hybrid work. Amazon believes that a completely hybrid work model wouldn’t be a fit for them. The company believes that working with an office-centric approach allows for better innovation. They see in-person interactions as key to brainstorming and on-the-fly collaboration.

Despite this, their model does allow for some compromise. Recently, they have allowed individual teams at Amazon to determine the amount of time that team members will spend in the office or working remotely.

With a company the size of Amazon, this compromise allows teams to tailor their hybrid approach to their needs. This will enable teams to figure out what works for them and their projects, they can use that flexibility to work with other teams that may still be doing 100% in-office work.

A con of Amazon's hybrid work policy is that it can be inefficient and often limiting. For employees who can complete their work from any location. Being stuck in a narrow interpretation of hybrid work can be frustrating.

The company is also disadvantaged when recruiting workers since they are limited to a localized talent pool. Potential hires will have to weigh any in-office attendance against greater flexibility offered by Amazon’s competitors.

In a world where fewer and fewer workers want, or need, to relocate for work, Amazon will remain an outlier, which negatively impacts their talent pool. However, Amazon sees a hybrid work approach as beneficial, even if its policies are limited.

Goodyear: an initially reluctant hybrid work model

If you are looking for a happy ending from a company that was reluctant to embrace hybrid work, look no further than Goodyear. When the pandemic paused travel and in-person interactions around the world, Goodyear had to change.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Goodyear’s technical employees and experts had to be onsite. This meant that they had to implement various technology tools, like video conferences, into their work to compensate for missed in-person interactions.

Adopting virtual meeting technology was much more cost-effective than flying workers across the globe to visit offices and attend meetings. It was such an impactful change that Goodyear adapted common hybrid work strategies. As a result, all employees can now work remotely partially, but there are no fully remote jobs yet.

A manufacturing company may be an unlikely place to see the adoption of new approaches to work; however, Goodyear proved hybrid work could benefit them.

How do I implement hybrid work?

Assess what each department, team, and position needs. Are workers equipped for success with a laptop and the required software to get work done? Or do they need more support? Complete a cybersecurity review or audit before implementing a hybrid work policy.

You will need to choose a company-wide communication tool and roll it out to your team and company. As remote work increases, more communication tools are available, making it easy to find something that fits your needs.

Communication tools help with everything from messaging to task management. Focus on finding remote work tools that can help you and your team get the job done without distraction. Easy-to-use apps and programs will have a better adoption rate, helping to speed up the acclimation to the new hybrid work approach.

Evaluating the companies with hybrid work models, it’s clear that they've kept it simple. Those companies use the tool that helps them get their daily work in order. They only expand their software library when needed, minimizing costs, ensuring a smooth transition, and preventing overcomplication.

What's an excellent tool to start with?

Keeping your company and team productive should be your main priority when working hybrid. For productivity, task management should be the priority. Rock works to minimize distractions that come with adopting hybrid work by keeping all communications in one app.

Using Rock before implementing hybrid work makes it possible for employees to work as they did before the transition. Your team can communicate when they need to with Rock’s built-in, centralized project management functionality.

When connecting employees is easy and fast, everyone will have more visibility into their team’s work regardless of where they are getting work done.

The core product suite of Rock combines asynchronous work with synchronous communication. Your team or company can streamline the software used and simplify your day-to-day work since Rock offers everything from messaging to task management, notes and file storage.

With the right type of software, companies can get back to being productive.

The availability of cloud-based technologies has helped level the playing field for small businesses around the world. Technology that used to depend on expensive and complicated infrastructure is now available to anyone with access to the internet.

Many small businesses have been quick to embrace this opportunity, especially in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. With 26% of small businesses investing in cloud based technologies such as Google Drive and Slack, according to a recent survey by Xero.

As a result, there has been a proliferation of tools, offering everything from digital payments and instant messaging, to predictive analytics. For small businesses, the challenge is finding the right combination of tools to help make them more competitive.

Unfortunately, this can sometimes lead to small business owners feeling overwhelmed by the number of choices. In many cases, having to reassess their technology stack every time a SaaS provider updates their pricing strategy.

For some startups it might make sense to build their own technology stack from the very beginning. However, most small businesses would be better served by an all-in-one solution that can tackle multiple use cases.

All-in-one collaboration tools for example, are not only able to speed up decision making within individual teams, but across the entire business. Beyond internal communication, they can sometimes also open up discussions with clients, partners, freelancers or volunteers.

Lowers the cost of doing business

The proliferation of cloud based technologies has resulted in products that are designed to perform a very specific business function. This makes sense when targeting a global enterprise with different departments and job functions.

Nevertheless, it is often an overdeveloped solution, especially for startups and smaller businesses with more generalist roles.

