<a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/becoming-a-world-class-knowledge-worker/" rel="follow">In the last article of this series</a>, we talked about how:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Following the shift to remote work, high standards of collaboration and knowledge management will be what separates the next generation of market leaders from the rest.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Very few knowledge workers actually know how to work productively, and communicate effectively in the workplace because these best practices are usually hidden routines not proactively shared.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Productive knowledge management starts with documentation, which drives clarity and conviction&mdash;and is the reason why documents, spreadsheets, and slides are the lifeblood of knowledge workers.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Structuring your docs, tasks, and updates with <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/templates-library/" rel="follow">scalable templates</a> is the easiest way to get started with documentation, and establishing higher productivity standards in your team and company.</li>
</ul>
In this article, we&rsquo;ll be talking more about a core application of documenting knowledge&mdash;recurring processes and workflows.
<h2>Document recurring processes with rich, step-by-step guides</h2>
Processes are more than boring protocols and bureaucracy&mdash;they&rsquo;re probably the strongest driver of a company's productivity, as they show how things are done.
No matter your other advantages (talent, budget, etc.), without effective workflows, everything else collapses. And even in a corporation, processes contribute directly to company culture, as they&rsquo;re reflected in how you hire, how you make decisions, and how you run things. <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/benefits-of-business-workflows/" rel="follow">Processes and workflows are a big deal</a>.
What are the keys to documenting your workflows?
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Identify what&rsquo;s recurring in every team. Think code deployment and retrospectives for engineering, hiring and performance review for HR, expense reporting and budget approvals for finance, <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/template-digital-design-brief/" rel="follow">design</a> and <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/template-copy-brief/" rel="follow">copywriting briefs</a> for creative. Prioritize what you do more often, which is likely more impactful for your organization.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Craft your how-to guides with new hires in mind. Similar to templates, put effort into creating a step-by-step guide on how the process is run. Add screenshots, links to external tools (e.g. file storage, team chat) and contact details of collaborators and stakeholders (e.g. approvers, decision-makers, owners). Always give context, and avoid abbreviations. Write with your new hires in mind&mdash;this will ensure you&rsquo;re as clear as possible, and address all the FAQs upfront.&nbsp;</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Make it easy to assign and track. Once you&rsquo;ve completed a process, stress test it. The first goal of a good workflow doc is knowledge transfer&mdash;assign it to a new joiner, and see if they can get to the expected outcome on their own. If they ask for help or get lost halfway, then you know where to improve.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Review workflows with your team&rsquo;s feedback. As with templates, set time aside to review and upgrade your most important processes. If you&rsquo;re a manager, give your team the chance to voice their feedback&mdash;they&rsquo;re the power users of the workflows, and will have the best ideas on how to improve them.&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
Again, recognize and reward those who build on your processes, as these are the same people that are innovating on your company culture.
<h2>Classify and store your files carefully to enable easy access to knowledge</h2>
When you create a lot of documents, templates, and processes, your knowledge can get easily lost.&nbsp;&nbsp;
If your company is working with multiple tools, <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/work-management-tool-vs-work-hub/" rel="follow">different teams might create files in each of them</a>. When Design creates tasks in Asana, Engineering works in JIRA, Operations writes notes in Confluence, Marketing stores business contacts in Hubspot, and the Sales team uses Salesforce, things can get out of control quickly. That's how knowledge silos start.
Finding a document sounds like a small thing, but it&rsquo;s a good proxy of how you share knowledge across teams and get aligned on work. At scale, this can take a real toll on your profit per employee.
The easiest&mdash;and most overlooked&mdash;ways for a digital document to get lost are when you don't give it a proper title or store it in a folder. Here&rsquo;s how to store your files for easy access:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Classify your files with consistent titles.Use a consistent formula for your file titles, so you can easily glance who wrote or owns them. For example, if you&rsquo;re a designer naming a file for your latest website wireframes, you could title it as 'DE - Website wireframes v3'. As a new hire, or a member of another team, I know that the website prototypes are owned by the design team, and that there&rsquo;s been two iterations of this website before this one.&nbsp;</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Store your file where it belongs. Before sharing a file to collaborate on it, make sure you store it in the right place (e.g. folder, project management board, wiki space), with the right permissions. This will ensure that,&nbsp;when you share it, everyone will have access to it. And if anyone needs to retrieve it, it will appear in their search algorithm, because they have access to the right folder.</li>
</ul>
This is a small step for personal productivity, which can compound into a much bigger step for a greater profit per employee.
<h2>Getting there&mdash;productivity is only one side of the coin</h2>
<a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/becoming-a-world-class-knowledge-worker/" rel="follow">We&rsquo;ve seen how personal productivity is a big contributor to revenue per employee</a>, company culture, and even talent acquisition. The easiest way to raise your productivity standards is by building discipline in documentation&mdash;templates, workflows and files storage are practical, small steps that quickly compound into greater gains.
If you're a manager, make sure you lead by example and use team templates&mdash;but most importantly, recognize your direct reports for building on them. If you&rsquo;re a new joiner, show eagerness to catch up with the standard, and then graduate to innovator, upgrading existing templates or creating your own set.
If my last job had started with <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-do-you-onboard-new-joiners-remotely/" rel="follow">a structured onboarding workflow</a>, written goals and plans, and if I&rsquo;d had easier access to information, I wouldn&rsquo;t have ended up leaving after less than a year. I didn&rsquo;t even wait for the cliff period to vest the stock (which grew 5x this year!). And I&rsquo;m okay with that.
Talent recognizes that what makes the difference in the workplace is not a goodie bag, but rather high work standards and strong work ethics, where you can learn from and get inspired to do your best work.
But productivity is only one side of the coin. Collaboration is an even more important, and more delicate component of becoming a world-class knowledge worker. And yet collaboration best practices are also so often overlooked&mdash;to the detriment of both teams and companies.
In this article, we&rsquo;ve seen how:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Recurring processes and workflows are a core application of documentation. These are more than boring protocols and bureaucracy&mdash;they&rsquo;re actually among the strongest inputs of productivity, as they show how things are done.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">When you create a lot of documents, templates, and processes, your knowledge can get easily lost.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-do-you-search-for-files-at-work/" rel="follow">Finding a document sounds</a> like a tiny thing, but it&rsquo;s a great proxy of how teams share knowledge and get aligned.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">At scale, taking time to access knowledge can take a real toll on a company's productivity and profit per employee.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Classifying files with consistent titles and storing them where they belong is an easy way to <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/limited-visibility-at-work/" rel="follow">make knowledge more accessible</a> across the entire organization.</li>
</ul>
In the next article of this series, we&rsquo;ll talk more about how to collaborate with your team, and how to protect your time while respecting your colleagues&rsquo; time.

