Expert Tip: Return To Work Processes

In their own words...
Read on below for the full transcript of the podcast. 

Conor McGrath: 0:00

Hi, everyone. Hope you're all keeping well. Thanks for joining our webinar today on return to work processes. My name is Conor McGrath. I'm digital marketing assistant here at FlowForma and I'll be your host for today's session. So before we get started, I have a few housekeeping tips for today's webinar. If you have any issues during the webinar, please email info@flowforma.com for assistance, I should also remind you that throughout the webinar, your lines will be muted, but please use the Q&A function to ask questions we'll hope to get to them at the end of today's chat and also note that today's webinar is being recorded.

Conor McGrath: 0:38

So today I'm delighted to be joined by my FlowForma colleagues Shay O'Connor who is Head of Solutions and Paul Stone who's our Product Strategist, welcome guys thanks for joining me today. So with that, I'm going to hand you straight over to Shay who's going to give you a bit of context about why you need to digitize now and a little bit about FlowForma to begin, so Shay.

Shay O'Connor: 1:03

Thanks, Connor. So why do you need to digitize now? And you probably at this stage feel that this is nearly self-explanatory, but basically if you read a lot of the consultancy blogs, reports and listen to webinars, that sort of thing, all the leading companies are all saying that digitizing is imperative. It is literally one of the points in this return to work that people need to take a grasp of, start preparing for it. We have all witnessed the advent of remote working and remote working as a standard. And the reality is that when we go back to the office place, we won't know who's going to be in the office who isn't, who's going to be remote working because we can't have the same numbers in the same place. So we need to put in an infrastructure, a method of a standard, a standard of operating, a standard of working that is consistent no matter if you're in the office or not in the office. We need to be able to have that consistency because everybody's circumstances can change so quickly. So that whole remote working has added this layer of complexity, especially when it comes to the likes of collaboration. So when you're dealing with, processes, when you're dealing with other people in other departments, it could be in other locations and now those people, even the ones who used to sit beside you, could be in other locations, we have to have a standard that would allow us to have full visibility of where our processes stand and visibility is really, really important. As I say, this is not a nice to have anymore. It used to be a nice to have. And some people kind of think it still is a nice to have because they haven't come back to the workplace yet, we need that continuity. So we need to be able to keep working day in, day out, month in month out with the same efficiency that we always have. And the only way of doing that is by coming up with a new method of operating. So this new method is actually gonna have a few impacts because it actually shows the commitment of the organization to the future. Commitments to the fact that they are taking everything seriously in regards to safety, even down to efficiency, getting the most out of everybody, making sure that people don't feel isolated because they're now part of a digital network. We've all been working on teams and Paul's going to talk to you a bit about that later on, but we've all been working through, the mechanisms like teams, et cetera, where we can talk to each other, but now we need to get to another place for not only talking to each other but also working with each other online, using the same tools and having all of our data and all of our information collected correctly. It's just going to make things a lot easier.

Shay O'Connor: 4:20

So just from a background point of view, a lot of our customers, so we have a lot of customers and the reason that they're using FlowForma is because it is easy to use. It's got a basis that allows you to create processes without the need for coding. So what's the upside of that? The upside of that is time, efficiency, even responsibility. So what you're talking about is people have the ability to create their own processes, change them as they get feedback, change them quickly as they get feedback from, internal people and even externally people, depending on where you're operating it. We sit this on top of Office 365. So the infrastructure is there. It's an app that can be up and running within an hour. I mean, in a half an hour in a lot of cases, and you can turn around your processes immediately start at it immediately. The reason that it is done so easily is because it's a three in one toolkit, you've got forms, workflow, document generation, all in one place, you do not have to create separate forms and workflow and documents and put them together and try and join them. That's done automatically. And the fact that there's the next piece with teams integration even brings it to a next level. It gives you a one stop shop for all of your digital process needs, and the nice thing is it's on that infrastructure it's on that Office 365 you can rock it straightaway. So from a background point of view, we have garnered all of our innovation, our roadmap, everything from the fact that we have over 200,000 customers growing monthly in 20 countries, literally across the globe from New Zealand over to the West Coast to the States we receive lots of accolades, we have companies who have gone through us from a due diligence point of view and a fine tooth comb. So you're arriving at FlowForma at the moment when you've got an award winning platform that is used by an awful lot of people who are giving us feedback all the time on the requirements of the product. So we're actually evolving the product based upon our customer's needs, as distinct from handing you something and saying, 'hey you have to run with this'. So as we evolve everything, and as a result of circumstances, like COVID-19, we can evolve things like the Teams App so we can bring that in faster than other companies would have done. And we can adjust things we can bring in templates to help people adjust to the whole circumstances, which Paul's going to talk about now in just a second.