Having to purchase a number of different tools can quickly consume a large proportion of a small business’ budget, especially when paying for multiple memberships. These tools are often targeted at larger enterprises as well. This can make them unaffordable to smaller companies, or price them out completely if there is a minimum company size.

These problems especially impact small businesses in the developing world, who often try to compete with less access to capital, and lower purchasing power.

Some of the more accessible tools on the market include Buffer for social media management, Figma for product and marketing design, and Rock for collaboration. These all-in-one platforms enable small businesses to carry out all of the necessary activities for a certain aspect of their business in one place.

All of this without blowing their budget, or having to update their tech stack every few months.

Enables faster decision making

According to a global survey of decision makers at companies with less than 1,000 employees conducted by SAP, 49.3 percent of decision makers believe that technology levels the playing field for small businesses when competing against larger companies.

That being said, technology is rarely in and of itself the thing that allows small businesses to compete. Technology is a means to an end, allowing smaller organizations to be more agile and adaptable than their larger counterparts.

All-in-one tools speed up the decision making process by making all of the relevant information available in one place. Built-in video and messaging functionality can help to reduce the amount of face-to-face time required to make a decision. This enables asynchronous work for teams that are distributed around the world.

Smaller tool stacks also make it easier for everyone in the business to be part of the conversation. Shallow learning curves allow people to get up to speed quicker compared to custom implementations.

Provides access to a wider pool of talent

All-in-one tools make it easier for employees to collaborate because they provide a centralized hub with a single end-to-end workflow. This means more focus, and less time spent switching between different tools.

They also allow individuals to develop a more rounded skill set. Mainly because there is less focus on highly specialized tools and individual parts of a process. Instead, employees grasp the full scope of their role, and even branch out into other areas of expertise.

In addition to the business benefits, these platforms can provide opportunities for people in parts of the world that might not normally have access to job opportunities matching their areas of interest and expertise. In some cases this can be exploitative, but for organizations that embrace equitable compensation, it can be a win-win situation.

For example, a good all-in-one collaboration tool can help small businesses become more competitive by unlocking a global talent pool. With centralized communications and strong documentation small businesses can focus purely on finding the right person for the role.

All this without having to think of considering commute times, office communication mechanics and face-to-face dependent collaboration mechanics.

Even for small businesses that require people to be on-premise part of the time, all-in-one tools enable more flexible ways of working. A helpful option as remote working opportunities create more competitive labor markets.

Empowering small businesses around the world

Small businesses represent over 90% of the business population, 60-70% of employment, and 55% of GDP in developed economies, according to the World Trade Organization. They also form an important part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals to “promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth, employment and decent work for all”.

Much of recent news coverage has focused on household names such as Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. Nevertheless, small businesses are facing the same challenges presented by the future of work, forcing many to reassess work.

Speed and agility have always been a competitive advantage for small businesses. But, in order to adapt, and embrace the changes required to succeed in a digital-first world, they also need access to the right tools—without being barred by pricing walls or limited functionality.

I joined Rock in 2020 as a business development working student. A lot has changed since then. I now find myself traveling around the world as a digital nomad while managing a wide variety of marketing activities at Rock.

What does working full-time at Rock look like for you?

There are a lot of things I love about my job at Rock: ownership of awesome projects, a hands-on learning experience, and seeing direct results from my efforts.

My day-to-day looks completely different compared to two years ago. When I joined we were working on officially releasing Rock to the public, with a product hunt launch, listing Rock on different sites, and other business development activities. Now, 2 years and thousands of signups later, I find myself leading content, growth and analytical activities across channels.

A lot of my workday is planned around individual deep work: managing content, changes in our branding across channels, and other less-defined growth activities. With only 4-5 meetings on a weekly basis, I find my schedule to be open and flexible to focus on important tasks instead of being stuck in meetings that could have been emails – or as we like to say, meetings that could have been a task or topic.

Having only a few meetings does not mean I’m not connected to everyone in the team though. With constant updates in different 1:1 and group spaces, I often chat to team members, partners and users from across the world (and occasionally share some GIFs now that they are finally available everywhere!).

Only a few meetings a week and asynchronous-first work means I often don’t work a 9-5 (this doesn’t mean I’m being lazy though!). Splitting my time throughout the day allows me to go surfing in the morning, to the gym at 2pm or leave early on a Friday to go travel for the weekend every now and then.

Because we organize our work with tasks, performance is not connected to when I’m online. Instead, we focus on what is being accomplished in every sprint or week-over-week period.

What does remote work look like for you?