Processes are more than boring protocols and bureaucracy—they’re probably the strongest driver of a company's productivity, as they show how things are done.

When workflows raise your work standards | Qatalog

When workflows raise your work standards

A hammer is, undeniably, a versatile and excellent tool. For something so simple to have so many uses is without equal. You can insert nails into things, pull nails out of things. Make meat softer. Encourage hot metal to be a different shape. Encourage soft metal to be a different shape. Bang wooden ones on wooden plates so that you can be heard shouting &ldquo;Order!&rdquo; and check if someone's reactions work by banging them on the knee with one.
Other uses of a hammer include: applying makeup, washing dishes, adding paint to canvas, inserting screws, cutting your dinner, banging a drum and soaping hard to reach places.
So, you can see that a hammer is a very versatile tool. The thing is though, while you could do all those things in the second list, you probably shouldn't. There are better, more appropriate tools for each of those jobs, from sponges to knives and paintbrushes
You're probably laughing now, &ldquo;How silly, I'd never use a hammer for those things!&rdquo; you think and, of course, you wouldn't, because it's silly to use the wrong tool for a job. However, I'm also confident that you've used a spreadsheet to do something it's not supposed to be used for at some point in your career, haven't you? Don't blush; it's perfectly fine. We've all done it. I certainly have, although in most instances it's because the organization I work for has mandated it.