Shay O'Connor: 7:10

This is just a snapshot, a brief snapshot of some of the clients that we are dealing with and literally, they are global clients. So stretch here, Inland Rail in Australia, Maverick in Boston, Aon Insurance worldwide. Ahold Delhaize has some of the largest retailers in the world. And obviously you'll recognize the NHS and Europol et cetera, we have done a lot of good stuff with the likes of the NHS and Liverpool of Tropical Medicine under the current conditions and ongoing where having digital platforms have been just godsend for them and as I say, for them, it wasn't an option. It was imperative that they had that they had that.

Shay O'Connor: 7:55

So we have got a batch of processes and process accelerators that we have put together for and the return to work. And they're very important because we want to take away the fear factor of making sure that everything is done correctly. When you go back to the workplace, you do not want to have to be scratching your head. Now there governance, there's compliance, there are good nice to haves. We have put them all into these processes and they're available to you straight away. Paul Stone is on the line with us today is going to focus primarily on the business continuity, the response plan and hopefully if we have time, maybe the return to work processes, but Paul, if you'd like to take control there, what we're going to do is show you first hand these processes, hopefully give you a nice flavor of what they'll look like and keep in mind that these are templates that are available already, so you can use them straight away. Paul fire ahead.

Paul Stone: 9:13

Yep. Certainly. So hopefully at this stage, everybody can see my screen. So what we're looking at here is a FlowForma installation and in a FlowForma installation, you have many processes, processes that are used and executed through the company to achieve business goals. Now, what I've done in this particular instance is I've loaded up some of our free templates for business continuity, COVID-19 response plan and pre-return to work. And we're going to have a quick look of what those processes look like. Now you access these processes in many different ways, you can access them on a website like we see here, I'm using a browser to view this and this is our landing page. So we're seeing tiles here to launch the processes, and then also some tiles down here to see processes at different statuses. So for example, I can see all of the response plans in place at the moment and what business continuity plans for executive review stage and so on. So we have tiles to launch processes and tasks down here to see processes of various status's. This is not the only interface that you can use to access to FlowForma we've also developed a Teams application that Shay referred to earlier on and with so many people using Teams here's FlowForma inside Teams, as you can see, it looks very similar to FlowForma that you saw on the browser and that's of course, deliberately intentional because we wanted the same user interface to all applications. So for example, we also have a mobile app that you can use on mobile devices, phones, and tablets, and iOS and Android. And that has a similar user interface, again you're always dealing with tiles, you click on the task to larger processes.

Paul Stone: 11:08

The system also has the ability to view lists and processes. So for example, I can see here all the business continuity plans that are at executive or executive review stage. So without going into more detail let's have a quick look of what these COVID processes look like. Let's take the business continuity plan, just as an example, when I click on the link, it automatically opens up in the browser and this is what a process looks like in FlowForma. The first thing you'll note is that it's not quite like any other process system that you'd be used to because it contains both the process and the data in one thing. So what we have here, what you're looking at is a series of steps in the process, which is shown at the top bar here and this is a simple view that tells the end user where they are right now in the process, what's going to happen next what's happening in the past. So it's a simple linear view of the process so that the business user can be immediately familiar with what they're doing. And how would this fit in with the rest of the activities in the process that achieves this business goal? In this case, the business goal is business continuity planning. So its a plan for continuity of the business at this particular form and varies from one company to the next, because obviously your particular continuity plan will be slightly different to the next person.