I decided to go fully remote in January 2022, leaving Rotterdam (which had been my home for 5 years) behind. Leaving behind great friends and a city that had given me so much wasn’t easy. But the idea of getting to travel the world while taking my career forward at the same time was an opportunity I did not want to skip.

For my first solo location I found accommodation in San Juan Del Sur, Nicaragua and decided to spend the next two months remote working there.

What is Nicaragua like?

I was scared of the idea of booking an Airbnb and spending large amounts of time working by myself in a holiday home. Thus, I booked a coliving space, which has an awesome view by the way!

Coliving spaces bring together remote workers and digital nomads from around the world. This makes them a great place to meet like-minded people. Another perk is that they often offer a fast internet connection, a must-have when working remotely. Or as Kenzo likes to call it, the base of the Maslov pyramid for remote workers’ needs.

A definite highlight of my stay was the opportunity to meet amazing people from all over the world with different careers, goals, and dreams. From consultants to freelance copywriters and nutrition & health experts, I shared my ‘office’ (the living room) and free time with people of different trades, backgrounds, and life goals.

Two months in Nicaragua also allowed me to visit places all over the country. I had the chance to visit typical backpacker destinations such as Ometepe, Granada, and León. I also got to surf a handful of times during work days and weekends, do short hikes around town, and check out most of the local bars and restaurants.

Oh, I also got to slide down a volcano which is definitely one of the highlights of my stay here. How does that work you ask? A Breaking Bad jumpsuit, a makeshift wooden board, and some goggles are all one needs.

What’s next?

We have great things coming up for Rock. Now that our help center and blog were recently updated, you can expect to see some rockin’ content across those and some new channels throughout the next few weeks.

My two-month journey in Nicaragua has come to an end by the time you read this article. My next travels are fully confirmed already though. After spending a month visiting friends and family I’m excited to visit Lisbon for 3 months and learn more about Portuguese culture and a new language. Portugal also has plenty of surf and a lot of interesting people to meet for sure.

No more volcanoes though, I think I scratched that itch for the time being by summiting San Cristóbal, the highest volcano in Nicaragua (allow me some bragging rights, it’s a 12-hour hike that starts at 2:30 am).

Will you be in Lisbon or are you interested in e-meeting? You can open a Quick Connect space with me through this link space.new/nicolaas. :)

Saying “no” is an important part of setting boundaries. Without it, we often let other people’s priorities take precedence over our own, which in the workplace, leads to unrealistic expectations, and less time to say “yes” to the things that really matter.

One of the main ways this shows up at work is the inability to say “no” to meeting requests, which is why many of us spend over 30 hours in unproductive meetings each month.

Saying “no” takes practice, and many people won’t be used to hearing it, but once it becomes part of your organizational culture, you’ll realise that work can be so much more than struggling to find time for productive work in between an onslaught of meetings.

When to say “no” to meetings

Before you start saying “no” to every meeting request that comes your way, it might help to understand the difference between which meetings you should accept, and which to reject.

Bad meetings are usually too frequent, poorly timed and badly run, whereas good meetings have a clear purpose, occur only when needed, fit around productive working hours, and are facilitated by someone who knows how to keep a group on track.

It isn’t always easy to spot the difference, especially when responding to a last-minute meeting invite. Here are some hard and fast rules to help you say “no” more often.

Say “no” to meetings where you’re not needed

Andy Grove, founder and former CEO of Intel, categorizes meetings into two types: Process- and Mission-oriented. Process-oriented meetings, such as weekly 1-1s and team all-hands, often require some level of direct involvement, which makes them harder to skip.

Mission-oriented meetings on the other hand, are often focused on a specific decision or project, and unless you’re the project owner, it’s unlikely you need to be in every meeting.

Establish what your contribution to the project is at the very beginning, that way you only need to join the conversation when there is information related to deliverables that you own.

Say “no” to meetings without a clear agenda

It’s not uncommon to receive a meeting invite from someone out of the blue, which often comes with very little, if any, context, and is scheduled at the last minute. Without a clear agenda, how do you know if the meeting will be a productive use of your time?

Before you say “yes”, it’s a good idea to ask a few questions. What is the context of the meeting? What kind of expectations does the organiser have in terms of outcomes and next steps? Is there anyone else that needs to be involved?

You will often find that when you ask the right questions, it becomes clear there isn’t actually a need for the meeting. A little bit of resistance will also force people to think twice before firing off an invite in future, reducing the amount of times you have to say “no”.

Say “no” to meetings longer than 30 minutes

Research suggests that only 50% of time spent in meetings is effective, which means the longer the meeting, the more likely that your time, or someone else's, is being wasted.

