As a new employee to Jive, I've been hungry to come up to speed as quickly as possible. When I started, I was expecting my inbox to fill up quickly, and to spend long nights keeping up with the typical flow of emails. I also expected to have to hunt folks down with the email chain of "FW: FW: RE: (etc!)" to get answers to my questions.
But things are different at Jive. I don't get many emails. No one does. And although I've only been here a month, I feel completely ramped up on the company, our products, and how work gets done. As you can guess, our popular social productivity product, Clearspace, is the reason why.
We use Clearspace extensively inside Jive. It's very powerful, a huge time-saver, and an extremely efficient way for everyone to stay current with what's going on. We have discussions, debate ideas, post documentation, track progress, share knowledge and easily find current and historical information through Clearspace. This isn't just lip service. I am just one example, and onboarding is only one small productivity benefit I see in Clearspace that will continue to empower our company moving forward.
In the past, I've seen various metrics indicating it takes roughly 3-6 months to bring employees to full productivity. It's such a big deal, that there are entire industries and experts in the field who are constantly creating new software, processes, tools and best practices to reduce the "onboarding" time.
It's really impressive to experience a rapidly faster personal uptime. I can only imagine the cost benefit to other companies. Not to mention, I'm very happy to be on board.
Comments
This post has 8 comments. We encourage you to please post your own!
cpcsolutions
Nov 3, 2007 at 1:15:23 PM
Could you elaborate on the methods that Jive implements Clearspace into day-to-day business operations?
--
Mark Recek
http://mark.recek.com
Eric Butler
Nov 5, 2007 at 9:58:44 AM
Hi Mark, thanks for the comment. Let me offer a few examples of how we use Clearspace internally:
- Meetings: creating agendas, collaborating during meetings, and communicating minutes
- Documentation: most documents created internally are created in Clearspace, keeping the data easily accessible, searchable, and organized (using spaces, tags, tag groups, etc.)
- Project updates: using documents and discussions to track progress and communicate status on various projects inside the organization
- Knowledge-sharing: using blog posts and discussions to keep everyone current on tactical items (everything from customer questions, to team updates), and more strategic items (status on roadmap, progress on quarterly objectives, etc.).
Kim Feraday
Nov 13, 2007 at 9:38:51 PM
Eric,
Have any of your customers used the product in similar ways? I imagine your company is in
the 50 to 100 employee range so it would be interesting to see if larger companies have
similar experiences. Groups of under 150 have a built in efficiency so the real test is
when you get similar efficiencies with larger groups or break the norms of small groups --
for example, if you have a significant number of core employees who work remotely.
BTW, this text box doesn't auto-wrap. Not sure why.
elbpdx
Nov 26, 2007 at 6:10:17 AM
Hi Kim,
All of our customers have remarked that onboarding with Clearspace has been amazing, and those customers can be as high as 10,000 people. Onboarding with Clearspace is effective because you can find people and learn about them easily and contextually--whether those are known people you have a tight link to organizationally or unknown people that you discover.
Charlie B
Nov 29, 2007 at 1:40:10 PM
Erik,
I'm interested in hearing more about Clearspace. It appears to be a very efficient Software collaboration tool. Does your software offer VoIP? I am currently using Communiclique and I find that feature of the product to be useful.
Charlie
Eric Butler
Dec 4, 2007 at 7:55:31 AM
Hi Charlie,
We currently do not have any VoIP integration in Clearspace, although we've discussed it before. Could you explain more about what you'd be looking for in that area?
Charlie B
Dec 6, 2007 at 7:41:43 AM
Eric,
I am in a business where my colleagues and I are constantly on the move.(This makes it hard to be on the same page). The reason I started using Communiclique is its collaboration software(sharing documents, task, and schedules).However, The VoIP integrated software is the feature that I find most useful. Since as previously stated most of my colleagues are never in the office, the VoIP conferencing allows us to have group meetings while never having to step foot in the office. This really has my employees working as a team.
-Charlie
Eric Butler
Dec 8, 2007 at 12:29:10 PM
Hi Charlie,
It sounds like you have a good approach on how to collaborate and communicate in an increasingly flat world! Thanks for your feedback and perspective on this.
-Eric