Shay O'Connor: 12:32

Paul, those steps that you're looking at there there's a big difference in those steps and what will be in a sequential process, because the different size boxes, it represents a different type of step, right?

Paul Stone: 12:46

That's well spotted there, Shay, absolutely. With these boxes here, you notice that the slightly smaller than the others. And that's because these process, these particular boxes are steps that occur in parallel. Let me press the submit button down here to move the process onto the next step. And I'll show you what that looks like. So when I submit, what I'm saying is that I'm finished with the current step its just giving me some information and I want to move on to the next step in the process, which basically is moving the workflow forward. In this case, what we're seeing is the list of planning activities that automatically loads up. And then this particular step is assigned to somebody in the organization. Now for the purposes of the demo, I've assigned all the steps in the process to myself, which is pretty unrealistic. You normally have more than one person partaking in the workflow. In this case, we have several steps that are executed in parallel by different people in different departments. So you can decide who you're going to assign to all these different work activities and then each person who's assigned to the step can go in and complete the activities in their particular step. So it can go and record a status of activity like it's completed upload relevant backing documentation, and then they specify a completion date and so on and there just some comments. Once all the information is complete, they enter in where they have completed the checklist or not, lets say I have and the system automatically says, okay, please sign here. In this case, recording a physical signature, it's not a hundred percent necessary, the system automatically records an audit trail. It knows who you are. It knows I'm logged in, in this case as a user called demo admin, it could be logged in as Paul Stone, and then it will automatically record that and stamp a date on it and so on. So keeping an audit trail in any case, but it's useful and certain circumstances and certain legal environments and so on. It's useful also to have a physical signatures for COVID as well.

Shay O'Connor: 14:43

And if you're using this on a mobile app, you take photographs, right?

Paul Stone: 14:49

Oh, absolutely. Yes. You upload photographs. On a mobile app, you can also do things like capture geographic location, GPS co-ordinates and you can represent those on a map and so on so the mobile app is quite sophisticated. You can capture all that data and capture all that data automatically too and so that's all stamped on the audit trail. You can always view previous steps by the way, inside the form. So you can click on previous steps and view the data that was captured at that point in time. The whole idea is that you're moving the workflow forward and as you're moving forward, you're capturing all that data and you get a complete picture of all the activity that went into achieving a business goal. In this case, carving out a business continuity plan. Then once all the users have completed their parallel steps, the system moves on to the next logical step in this case, it's executive review and on the executive review you know, I can specify whether I approve or reject the plan and so on. Once I approve it again and asks me for a signature, I can save it and enter in any comments. So that's what the business continuity plan looks like to the end user. And if I close that out, what we'll do is we'll have a look at the configuration of that plan.

Shay O'Connor: 16:07

If people want to change certain things on the process, I mean, this is a template after all. So we're just giving the template so you can make your own adjustments, right?