Many meetings take longer than needed because so much time is spent getting everyone on the same page. You can accomplish the same thing without extending a meeting by sharing documents and relevant pre-reading material beforehand.

Anyone familiar with Parkinson’s Law will know that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion", which means it’s often best to limit meetings to half an hour. In most cases, it will be enough, and if not, you can always schedule a follow-up.

Say “no” to meetings that kill your flow

Getting into a flow state doesn’t happen instantly, which means setting aside distraction-free blocks of time that allow you to focus. Interruptions not only kill your momentum, they can also cost you additional time and productivity in the form of meeting recovery syndrome.

For the meetings that you have no choice but to accept, try and group them together at times when you would normally work on other shallow tasks such as admin and replying to emails. There are even tools you can take advantage of to do it for you, like Clockwise.

Say “no” to meetings for an entire day

Companies such as Facebook and Shopify have gone so far as to introduce no meeting days. Many of them understand the pressures that come with remote working, which is why they have adopted policies at the organisational level that support employees.

The aim is not to shift meetings from one day to another, but increase the amount of time you have available for productive work each week. It might not work for all teams, but meeting days can help you rely less on synchronous forms of communication.

As many of the world’s best technology companies have shown, it’s possible to run a successful business with very few meetings. Synchronous forms of communication like in-person and online meetings have their place, but they don’t need to be the default mode.

5-minute screen recordings and short audio messages can be much more effective than 30-minute meetings, it’s just a question of people embracing a new way of working.

Asynchronous work with Rock

At Rock we believe asynchronous communication will be the primary way that organisations communicate in the near future, which is why we’re working hard to enable people around the world to spend less time in meetings, and more time working on the things that matter.

Rock is working hard to enable remote teams in a way that means less time spent in meetings, and more time working on things that matter — click here to learn more.

No more back-and-forth on which tools to use to work together, as with Quick Connect, you can instantly start working with anyone. If you want a more memorable Quick Connect link, you can now claim your own custom space.new URL when you’re on PRO or TEAMS.

This release also includes link previews and GIFs on the web and desktop versions, a new help center and blog, and many improvements to the mobile app.

Check out the first-ever product release webinar, where Nico & Greta walk you through the latest features and their different use cases.

Quick Connect PRO ?

Personalize your Quick Connect to highlight your business name or the service you’re offering with a custom link.

You can add your Quick Connect link to social media channels & communications, your freelance profile, or client-facing websites or business cards. This makes it easier for people to start a conversation with you and collaborate on anything.

Use Quick Connect to seamlessly get in touch with new clients, offer customer support, or collaborate with anyone for an up and coming business partnership. Make sure to claim your link in time, once it’s taken it’s gone!

We have also added template spaces to Quick Connect to create a more customized experience. Available templates include: operations, recruiting, product design, marketing campaign, engineering, project management and customer support. Customized template options are coming soon to PRO and TEAMS!

Link Previews on web and desktop

In addition to previewing links on mobile, Rock now shares a thumbnail of links that are shared within your spaces. Get a quick sense of videos, articles and other links that people share in a space with a thumbnail and a snippet describing what you shared.

GIFs on web and desktop

You can now share your favorite GIFs on the web and desktop versions of Rock!

GIFs become available in a group space with more than three people. You will receive a notification saying ‘GIFs unlocked ?’ and the GIF button will appear next to the emoji functionality.

Browse thousands of different options from the Giphy library and share them in the chat with your team to say something only the right GIF can express.

Pinboard [Mobile only]

Pin important information in a dedicated panel in each space. This makes it easier to find important tasks, topics, notes, files or messages without having to go looking.
You can pin multiple objects in a space, allowing everyone to quickly check out and access information by clicking on the pin button in the top right corner of the space. This may include a welcome message, a weekly announcement, or an important task or note.
How to pin:

• Messages: keep the message you want to pin pressed for a few seconds and click on the pin icon afterwards.
• Tasks, notes, files and topics: press the pin button in the top right corner of the object. You can unpin items by selecting the same pin button again.

Pinned information can be accessed by clicking on the pin next to the space name. You can also filter pinned information to quickly browse through relevant objects by mini-app.

Import tasks from CSV [PRO & TEAMS]

Are you looking to quickly create a large amount of tasks or move documented information over to tasks? The import from CSV functionality makes it easy to quickly create a whole set of tasks.
Add your information into the provided template and migrate it to Rock within a few clicks. You can access the import from CSV feature in the Import section of your Settings panel.

Log out from all devices

Not sure on what devices your current account is logged in? This feature allows you to log out of all devices your profile is still connected to in one go. That way you can make sure that you’re the only one with access to your account.
You can access the feature from your Settings, press the three dots, and select ‘Log out from all devices’

Rock Help Center ?