<h2>Why are we obsessed with spreadsheets?</h2>
A while ago, I did some work for a public organization with 50,000 employees spread worldwide. For the entire organization, their forecasting model was based on a single spreadsheet maintained by one person in an office in Perth, the head office being in the USA. Every project manager in that organization then copied that master spreadsheet to their own computer to manage their project, uploading into a finance system once a month. The person in Perth regularly updated it of course, but when you looked under the hood, it was like arcane magic.
That organization was using a hammer to clean their bathroom sink. Does it work? Sure! Is it appropriate? Absolutely not. But it worked to fulfil a need that could probably be found elsewhere, <a href="https://medium.com/all-the-things/a-single-infinitely-customizable-app-for-everything-else-9abed7c5b5e7">so we muddled through</a>. As do many other organizations, but without proper funding for the correct kind of platforms, <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988">terrible mistakes can happen</a>.
More than that, though, it's not just financial and clinical data that people are storing in spreadsheets. Go and take a look out of a window. See something that was built within the last 10 to 15 years? It was probably made using a spreadsheet to manage at least one part of the construction. &ldquo;That's not so bad!&rdquo; you cry. Well, I can see a nuclear power station and an airport if I squint from my window. I'd rather they didn't plan projects and create Gantt charts in a spreadsheet when constructing such vital buildings! (I can&rsquo;t see a nuclear power station and I can only see planes from my window, but you get the point!)

<h2>But my spreadsheets are great!</h2>
Look, don't get me wrong. Spreadsheets are excellent, smart things most of the time. With over <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/983321/worldwide-office-365-user-numbers-by-country/">650,000 organizations in the US alone using Microsoft Office</a>, I can see how comparing a spreadsheet to a hammer is a little unfair. A better comparison would be to compare a spreadsheet to a utility tool, which had knives, saws, screwdrivers, bottle openers and those things for getting stones out of horses feet.
But if your builder turned up to start on your remodel and their entire toolbox contained just one tool&mdash;a utility tool, you'd question whether they were the right person for the job, wouldn't you?

<h2>A better alternative: new ways of working</h2>
The next time you reach for a spreadsheet to start a new thing, pause for a moment and consider whether there might be a better, more suitable tool for the job at hand? Something that is designed to do the job you're about to do, to do it better, faster, more accurately and with fewer requirements for you to create arcane (or just plain) magic in the formula bar.
For example, most organizations go through a period of <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/new-way-of-work/">goal setting</a>, either annually, or quarterly around this time of year. Many of those organizations will be using spreadsheets to track the goals and associated metrics and most of those goals and metrics will be forgotten about until the next review period. Sound familiar?
Better tools will also be more likely to integrate with work hubs like Qatalog. Offering you a view of all your work in one place, regardless of which online service you&rsquo;re using. Let's face it; spreadsheets don't integrate with anything and, even when they do, you have to ask yourself, &ldquo;I'm just using this spreadsheet as a database, aren't I?&rdquo; Other more appropriate tools will also be easier to share, less likely to be broken by someone unfamiliar with it and will probably come with automated backups and an SLA!
So, while you could use a hammer to cut your next slice of cake, you have to ask yourself whether you should.

While you could use a spreadsheet to track your next project or goal, pause for a second, and ask yourself whether you should.

Why are we obsessed with spreadsheets? | Qatalog

Like the trusty hammer, a spreadsheet can do a great many things. But while you could cut your birthday cake with that hammer, you probably shouldn’t.

Are you using a hammer to wash the dishes?