Paul Stone: 16:22

Yep, absolutely. You can make your own adjustments and it's intended to do that. The template basically is very rich. It contains a lot of information in relation to a COVID details. If we were to open, just for example, the COVID response plan, it's an even more complicated workflow, with more details in it. As you can see, there are many more steps in this process and this process is very detailed. So this particular process is actually a regulatory process it's required by the government to show that you're taking appropriate action for taking people back into the workspace and this process can be tailored to your particular environment to ensure that you're capturing all the COVID-19 return to work activities that you're required to do by the government. So let me show you a little bit of how easy it is to do because it's very straightforward. Remember we're a no code system so we have a no code interface in terms of maintaining your workflows. And this is a tool here called the flow designer and the flow designer basically allows you to define your steps in the process. And also all the detail of the data that you're going to capture. For example, the signature and so on that you want to capture at each step in the process. It's very easy to use. And if I wanted to add a new step into this process, all I'd have to do is click on plus step over here, type the name of the step. And let's say, review plan, press save. Okay. And then that review plan step is added in at the end by default, but I can just drag it up to wherever it's supposed to execute. And in there I can add in a question. Now question is piece of data. So I want to say, let's say, 'do you approve this plan?' And I can make that your answer to the question. I can make it a piece of text if I want to, or I can make it into a different type of answer. So let's say I want the answer to be a yes or no question. So you don't answer yes or no. And I can say, it's mandatory. You have to answer this before you can submit a step. I could also put in some help text and so on here, but I'm just going to save that show you what happens. And as you can see, it adds it into the review plan step. So next time you go into that process, you'll see a new step box as the second box in the, in the line. And it will, when you move on to that step, it will ask you what, and do you approve this or not? But the real power of the system is only half of it is the workflow data aspect, the other half are things called business rules. The business rules are automatic activities that happen during the process. So these, this is the machine in the background if you like doing the work for you, you put in all your rules. So this is where you make a big gain in productivity, because you can add in these business rules to do things for you. Like for example, generate an email or generate a document or for example, you can add in a simple one, let's say pass back. Let's say I don't approve. I say, no, what I want to do. I want the workflow to jump back to the previous step and maybe send that person an email. So I put it in a business rule to loop the workflow back to the previous step. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to say, well, I want to, first of all, check if the person entered 'no'. So here, I just say, there's the question that I want to examine and I want to say, does it equal 'no' and if equals no, then I want to jump back to the introduction. So move the workflow back a step. So as you can see everything that I've shown you so far, it's all about filling in forms so you're never writing any code. All you're doing is you're selecting boxes, selecting options you know, it's very straightforward.

Shay O'Connor: 20:17

With a rule, you've got a description, a condition, and then an action?

Paul Stone: 20:23

That's right. Description, condition action. And every single business rule is the same. Even something a little bit more complicated, like sending an email, as soon as I opened it up, you see that? Yep. Here's the description, here's your condition, and there's your action. Now with emails, we can send templates, we can send targeted messages to targeted audiences. You can send them on specific days, we can attach documents and so on. So there's quite a lot you can do in this particular rule. So it was quite a lot more complicated to show them than the previous one.

Shay O'Connor: 20:53

The whole thing here is that we've got this suite of processes that im glad I wasn't putting them together, because if it wasn't digitized there in front of me, you just have a hell of a lot of documents lying around the place trying to get filled in, but you basically have this framework, we've put this together, taken all of the sweat out of it but it's fully adjustable and you can add lots of rules to it. You can decide to communicate with different people so they can see the status, all that nice stuff, and all visible through Teams.

Paul Stone: 21:32

Absolutely. And as you saw, how quick and easy it was to add a step, another a question, and you can see that actually substantially modifying this to add multiple steps will be no problem at all and really quick. The key thing is, as soon as you've made these modifications, it's immediately available to you, regardless of what interface you're using to access FlowForma. So whether you're using that browser or you're jumping over to the Team's app, this will automatically refresh so that any new processes you add in, are added in automatically, and then you can create specific lists or views, we call them views, on the processes to see processes in specific states.

Shay O'Connor: 22:12

These templates, I mean our customers, our existing customers are going to get them anyway.

Paul Stone: 22:21

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. These templates are free to download and you can download them through the application itself and they will automatically install and away you go.

Shay O'Connor: 22:32

That's with all the other templates that are there as well. So it's just, we're adding on increasing the number of templates available.

Paul Stone: 22:40

Indeed. Yes. These are just a handful of the templates that we have a change request since the management. That's the one we have, I think it is over 20 now and certainly over 20, so yep, absolutely. You can just download them and install them automatically.