Resources, documentation and so much more! Browse the help center for support material on tasks, messages, notes and any other Rock feature.
We will be adding new help center articles on a continuous basis so if you’re looking for something specific let us know by opening a space with us!

The new Rock blog ?️

We have also upgraded the navigation experience on web and mobile for the Rock blog. This makes it easier to find relevant articles and improves the reading experience across devices.
We are also enabling guest posting. Are you a writer, company or user that has a story to tell that you think is relevant to our audience? Feel free to reach out to open a space with us to further discuss possibilities.

Mobile updates

We have added a bunch of improvements to the mobile experience. This product release includes the following changes and fixes to the mobile apps:

• Quick Connect (PRO) - pick your own custom Quick Connect link and use a template for your Quick Connect space.
• Pinboard: pin anything in a space for easy access to all your important tasks, notes, files, and more.
• Force log out from all devices
• A whole lot of bug fixes and smaller improvements.

Download the mobile app

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Meetings can be excellent at establishing and maintaining connections between team members (who might be geographically distant). But too often, virtual meetings are not a productive use of everyone’s time. Throughout this article we share a few best practices for your virtual meetings to make sure you are getting the most out of your time together.

When the shift to remote work was new and unfamiliar, many of us became all-too-familiar with virtual meeting burnout. Managers and companies relied too heavily on virtual meetings to bridge the gap between in-office camaraderie and the often isolated reality.

Why are virtual meeting best practices important?

As we have written elsewhere, we believe, “video conferencing (when done right) is a helpful tool because it’s a high-quality communication method.” Implementing best practices can help your team use virtual meetings effectively and keep them from being time-consuming.

You can improve virtual meetings by establishing a shared virtual meeting etiquette where you determine who takes notes in advance. While these common-sense insights are good to remember, thinking more critically about meetings drives some of the best practices.

We know that when it comes to virtual meetings, it is important to ask yourself some questions before sending those invites. Your team members’ calendars are a valuable resource, so make sure you are using their time wisely. Here are some best practices that can help teams plan and execute virtual meetings more effectively.

Cancel (or shorten) meetings

This is a bold suggestion but hear us out. Canceling your meetings can help you make sure that you are thinking critically about how your team’s time is used. Before you schedule a meeting, identify what you want the outcome to be. What decisions need to be made? Are you looking for insight from your team?

Reflecting on the topic of the meeting, are the benefits of a meeting (such as interactive discussion and quick decision-making) essential? Instead of a regular status update meeting, written updates can provide the same information.

We have all heard the saying, “this meeting could have been an email.” Sometimes, a meeting should have been an email. Recognizing that a virtual meeting is not needed is a good skill to have. Written updates can provide a thoughtful summary of statuses for projects and tasks that you can easily reference later. You can add that summary to project documentation or share it with a team member.

If a meeting is needed, shortening it can help to make sure you discuss the important items. When a meeting is 30 minutes instead of an hour, the shorter meeting length can ensure that priorities are discussed and addressed first. It limits your meetings to only the essentials, which is what meetings should be for anyway.

Substitute your meetings with other tools and resources

While you might not need an hour-long meeting for check-ins, being able to communicate with your team about how their work is important. It contributes to overall transparency and helps you keep an eye out for any roadblocks.

Giving your team the ability to check in on projects and tasks enables them to work independently and cuts down on some of the need for virtual meetings. Turn to your tools to find a solution that doesn’t rely on time-consuming meetings.

Take care of things with tasks

Tools like Rock often have a tasks feature to help workers manage and organize the actions that need to be completed.

You can also give your team members access to shared files or task boards so they can check on how something is progressing when they need or want to. This frees up your time and puts the tools in your teams’ hands so they can work more independently.

Make the most of messaging

Group chats can also be a useful way of sharing information passively with your team. Those methods also allow your coworkers to respond when they can. Their responses will likely be more thoughtful and helpful than if you asked them to jump on a call.

With Rock’s messaging feature, you can chat with everyone in a space or tag a team member to ask them something directly while still enabling the rest of your coworkers to see their answer. This helps to prevent information from being siloed while freeing everyone to focus on their work.

Rock’s messaging also allows you to share polls where everyone in a space can quickly weigh in with their opinion.

Rethink how you use your meeting time

Does your team spend time on discussions that could be a one-on-one conversation between two team members instead of the whole group? Do they ask for information?

Instead of providing in-depth answers, create an action item to share existing documentation or task boards with a team member. This provides a more comprehensive resource for them that they can reference when needed. You will answer their questions and help them work more independently.

