Account Setup Guide

A guide to setting up your account, onboarding your team, and visualizing your digital workday.

Welcome to Produce8! We help digital teams understand how they use their technology and time. Our goal is to help everyone recover an hour every day and create space for people to do great work. Optimizing team workflow requires data so we can have effective communications about work, make improvements, and measure the impact of those changes.

Here’s a guide to help make onboarding, setup, and inviting your teammates a breeze. 

Table of Contents

1. Create your account
2. Start subscribing to your digital toolset
3. Set up your Personal Workspace
4. Introduce Produce8 to your team
5. Invite your team
6. How to tell if your team is adopting?
7. Elevate your 1:1's
8. Collective action in a Shared Workspace
9. Continue the conversation
10. Additional support and education resources

Step 1: Create Your Account

First things first! If you haven't done so yet, you need to create an account. 

If you've been invited to set up Produce8 by one of our partners, you will be prompted to assign a level of permissions for them. Setting Admin access is a good idea so they can help review your account setup, ensure everything is configured correctly, and troubleshoot any issues more efficiently, should they arise. Note that you can change these permissions at any time through your Company Account page.

Step 2: Connect To Your Top Work Tools

1. Add the Extensions: Start by installing the Browser and Desktop Extensions. These extensions enable activities from both your web and desktop-based tools to be sent to Produce8. Follow the prompts provided during account setup to install these extensions.
2. Create Subscriptions: After installing the extensions, create Subscriptions to your core work apps, and define what Category they fall under. This allows you to visualize how you navigate between apps through the day. Here are some recommendations on the kinds of tools that can provide important context into your digital work environment:
   1. System of record apps (CRMs, ticketing systems, project management tools, etc.)
   2. Collaboration stack apps (email, meetings, messaging, etc.)
   3. Core work tools (wherever you spend a significant amount of time getting your core work done)
   4. Supporting/Administrative tools (calendar, company wiki, HR platform, BI tools, etc.)
3. Delegate Admin Responsibilities: If you're not the designated administrator for your Produce8 account, invite the appropriate person to administer it. The Account Administrator can then add all the necessary work apps for the team before they join. This streamlines the onboarding process for new users and ensures they have access to essential core work apps from the start. 
4. User Permissions: Account Owners and Admins can manage user permissions for Apps, Categories, and app subscriptions. By default, these permissions are toggled off. Ensure that user access is appropriately configured to prevent issues such as duplicate apps. Please refer to the Roles & Permissions guide for more details. 

Be sure to add in and authorize any relevant Direct Integrations to ensure you have access to comprehensive insights into your work habits. 

Step 3: Set Up Your Personal Workspace

Customize your Workspace by ensuring Subscriptions to your core work tools, collaboration stack, and even potential distractions are added in your Personal Workspace. This personalization helps you tailor your workspace to reflect the tools and applications you use most frequently.

Be sure to add in and authorize any relevant Direct Integrations to ensure you have access to comprehensive insights into your work habits. Integrating these tools allows Produce8 to accurately capture your interactions and provide a holistic view of your workday.

This setup is crucial because it enables you to:

• Understand Your Work Patterns: By having a detailed view of how you spend your time, you can identify productivity peaks and potential areas for improvement.
• Visualize Your Digital Workday: Gain insights into your daily workflow, helping you manage your time more effectively and reduce unnecessary context switching.
• Reduce Distractions: By seeing how much time you spend on different tasks and applications, you can make informed decisions to minimize interruptions and stay focused.

Your Personal Workspace is private, ensuring that the insights you gain are for your eyes only. This allows you to make personal adjustments confidently, knowing that your data is secure and viewed only by you.

Step 4: Introduce Produce8 To Your Team

Gather your team for an informative session to introduce them to Produce8. During this session we’ll:

• Provide an overview of Produce8’s features and functionalities. 
• Demonstrate how to navigate the platform, including setting up Personal Workspaces and accessing key insights.
• Offer guidance on using Produce8 on their journey to healthier, more productive workdays. 
• Empower the team to incorporate the insights from Produce8 into their conversations to support personal and professional growth.

