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• By Ioanna Constantinou
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Working in a start-up company in Cyprus is quite a challenge. Nowadays, technology is evolving every minute and the only thing that you have to do is to follow.

From the interview round, I remember Argyris saying that, “we are a team who likes to use technology”. I did not understand this until the first day I joined the team.

When I came to the ideas2life team, I thought that I will never understand this type of technology that everyone follows. I was overwhelmed of how easy everyone manages this technology and I thought to myself “I will never learn how to use all these”.

I had an intense training week. The things that I learnt were too many but it was simply to get me ready on the things I will be working on the soonest possible. The 3 words that I believe characterized me were confused, panicked and pessimistic.

Moreover, the friendly environment helped me to overcome any difficulties that I faced at the beginning.

Lastpass

Let’s start with Lastpass. I can easily say that Lastpass is very useful because it stores safely every password you use. For example, you write it once, save it on Lastpass and then you have it there for a lifetime :)  

Also, it is very helpful to use Lastpass since you do not have to write the username or the password every time you want to sign in, in all the different sites.

Day by day, I become familiar with these “different types of software” and now I understand why the team follows this method. And that is for security reasons.

For example, when I joined the team, I said to Argyris “Can we do smaller passwords in order to remember them more easily?”. Well, as long as Lastpass is around this is not a problem – and it is also better to have random, big passwords for our privacy.

Asana

Instead of using Emails for our daily tasks, we are using a software called Asana.

In fact, Asana is more helpful than Emails. You can see all the tasks you have for the rest of the week, month or even year – while in emails you may miss something in case you have a ‘busy’ email inbox.

However, Asana is the weirdest of them all (softwares). You have to remember to:

1. Add a title.  Okay, where?  “The title is the Write a task name”
2. Describe what you want in the task and then write a CTA.  What is that? Call To Action is the steps that need to be done by the person receiving the task. So, it is important to do this because you avoid any confusion.
3. Add Project. Why? It is very important to add projects when you assign task to someone in order for all the members who follow that project to see the task and be informed about it. Ideas2Life is all about transparency. Otherwise you keep the task private.
4. Also, it is important to remember to add date in the task in order to help the other person understand the task’s importance. If the person can not do this in the specific day you assigned it to them, they can change the day, and if the task is for date = today you can mention it in the CTA :)
5. After all, when you complete a task do not forget to press the Mark Complete button (such a satisfying feeling!).

Furthermore, as I was saying before, Asana is weird because it does not have the ‘send’ or ‘save’ options. On the first days I was always searching for these buttons.

But being weird is part of our culture – so our software need to be weird but brilliant too :) The best part about Asana is that you can always go back to the tasks to see what you’ve written and amend anything you see that needs improvement.

Nothing stays forever once assigned to someone :)

I also like the fact, that while using Asana, we can always keep reminder tasks to ourselves. Whether this is something that needs to be told to another team member or something that we want to do – we are humans and we may forget things :)

Slack

Another important software is Slack. We use Slack for our internal communication.

It is divided into any kind of channels, for us to communicate with the relevant team and announce things, ask questions and co-operate.

The most important channel that all the team members have to use is the “team-my-work-today” channel.

In this one, everyone has to write every day what they are going to work on depending on their tasks. This way, we all know exactly what all the team members do for the day :)

For instance, when you are an operator, you have to update frequently several channels in order to inform the others about restaurant changes or customer feedback (in real time).

For example, Costas from Costas Souvlakia called and he said that for today he wants to deactivate Gyro Kotopoulo. This is done in order to inform the rest of the operators of the change in case they have to handle the same request / call again. The channel for these changes is called “the ops-menu-related”.

Google Drive

Microsoft Office… ha-ha :P we do not use Microsoft Office, we just use the Google Drive.  It is an easy way to manage your documents and you can find it whenever you want.

When I started using the Google Docs I was searching for the button “save” and guess what? –  the button does not exist.

When you write something automatically your documents are stored. Moreover, with Google Docs everyone in the team can have an access and see every single document in the Drive :)

To conclude, after careful consideration and research, Ideas2Life decided to use these softwares to make their work life easier. For instance, we can work from home while communicating efficiently with the rest of the team in the office.

That’s our software and our culture :)