Structure can save you from stress

If your team has trouble staying on track, share an agenda ahead of the meeting. Agendas help make sure meetings have a defined plan and objective. They can also help shut down any tangents or vague discussions.

Asking your coworkers to send items for discussion in advance can also help prevent the meeting from wandering off-topic. This also makes sure that you and your team are talking about the topics they have questions or opinions on. When a team member sends an item for discussion, you can sometimes address the topic via tasks or chat.

Summarize the meeting at the end, and reiterate any action items to confirm that everyone understands what they have been asked for. Making meeting notes along with action items available to your team after the meeting can provide a useful reference, promote asynchronous work and be added to project documentation.

Your time is a valuable resource

Virtual meetings remain a staple feature of modern workplaces. Whether you are working remote, part of a distributed workforce, or in an office connecting with coworkers on the other side of the world. It provides workers with a venue for interactive discussions and quick decision-making.

Without structure or thinking critically about the objective, virtual meetings can quickly get out of hand. Remember, best practices for how to tame virtual meetings are:

• Canceling your meetings means that you won’t “meet by default”. Apply this to standing meetings that are supposed to be for check-ins. Your time is wasted by calling in, reviewing updates, and reiterating unnecessary information that can be documented in tasks or messages. If you do need a meeting, shortening the length will force you to stick to the essentials.
• Replacing meetings with other tools involves thinking about what you need and the best way to get it. Using messaging and task management can better organize information and empower your team to work independently.
• Rethinking how you spend time in your meetings means that, when you do need a meeting, it is effective. Structuring your meetings with agendas, note-taking, and action items can help you make the most of them.

These best practices will help you and your team focus on what matters, not meetings. Remote work tools like Rock can help you share information via documentation and messaging. Collaborate with task boards, and meet when you need to.

While it's great to work from anywhere, flexibility can still be an issue for teams that struggle with timezones and remote work. Distributed and remote teams can leverage asynchronous work to be less dependent on direct responses, meetings and just being online.

No matter where you’re working, you might have to align your schedule with your company’s headquarters in another time zone or continent. You might also be stuck working a nine-to-five schedule that’s difficult to juggle with your personal life.

The increased importance of asynchronous work

Since remote work is far more widespread today, companies and teams should adapt to overcome this challenge. A new type of remote work is emerging that offers workers the flexibility they value while benefiting businesses too—asynchronous work.

While it may be an intimidating change, once you have nailed the right amount of communication and committed to detailed documentation, asynchronous work can be incredibly rewarding. People can enjoy benefits including flexibility, better communication, and documentation.

In addition, working asynchronously can prime you for “deep work,” a term that Cal Newport coined to describe the ability to work intensely without distraction. This ability to deeply immerse themselves in tasks allows employees to become more productive and produce better results.

With asynchronous work, people are empowered to be more independent and effective.

Asynchronous Work: Meaning & Methodology

So what is asynchronous communication and why is it so beneficial for remote teams? Asynchronous work is a methodology that treats work like a relay race instead of a sprint. This allows team members to pick up tasks from others without waiting for meetings or direct messages.

Two important parts, core to the methodology:

• Documentation: Store information so anyone can find project details, past activities or important updates without relying on being online at the same time.
• Task management: Document and track who is working on what with descriptions, assignees, start- and due dates, labels and more.

Instead of synchronous work, where a team needs to be online during the same hours, people now have the actual freedom to decide when and how to work.

One team member might start their day at 6 am while another might not start until noon. When there are people across different locations across a country or continent, working as their individual schedules permit provides a flexible solution.

The true meaning of asynchronous work

Simply put: asynchronous communication is communication that doesn’t happen in real-time. Instant confirmation or feedback is not guaranteed, and generally the team members are geographically dispersed. 

Geographical dispersion itself however, doesn’t mean that the primary collaboration is done asynchronously. There are a couple of workflows remote teams need to implement to reduce the need for synchronous collaboration and make a shift closer to asynchronous.

Relying on remote asynchronous communication methods is especially important for distributed teams. Retrieving, tracking and following up on work can quickly become a challenge when working across locations and time zones. This often leads to constant checkins, meeting overloads and non-productive work schedules.

People can respond when it’s convenient and during their own set work times. Next steps can be taken without having to wait on someone else as everything can easily be found back. Asynchronous working setups often don't expect communication to be immediate. This gives people the flexibility to decide what hours they want to get work done.

You are never held up when a coworker is offline if you leverage asynchronous work correctly. You and your team can stay on top of work and move away from the hyper-responsiveness that often comes with live, real-time communication.

Benefits of asynchronous work

We’ve talked about what asynchronous work is and how it, well, works. As a new approach, asynchronous work provides quite a few benefits that more traditional, synchronous workplaces cannot.

