Redbooth Workflow Templates: An Invitation to the Library

We recently rolled out our new workflow template library, and we’re really excited to see that a lot of customers are already browsing the library and utilizing the templates.

Whether you’ve just started for free or your entire organization already uses Redbooth, I invite you to browse and explore the template library.

We’ve got workflow templates for everything from financial due diligence to leading a team meeting to designing a website for a customer. There’s a lot of excitement about it — and what we have there now is only the beginning.

The original inspiration

The templates in the library were inspired by real-world business examples, and the very first one was inspired back when we got our Series B round of financing.

We were working with a law firm on the B round — a firm that later became a paying customer of ours, and you’re about to see why.

If you haven’t gone through a venture round before, it’s a complex legal transaction consisting of many, many steps. And we actually saw that they were managing the entire process with a piece of paper with checkboxes.

We took their piece of paper with all of their steps, and in less than 10 minutes, we made a template for them where they could have consistency, repeatability, and complete visibility. They can manage all these complex steps now, and never again let anything fall through the cracks.

Their need to have meetings was also greatly reduced. Instead of having a daily status meeting during this complex legal transaction, they can now — within seconds — know the status of everything.

Now with this process set up in Redbooth, they’re able to deliver better service for their clients, get deals done faster, and manage the entire process easily. They can even invite people into the workspace, even other attorneys or entrepreneurs who have never even used it before.

So seeing how much value there was in bringing that process into Redbooth inspired this idea where we can take common yet time-consuming or error-prone transactions and interactions and build a template around them.

And it reminded us that we’ve been using our own best practices in Redbooth to build out key processes internally as well — so we wanted to capture that for our users too.

Onboarding: A common challenge

Specifically, we’ve been using repeatable processes to onboard our new hires, and we couldn’t be more pleased to have those processes in Redbooth.

Of course, there’s a template in the library that you can use for onboarding a new employee too. We recognize that everybody’s process is going to be a little bit different than ours. And the goal is not to convince you to use our process, but to take something that you can use to jumpstart and better manage a process.

Once you launch a workflow template in your Redbooth account, you can modify it any way you want. You can add and remove tasks, rename task lists, assign individual tasks to your team members, add deadlines, and drag and drop tasks from one lists to another. You can save it to make it part of your own Redbooth environment.

Customizing it like this makes it easy for you to onboard a new employee. You know who’s doing what, when, and you don’t need to keep track of all this in your head. You can focus on more critical things.

The other valuable aspect to centralizing the process in Redbooth is that it makes the files and documents associated with onboarding actionable. Whether it’s an NDA or an employee agreement stored in Box or SharePoint, we find that many organizations don’t have a workflow to manage these documents.

With Redbooth, you can actually drop them into this workflow, where you can route them to the employee for a signature. You could mark it complete. Essentially, you’re making these documents easier to work with, easier to manage, and you can now track it.

Between actually setting up your official new hire onboarding in process in Redbooth and empowering your new hires to engage with Redbooth and explore various workspaces, you might be pleasantly surprised at how much faster you can have folks up and running.

Tina Baylocq, a recent addition to our team, recently wrote about how getting up to speed in her new role took her a single day in Redbooth — although it normally takes about three months (!) in a typical organization.

We were happy to hear that, but not surprised. We’ve had a number of customers who have reported slashing their onboarding time in half by using Redbooth.

In essence, we’re talking about taking a process that almost every employee in an organization goes through and digitizing it. The workspace helps you manage that process so you don’t forget any steps. You have visibility into it, and you can have multiple people working on the many-step process while still feeling like it’s simple and streamlined.

That’s important for any organization, but it’s especially important for organizations that are experiencing rapid growth — or need to do more with less.

How you can get started

Here at Redbooth, we’re a fast-growing company with a team that’s all over the world, and everybody here is very busy. If we didn’t have our workflows set up in Redbooth, things would fall through the cracks very easily, and we might not even realize it.

For example, without those workflows, we could have a new hire join the team, and then weeks later — when they can’t get into the office — realize they never got their keys. Those things can happen in the best-executing organizations, and by creating this, we don’t need a whole team just to manage the process. It works well for us to manage it ourselves in a somewhat autonomous way. And the worfklow template is a rudder for the process in that it’s easy to understand and manage along the way.

When you’re new to Redbooth and you open up a fresh workspace, it can feel powerful — and you can feel curious about how to approach it in the most strategic way. Sometimes we hear that for new users it’s like a blank slate, full of possibilities.

So I would encourage you to browse the template library (including the Marketing, Sales, Legal, and Events categories) and select a template that is similar to something you’re already doing at work. Then it’s easy to start with that to accelerate your process to give you some ideas about how to use Redbooth most strategically, and to invite your team in to work together you with it.

If you go into the library and there’s something you want to see there that you don’t see, I’d love for you to let us know. (Email marketing [at] redbooth.com, with “template idea” in the subject.)

You can submit your idea, or create your own template and share it with us, and we can look at making it a template in the library. We’re excited to continue to grow the library, and to give you new ways to make familiar processes easier and faster for your entire team.