Step 5: Invite Your Team

Invite them to join Produce8, install the Extensions, and set up their Personal Workspace. But don’t necessarily ask them to join a Shared Workspace right away. Instead, allow them to use Produce8 on their own individually.

Pause to let them familiarize and gain awareness on their own digital work patterns. During this time we will provide supplementary tutorials to help team members dive deeper into understanding work patterns, setting goals, tracking progress, and sharing insights.

Step 6: How To Tell If Your Team Is Adopting?

It's crucial to ensure that all team members are fully adopted and connected with the necessary extensions and integrations. Regularly checking on adoption status within the Produce8 app can help you achieve this with our Admin Dashboard.

You can assess active user counts, Browser and Desktop Extension setups, and integration summaries for key call and calendar applications.

Start leveraging the insights from Produce8 during your next 1:1 or team meeting.

Encourage your team to set goals to foster a productive work environment. Consider implementing the following strategies:

1. Set Clear Goals: Encourage your team to set a goals  to prevent burn out and ensure productivity, such as setting a maximum working hours limit and encourage regular breaks by setting a maximum digital intensity. Tackle distractions by aiming for a minimum Focus Score and reducing collaboration distractions with maximum time limits for specific collaboration apps. 

2. Leverage Role Assumptions: Use Produce8 to measure the ability to accomplish core functions effectively. Foster two-way accountability in goal discussions and focus on addressing systemic issues to determine what is holding them back. 

3. Address Systemic Issues: Ensure that team members are set up for success by evaluating if they have manageable workloads and sufficient resources to accomplish their tasks effectively. Address any concerns regarding competing priorities and provide the necessary support and resources to facilitate success.

4. Reduce Distractions: Analyze metrics within Produce8 to identify and minimize distractions. Focus on reducing habit-checking behaviors and consider muting notifications for non-essential channels. Encourage batch-checking emails and messages to optimize focus time.

5. Evaluate Meeting Effectiveness: Assess the value of your meetings by considering their impact on productivity and outcomes. What is happening during those meetings? Are participants engaged, or do they have too many competing priorities, they feel the need to multitask to get things done. Are meetings adding value, or are they simply increasing workload?

Step 8: Collective Action In A Shared Workspace

Dedicate five minutes during your team meeting to discuss the potential challenges the team is facing and uncover which challenges are personal and which are systemic challenges. Brainstorm solutions and strategies for solutions. Come together and make an agreement on the action you would like to take. Openly discussing these challenges will provide additional perspectives, inspire effective solutions, and foster collaboration towards shared objectives.

Not sure where to start? Here are some topics to discuss:

• Are there too many distracting notifications?
• Do they have too many competing priorities? 
• Are meetings adding value, or are they simply adding to the workload?
• Is there enough time to do their most impactful work?

Create a Shared Workspace and ensure that all the relevant Subscriptions are available to view within your Shared Workspace before you invite any members.

Invite your colleagues and share the Guide to your team’s Shared Workspace so they can connect to the Team.

Pay attention to the data in your Shared Workspace. Notice similarities and differences that you see between your workflows. What can you each glean about how the other works? How can that help you work better together?

Step 9: Continue The Conversation

Make sure that you routinely review your digital work patterns in Produce8 as a team and as individuals. Look for patterns of focus and distraction and consider what you can do as individuals, as a team, and as a business to optimize your working patterns, your tech stack, and your collaboration.

• Get a deep understanding of your team's digital work patterns.
• Plan and run initiatives to test hypotheses about how you work. (ie. What can you do as a team to reduce distraction and increase focus and well-being?)
• Study your collaboration app usage.
• Study the usage of a single business application. 

Continue learning and repeat. This process need never end!

And Don’t Forget, We’re Here To Help You Along The Way

We’re really honored to have you on board and we’re committed to your success with our platform. Please be sure that you let us know if you run into any difficulty, have any questions, or want to suggest how we can improve the app. It’s our goal to help you get the most value from Produce8 and to make sure that our roadmap is a good reflection of your needs.

Finally, we encourage you to spread the word about Produce8! Don’t be shy about sharing out our signup link.