With increased independence and communication, asynchronous work offers support to remote teams in a way that rigid schedules and set office hours simply can’t.

Longer periods of focus and concentration

Asynchronous work enables you to feel more focused on the task at hand with minimal interruptions. Normally, questions or messages can pull your attention away from what you’re working on and shatter your concentration.

With asynchronous work, there’s little to no pressure for workers to respond immediately. You can focus on writing, coding, or problem solving and get work done.

More flexibility

Asynchronous work adds more flexibility for you. Because you don’t need to be online at the same time as management or coworkers you can work when it’s best for you. This will help reduce stress, since work can be aligned to your life, not the other way around.

Additionally, since asynchronous work’s emphasis is on results, not the amount of time worked, you have greater independence to complete tasks and projects. You shouldn’t have to sit around when your work is done for the day.

Better communication and documentation

Since your team may not be online at the same time or have the same context as you, communication and documentation needs to be more thorough and intentional. Asynchronous work, by necessity, improves the quality of communication and documentation. Coworkers can understand decisions, request and projects without asking around for details or updates.

Documentation is also key to getting asynchronous work right. When your documentation is thorough and communication is effective, workers can get answers to their questions independently. This prevents important information from being siloed, increases transparency, and allows projects to move forward regardless of personal work schedules.

Disadvantages of asynchronous work

While asynchronous work offers a flexible, empowering, results-oriented approach, it has some drawbacks. The good news is that, if these drawbacks are given serious consideration and thoughtfully addressed, your team or company can easily avoid or resolve them.

It can be a hard change to navigate

Making the move to asynchronous work is a big shift, and with any change comes risk and the time-consuming realities of implementation. Although the COVID-19 pandemic may have given asynchronous work a boost, most workplaces still rely heavily on synchronous communication and work approaches.

Change can be stressful and complex, especially with larger teams or global companies. Some elements of communication can also be lost, making it harder to differentiate different types of communication styles.

Although it may be intimidating, remaining intentional and decisive about implementing asynchronous work will ensure that it’s a smooth transition.

The right amount of communication can be hard to find

Communication may be an issue if asynchronous work isn’t intentional and deliberate. Too much communication may keep your team in the loop but it can also lead to burnout, and information exhaustion. Messages, notes, and task boards can be powerful tools to make sure that nothing gets missed. Nevertheless, they also make it hard to organize and use information effectively when overdone.

On the other hand, too little communication can leave frustrated coworkers tearing out their hair in different time zones. Details can fall through the cracks and escape notice if communication is lackluster.

Asynchronous work requires an intentional and thoughtful approach to communication. Ask yourself: Who actually needs to see new information?

Documentation that needs constant maintenance

It’s hard to keep workers on the same page without thorough and up-to-date documentation. This is especially true if they take advantage of the flexibility that asynchronous work offers and work in different towns, time zones, or continents.

Building reliable, accurate information repositories can preemptively answer questions and provide guidance for workers, no matter where they are or what time it is.

With all things, these drawbacks can be intense or mild, depending on how you approach them. It’s important to remember: asynchronous work relies on structure, thorough documentation and high-quality communication to succeed.

What does it take to make asynchronous work successful?

The short answer is good communication! It’s important to make sure nothing gets missed when collaborating on work schedules that don't overlap. Just like how asynchronous work doesn’t need team members to work the same hours, asynchronous communication doesn’t need a real-time response.

Asynchronous communication methods require channels that allow team to track work at different times. These methods include:

• Task management: Manage ongoing activities or projects in a documented way by creating, editing and updating your work through tasks.
• Note taking: Write down important information about meetings, discussions or workflows so everyone can get an update without requiring a meeting.
• File management systems: Store files, graphics and longer pieces of information in dedicated folders that are accessible to everyone in the team.

An asynchronous work methodology gives people more reference to work as information is well-document. People also get more time to process information because they don’t require an immediate response.

When to switch to synchronous channels

Synchronous communication can be a helpful tool too when really needed. This type of communication, which relies on real-time responses, is helpful when used for complex discussions, personal development, brainstorming sessions, or when things become too time-consuming to resolve through asynchronous communication.

For example, meetings can be exhaustive and unproductive, but when they’re limited to situations when they’re really needed for collaborative, fast decision-making, they’re valuable tools in any workplace.

Leverage your documentation

Effective and organized documentation is another pillar of successful asynchronous work. Since team members might log on late at night or from the other side of the world, it’s important to find and access the information you need, when you need it. Waiting for someone else to be online will slow you down by forcing you to wait for their availability.

Good documentation also reduces how often you need to communicate with your team members about the small stuff. If your documentation is organized, you can navigate to shared notes or files and find the project or workflow details you’re looking for.