Even before working from home became the norm, companies frequently used work management tools across their organizations. Each team has specific problems they solve, and each uses the tools that make sense to them. However, these productivity and collaboration tools do not always help us bridge the gaps between teams, or enhance visibility into what&rsquo;s happening across an organization. That&rsquo;s where work hubs come into play.
Let&rsquo;s explore what they are and how this combo works.&nbsp;
<h2>What are workplace tools and apps?</h2>
Workplace tools are the softwares, apps, websites, and resources that we use to get our work done. Quite often we&rsquo;re so used to them that we don&rsquo;t even realize how many we actually use every day.&nbsp; According to 2020 <a href="https://www.okta.com/businesses-at-work/2020/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">research by Okta</a>, the average company uses 88 workspace apps&mdash;and over 10 percent of companies use over 200!
There&rsquo;s email, of course. Everyone has an email. Then there&rsquo;s team messaging tools like <a href="https://slack.com/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Slack</a> for those quick questions and updates. There&rsquo;s project management tools such as <a href="https://asana.com/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Asana</a>, <a href="https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Jira</a> and <a href="https://clubhouse.io/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Clubhouse</a>, there&rsquo;s wikis, like <a href="https://www.notion.so/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Notion</a>, or <a href="https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Confluence</a>. And we can&rsquo;t forget about <a href="https://zoom.us/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Zoom</a> and <a href="https://docs.google.com/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Google Docs</a>. There are many useful tools, so let&rsquo;s look at them in a bit more detail.&nbsp;
HR software
HR software is essential for Human Resources and People Operations teams to manage people&rsquo;s personal data, HR metrics, and payroll, and to store our contracts, benefits and holiday information. At Qatalog we use <a href="http://charliehr.com" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">CharlieHR</a>, for example. It&rsquo;s also quite useful for team leads&mdash;all the information you need to manage your team well from an admin perspective is there. However, for the rest of the company, it&rsquo;s just a handy tool to book holidays. We log in, see how many days we have left, book the days off, and log out.&nbsp;
Project management software
When we get team-specific, things get more complicated. There are tools such as <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-project-management-asana-trello-jira/" rel="follow">Asana, Jira, and Clubhouse that we use to track our tasks and projects</a>. They can be individual or shared with teams for visibility. However, no one tool works for everyone. Engineers use project management software that makes sense to them, but the rest of the company usually tries to stay away from their tools of choice. Unfortunately, this creates silos of information that are hard to join up.
Corporate wiki &amp; intranet
Then there&rsquo;s <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-vs-company-wiki-notion-confluence/">the wiki or intranet</a>&mdash;the source of truth for all the information that&rsquo;s being worked on in a company. At Qatalog we use Notion. Confluence is another popular alternative. We go to Notion for our processes such as how to book a holiday, benefits, how to expense, and how to request help from a team member. Wikis are great for storing information that doesn&rsquo;t change often. However, it&rsquo;s a common practice for a lot of companies to adjust or even hack single-purpose solutions to meet their broader business needs. Next thing you know, wikis are used for the information that needs constant updating, such as who in the team is working on what. This type of information may need weekly refreshing and becomes one team member&rsquo;s tedious job to keep it up-to-date.&nbsp;
Video conferencing&nbsp;
Let&rsquo;s not forget about video calls. Almost all companies dial into at least one daily. We use calls for project status updates, team meetings, and to bring everyone together. These are all good reasons, but if at some point we start spending <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/communication-overload/">too much time on calls</a>, we may feel we can&rsquo;t get any work done.&nbsp;
Other SaaS tools
Finally, there are analysis tools with dashboards, business automation software, goal setting and tracking tools, and document writing and creation apps. The list of workplace tools goes on, and information gets scattered across them. In our attempt to promote productivity and collaboration at work, we&rsquo;ve adopted too many SaaS tools that <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/new-way-of-work/">in aggregate produce a counter-effect</a>.
Over 70 percent of companies we spoke to said that they spend too much time searching for information. Our daily work shouldn&rsquo;t have to involve becoming investigators, <a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/how-do-you-search-for-files-at-work">searching for information all the time</a>, looking across all these different tools trying to understand who is working on what and who you should ask if you need something.
<h2>So how can a work hub help us and how is it different from yet another work management tool?</h2>
A work hub organizes your work tools and helps you get the most out of them. It integrates all the different tools that we use daily and helps us add context to our work. Sounds great, but what does this really look like?
A work hub maps and links together profiles of all the people, teams and projects in your organization, as well as all the productivity and collaboration tools they use. Thus it becomes a place where you can find and access everything about a team or company. It is updated automatically, making sure you always have the latest information to do your best work.
Let&rsquo;s take an engineering manager who has several projects running at the same time. Each project has lots of people engaged and some may even overlap. All these projects are at different stages with progress, milestones, and blockers. Previously, this engineering manager may have had to rely on Slack channels, <a href="https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira">JIRA </a>reports, <a href="http://www.github.com">GitHub</a> repositories, and Teams calls to know who is working on what and to get exact updates. But with a work hub, the manager can make sense of where all the projects are, who is working on them, and how each project is progressing against its targets. A work hub allows folks to easily share progress within teams and across the wider company. It brings it all together. It&rsquo;s a connective tissue that makes sense of things.
Using a work hub untangles the mess of not knowing what is going on at work. By simplifying search and tying information together, we suddenly get back a lot of time. We also get a sense of peace and balance&mdash;in a way that frees us to perform at our very best.

