Boost your productivity: Stay Remote. Work Together. Collaborate Better.
As COVID-19 (Coronavirus) continues to impact more people, companies and countries, the need for collaboration and work management tools are critical to ensure people can continue to be productive while working remotely. However experienced we might be with global collaboration, and how much ever relaxing it may be to work from the comfort of our home, we definitely miss the opportunity to personally connect with our colleagues, conduct in-person discussions, physical white boarding sessions, or simply walk up to our colleague's desk to follow-up on a task. I know I do.
While we at Citrix ensure to maintain safe, secure and uninterrupted business operations for our customers, here are a few tips and tricks to enhance your productivity and accountability while working remotely utilising Citrix Podio.
How to stay up-to-date?
Notifications are going to be your best work assistant during this period of remote collaboration.
- Follow / Unfollow content on Podio to intelligently manage what alerts you want to receive as notifications vs what you should skip to prevent cluttering your notification stream.
- I personally prefer the in-app notifications by clicking “Show All” in the notification pull-down and then viewing all notifications related to a single item clubbed together. This prevents context switching and saves time by not going through each notification independently.
- My colleague, on the other hand, prefers email notifications as they can be customised further and based on his role, he does not need to go through every update on every content that he follows. For example, you can choose to be notified on email only regarding meeting updates or only when someone @mentions you on a content on Podio.
Activity streams are the best way to stay conscious of all work happening around you irrespective of whether you follow the content or not.
- When on a tea break, make it a point to glance through the activity stream on your personal / workspace homepage for a quick overview of high-level updates.
- Track work progress by keeping a close tab on the activity stream of an item. When collaborating remote and even in different time-zones, this helps you stay up-to-date with why, what, when and who made a change on the item.
- The comments field on the item can be utilised for adding notes and collaborating with stakeholders, proposing thoughts and sharing challenges. Miss white-boarding? Doodle up your thoughts on a personal board or just a piece of paper and share it as an image along with comments for recording your thoughts on the item.
- @Mention your colleague if you are awaiting feedback from someone specific to drive their attention to the item
- Use the file upload functionality on an item to share documents, designs and other attachments. If you do not have the option to add a file to an item, check with your app admin to enable file upload to items in the app.
How to collaborate better?
- There are multiple modes to communicate with your team within Podio like tasks, messages and comments; each mode specialised in a different context. Check out our tips to understand where does each mode fit in best.
- Want to broadcast a message to all members in your workspace? Share your message / question / poll as a status in your workspace activity stream. You could also create a ‘news’ app to track all communication items; just ensure all required audience follow the app to get notifications when a new news item is added.
- Do not forget to use GIFs and Emojis in your various conversations like comments, status and messages on Podio. They are the best way to express yourself while being remote and still be understood perfectly!
- Need to share a specific piece of information / item with someone who is not part of the workspace, say, a client or an external team member? Share the item with the required person. This works irrespective of whether the person is already a Podio user or not. You can also share the item in read-only mode.
- Not able to meet customers and collect sensitive information or business critical feedback? Try out Podio webforms to collect and store information in a Podio app. You can also utilise our Dynamic Forms extension for enhanced and more intuitive user interface for webforms.
How to stay responsible and track deliverables?
Build accountability within your team with clear segregation of tasks and deliverables.
- Have you explored our actions app yet? It helps you keep a track of all your deliverables or assign tasks to your team members in a structured manner. You can also modify the app template to track progress of each deliverable or create milestones in terms of sub-tasks (by utilising the native task functionality on Podio).
- Native tasks on Podio can be used for tracking quick personal to-dos. These to-dos can either be independent or be linked to an item, app or workspace for retaining a context. When linked to a deliverable item of an actions app, the native task serves as a subtask.
Pro Tips:
- Check out our keyboard shortcuts for quick actions.
- Build workflows or sign-up for workflow automation to automate actions, build integrations and save time.
- Check out the list of Podio extensions built by our partners to boost your productivity through different integrations.
- Request help from a Podio partner to assist you setup your Podio organisation and derive maximum productivity.
Other Productivity Boosters at Citrix:
- If you haven’t checked out Citrix Workspace, this is the time to learn more about how to enable secure access to SaaS applications, legacy infrastructure and virtual desktops in one place.
- Miss connecting in person with your team or manager and reviewing your documents and presentations? The Feedback & Approval workflows of Citrix ShareFile will prove useful here.
- Struggling with tax filings, contract approvals and renewals? Check out our e-signature functionality with Citrix RightSignature.
- Utilise Podio integration with RightSignature to create contracts through workflows and get them signed electronically.
Citrix with its suite of products is here to help you stand together, virtually, at this hour of crisis. We want you to believe in staying remote yet working closely. Let us know if you have other tips on how to collaborate better and be more productive in the comments. We would love to hear from you!
Stay Safe!
/Pallabi - Podio Product Manager
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Thanks for your comments and queries.
Selim Sevinc: I echo your thoughts and we too understand that in-app video conferencing would have been a great collaboration booster at this time. However, our integration with our 3rd party in-app video conferencing tool has failed due to changes at the 3rd party tool's end and hence we are not able to provide the feature currently. We are looking to integrate with a more sustainable tool in near future, but would not be able to deliver the new integration immediately.
Mike: We understand this could be a difficult time for struggling businesses. I do not have an answer yet on if we can reduce our price, but we are working on how we can support our customers to sail through this phase.
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Hi Mike!
I would be happy to look over your account and see if we can offer some type of discount to you during this time!
Can you please create a support ticket here: https://podio.com/site/contact and we would be happy to see what we can do :)
/Kelley - Podio and Workflow Automation Support
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How does one become a Podio partner that helps people set Podio up for their business? I've set up 6 companies on the platform and could definitely help with the most difficult portion of setup - thinking through the best way for your team to use Podio. Would love to know more info if that's a thing 🤷🏻♀️ thanks!
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Beth Barbaglia I have sent you an email with more details on how to join the Citrix Podio Partner network. As a starter, you can get a glimpse of Citrix Partner Program at https://www.citrix.com/partner-programs/solution-advisor.html.
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