Inboxes will stay uncluttered and your team can streamline their work by referencing and accessing important information at any time.

Maximize deep work with asynchronous work

Deep work is when you perform professional activities at the height of your mental capabilities. It relies on focus, on keeping your attention fully concentrated on the task at hand. With deep work, people are intentional and deliberate.

Cal Newport coined the term in his 2016 book Deep Work: Focused Rules for a Distracted World. He says, “​​Deep work is my term for the activity of focusing without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It describes, in other words, when you’re really locked into doing something hard with your mind.”

Instead of investing a long period of somewhat-focused work, you deliberately incorporate limited spurts of intense focus.

Cal Newport says that, “instead of focusing too much on what’s bad about distractions, it’s important to step back and remember what’s so valuable about its opposite. Concentration is like a super power in most knowledge work pursuits.”

Working asynchronously supports deep work because it helps to free you from distractions. You can focus more on the task in front of you—bringing the power of your concentration to the table. Spend less time locating files or referencing emails buried in your inbox.

This empowers you to focus on the work that really matters.In addition, asynchronous work enables you to focus on productivity. You can focus on getting work done instead of paying attention to clocking in and being online.

What tools do you need for asynchronous work?

There are lot of different platforms that can come in handy for asynchronous work. Focus on those that offer well-documented communication, accessibility and asynchronous communication channels.

With the right resources, asynchronous work can take your work to the next level. Some remote work tools that help with asynchronous work are Rock, Notion, Coda and Google Drive.

Rock

Rock is asynchronous by default and synchronous when really needed. Asynchronous work should be the foundation of team communication. Nevertheless, you should not forget that synchronous communication still adds value to collaboration. Rock's multimodal nature lets you pick and choose how to communicate depending on urgency and priority.

Asynchronous features such as task boards, topics, notes, and comments help you organize your day-to-day work. Meanwhile, real time communication through features like messaging and video conferencing come in handy for discussing complex topics or brainstorming.

Notion

As a productivity and project management software tool, Notion provides a single interface for users instead of requiring that they cobble together various tools.

No matter what type of work you do, you can configure Notion to fit your needs. It’s highly customizable and therefore flexible to whatever organizational approach you take. You can collaborate with other users in Notion and have all of the visibility you need.

Coda

Coda is an all-in-one tool that combines text and tables. This allows teams a high-degree of versatility, since they can customize each doc to fit their needs. Coda helps to streamline internal workflows while keeping information accessible so teams can work together, wherever they are based.

As a platform that’s flexible and customizable, Coda can help your team work together asynchronously, no matter what they need.

Google Drive

Providing cloud-based storage, Google Drive is nearly ubiquitous in today’s workplaces, schools, and organizations. Shared files make it easier to access and organize work between people.

Because it’s a cloud solution and asynchronous in nature, Google Drive makes collaboration easy. Team members can share files with each other, make edits, and provide feedback in Google Drive.

Because Google Drive is so easy to navigate and comprehensive, it’s a valuable tool for asynchronous work. It also becomes easier to ask a coworker in another country to provide feedback on a draft you're working on.

Build a base of shared knowledge for your team

Rock is a central hub that provides a structure for stored team knowledge. Task boards allow you to see the status of a project, what everyone is working on, and how progress is going.

Task boards let users comment and ask questions. This creates an asynchronous workflow by default. People can catch up by looking at tasks instead of distracting video calls. The transparency of task boards helps teams declutter inboxes and prioritizing work.

In addition to task boards, teams can create notes or add files for better documentation without leaving Rock. You can also connect cloud storage providers like Google Drive, Dropbox or Figma keep important information at hand.

Look forward and work asynchronously

With asynchronous work, you can stay on top of your tasks, maintain work/life balance, and strengthen team knowledge. Rock is a tool that can help you reach these goals by being:

• Multimodal: With tasks, notes, messages, files, and meetings in one place. You can get all of the project management or work functionality your team needs without ever leaving Rock.
• Asynchronous: Rock has fewer elements like online status and read receipts so you can focus on your tasks and projects. With asynchronous communication, you can respond to non-urgent tasks when you have the bandwidth. You can also focus on deep work without calls and meetings interrupting.

Use fewer tools, platforms, and apps during your workday with Rock. By having tasks, notes, and topics alongside messaging and meetings in one place, you'll need fewer tools. You can also work in a more structured way, across teams and document important information.

Asynchronous work provides a better, more flexible way for teams and companies to approach remote work. Rock employs asynchronous work by default while making synchronous ways of communicating accessible for when really needed. This way teams can truly embrace the future of work.