What’s the difference between workplace tools and a work hub? A work hub organizes your work tools and helps you get the most out of them. Read more in our blog.

Work management tool vs work hub | Qatalog

Using a work hub untangles the mess of not knowing what is going on at work. By simplifying search and tying information together, we suddenly get back a lot of time.

What’s the difference between a work management tool and a work hub?

<h1>Intro to templates library </h1>
Working in teams can be challenging. Processes, knowledge and information get scattered across various tools and teams, making it hard to find things quickly when you need them. Most often though, it's even harder to get started with creating knowledge and processes to share with your teams.
We built this library of templates so you can cut through the chase, and get started sharing, scaling and tracking your work effectively, even when remotely.
You can refer to these templates every time you need inspiration on how to draft a recurring meeting update, or set up a new team or company-wide process.&nbsp;
Get started by clicking on the templates below, and copy paste the 'Template' section in each of them. You can customize each template as per your company processes and operations.
<h1>Updates</h1>
Share your work effectively and get the right attention with templates for your recurring meeting notes, feedback requests, and more.
<ol>
<li><a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/template-daily-standup/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Daily Standup</a></li>
<li><a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/template-1-on-1-notes/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">1:1 Notes</a></li>
<li><a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/template-team-weekly/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Team Weekly</a></li>
<li><a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/template-marketing-weekly/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Marketing Weekly</a></li>
<li><a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/template-issue-feedback-request/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Issue/Feedback Request</a></li>
</ol>

<h1>Workflows</h1>
Track and scale your work with templates for your team-specific and company-wide processes.
<ol>
<li><a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/template-usability-testing-plan/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Usability Testing Plan</a></li>
<li><a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/template-hiring-process/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Hiring Process</a></li>
<li><a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/template-copy-brief/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Copy Brief</a></li>
<li><a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/template-digital-design-brief/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Digital Design Brief</a></li>
<li><a href="https://qatalog.com/blog/post/template-holiday-request/" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">Holiday Request</a></li>
</ol>

<h3>________________________________________________________________________</h3>

This is a living library&ndash;we'll be adding more templates every month. If you can't see a specific template here, feel free to send us a <a href="https://twitter.com/qatalog" rel="follow noopener" target="_blank">tweet</a>.

Explore powerful templates for your recurring updates and workflows to share, scale, and track your work.

Qatalog templates library

Intro to templates library

Updates

Workflows

________________________________________________________________________

Written by
Matteo Tittarelli

Make work better.

More from Qatalog

When workflows raise your work standards

Are you using a hammer to wash the dishes?

What’s the difference between a work management tool and a work hub?

Qatalog templates library

Intro to templates library

Updates

Workflows

________________________________________________________________________

Written by Matteo Tittarelli

Make work better.

More from Qatalog

When workflows raise your work standards

Are you using a hammer to wash the dishes?

What’s the difference between a work management tool and a work hub?

Written by
Matteo Tittarelli