Paul Stone: 22:59

So we're quite excited by the way about this Team's App just while I'm showing it here. Our Team's App is a response, if you'd like, to COVID, we accelerated this it was on a road map for later in the year. However with everybody using Teams, it seemed to make sense to get our Teams App on the market as soon as possible. And, and we're quite proud of what we've achieved and it's fully integrated into Teams. It actually installs as an app within your team's environment. And it means that you can work FlowForma while at a meeting. So you can be on a call or you can be working on a team working on it, collaborating on documents, let's say collaborating on a document, which your team and in the Teams environment, and then maybe pushing that document through workflow to get the document approved issues to the intended audience. So it integrates workflow with your Team's environment. And as Shay was talking about earlier on it adds structure to your activity within Teams. So, you know, as you're working, Teams is relatively unstructured or you have call or working documents and so on, but what FlowForma does it ties all of that activity into the achievement of business goals, through execution of processes.

Shay O'Connor: 24:13

Cause it's one of the things actually we've come across from people asking us about Teams. And that is about structure because people adding Teams does a whole lot of work, a whole lot extra groups going in and all that sort of thing, where that in itself can hit your efficiency. You might, you have a platform, but you actually need some structure. That was great. Paul, thanks a million for that.

Shay O'Connor: 24:48

So just from a summary point of view, I mean, I'm sure you've gathered from all of this. The reality is digitization. It is not a nice to have anymore, as I was saying earlier, it's imperative, you've got to do it. You want to show all your staff and all your customers and your third parties so all those people, you deal with your suppliers and so on, show them that you are cutting edge at taking on the likes of this pandemic and you are getting rid of all your paper and you're putting in a new environment that everybody can work on. The fact is with these return to work accelerators, it gets everybody in the new way of thinking because they have to use these to get back up and running in the workplace. So then you start adding onto it. You can pull in your external users and your third parties, your suppliers, your contractors, whomever it is, they can be all working on the same process because we actually have an environment that is extendable. You don't have to just stay within your own tenancy. You can actually invite people in and have them validated via, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft and all of that and you can still use it on Microsoft Teams. The reality is you're going to have to digitize so you should really look at doing it now be prepared for going back and why not hit the road running with the accelerators cause they're free anyway.

Conor McGrath: 26:40

Thanks guys. I'm sure our audience, again, really good insights from your chat just now. Before we jump into some questions and you might be interested in downloading our new Whitepaper, 'Why digitization is no longer an option' as Shay has just mention there, and you can get that from our website at www.flowforma.com/digitize. We're just a little bit tight for time, but we might try and get a question or two in before we close today. And there's one here, Paul, "wondering how the Team app works and do I need FlowForma to use it?!" You might be able to get that one first quickly.

Paul Stone: 27:20

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, certainly. And so the Team's App is something that you download from the Team store. And so there's a little apps icon there in Teams, and you can go in and find it. Now it's at the moment being published, so it won't be published until the end of the month, but we can certainly give you demonstrations up until that point. Once you've downloaded the Team's App, it's just inside your Team's environment. However, the Team's app links through to FlowForma installed in your SharePoint online environment. So you do have to have the FlowForma installed for the Teams App to actually show you any processes and so on. So it's a little bit like our mobile app, it's the same thing, the mobile app is kind of a viewer again. And the mobile app requires you to have FlowForma installed in SharePoint online or Office365 and then it picks it up, it automatically points itself to your Office365 tendency.

Conor McGrath: 28:14

Great. Thanks Paul. There's quite a few questions after coming in but I think we might just be close to time. I might just say, thank you all for joining us, and a big thank you to my colleague, Shay and Paul for your time. I know everything's quite busy right now, given all of this going on, so thanks for your time today, guys.. I should quickly mention that the COVID-19 center on our website for tips and resources to help you during this period of rapid change, that you find some information about our free process templates on there. But if you're looking for a more in depth understanding of these templates, I would suggest that you schedule a free one-to-one demo with one of our process experts, or in fact, you know, try yourself and sign up for a free 14 day trial. And so finally, when this webinar ends, you'll be invited fill in a quick survey, we would really appreciate if you could fill that out for us, it's really beneficial for us. It only takes about 1 minute. So if you could do that first would be great but yeah. So thanks for joining us today. Um, that's all, so, uh, all I can say is that have a great day, everyone stay safe. Bye now.