This is a guest post from Mile Živković, a content writer and work-life balance expert at Chanty – a simple and AI-powered Slack alternative. When Mile isn’t busy writing epic posts on productivity, work-life balance and time management for Chanty blog, he’s probably driving somewhere. His hobbies include cars (huge fan of Alfa Romeo), photography and collecting pocket knives. You can catch him on LinkedIn.

What do you do when there’s work to be done, email communication simply doesn’t cut it anymore and tapping your colleagues on the shoulder is not the ideal solution for communicating in the office?

You use a chat app to collaborate with your team.

With email becoming clunky and outdated and the need for rapid, instant communication at work, the market for team chat apps is ever-growing.

However, with so many options out there, making the right choice can seem impossible. Pricing, the number of users, integrations, searchable history, these are all elements to consider when making a choice for your team.

To make the process a bit easier, we’ve singled out some of the best team chat apps out there with our honest feedback. These are some of the best workplace chat apps out there and we hope we’ll make it easier on you to make a good choice. Let’s dig in!

Team chat apps: The quicklinks!

• Slack
• Chanty
• Typetalk
• Flock
• Fleep
• Microsoft Teams
• Ryver
• Glip
• Process Street

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Process Street is a 100% remote company. We have been from day one.

But our CEO Vinay Patankar has been remote longer than that. Process Street is Vinay’s third remote company, meaning 10 years of running companies remotely.

At the time of writing, we have around 50 employees across multiple continents and it’s working so well for us that we’ve just sealed our Series A funding round from Accel, Atlassian, and Salesforce Ventures.

We thought now would be a good time to do a deep dive into Vinay’s thoughts on remote work and why his experience of it has kept him remote.

For this Process Street article, we sat down with Vinay to ask him 4 key questions, which we’ve provided links to below:

• Were you distributed from day one?
• How many employees do you have and in how many countries?
• What are the biggest challenges of having a distributed team?
• What are the biggest advantages?

Vinay has also produced a short video series of key things to learn when working in or running a remote team. You can check these videos out in the section below: Continue Reading

🚨If you’re on the front lines fighting COVID-19 and want to use these processes to help your facility, please contact us and we will set you up with a free account*🚨
In the wake of challenges at the scale of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 it is vital that we share as much knowledge as possible to help each other prepare for the problems we face and fight them effectively when they arrive.

This article will compile the procedures outlined in the Handbook of COVID-19 Prevention and Treatment (2020) produced by The First Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine (FAHZU).

FAHZU had significant success in tackling the spread of coronavirus within its hospital while seeing successful outcomes and has – in association with the Jack Ma Foundation, AliHealth, Alibaba Cloud, and other partners – released the above handbook to guide hospitals and medical centers around the world, and inform them of effective best practices to fight the coming challenge.

The handbook contains many materials including policies, charts, and imaging examples. In this Process Street article, however, we’ll focus on the process-aligned elements of the guide.

Some of the items we have extracted from the handbook function as linear procedures to guide action, others as processes to guide the setup or auditing of systems.

Each process template will be embedded below with a description. The article will be structured as follows:

• How to use these COVID-19 templates
• Handbook of COVID-19 Prevention and Treatment from FAHZU (2020)
• 16 COVID-19 procedure templates to help hospitals and medical centers fight coronavirus
• How to use Process Street for healthcare providers

Process Street COVID-19 procedure templates quicklinks

The quicklinks to each template are here:

• COVID-19 Procedure: Isolation Area Management
• COVID-19 Procedure: Disinfection Procedures for COVID-19 Isolation Ward Area
• COVID-19 Procedure: Lung Transplantation Pre-Transplantation Assessment
• COVID-19 Procedure: Nursing Care During Treatment (ALSS)
• COVID-19 Procedure: Protocol for Donning and Removing PPE
• COVID-19 Procedure: Staff Management (Workflow and Health)
• COVID-19 Procedure: Daily Management and Monitoring of ECMO Audit
• COVID-19 Procedure: Digital Support for Epidemic Prevention and Control
• COVID-19 Procedure: Discharge Standards and Follow-up Plan for COVID-19 Patients
• COVID-19 Procedure: Disinfection of COVID-19 Related Reusable Medical Devices
• COVID-19 Procedure: Disinfection Procedures for Infectious Fabrics of Suspected or Confirmed Patients
• COVID-19 Procedure: Disposal Procedures for COVID-19 Related Medical Waste
• COVID-19 Procedure: Disposal Procedures for Spills of COVID-19 Patient Blood/Fluids
• COVID-19 Procedure: Procedures for Handling Bodies of Deceased Suspected or Confirmed Patients
• COVID-19 Procedure: Procedures for Taking Remedial Actions against Occupational Exposure to COVID-19
• COVID-19 Procedure: Surgical Operations for Suspected or Confirmed Patients

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The humble safety inspector is one of the forgotten heroes of our modern age.

I know, I know, you get it all the time. People must be buying you drinks non-stop.

In the UK, for instance, there has been an 84% decrease in the number of fatal injuries by employees at work.

In 1974, Britain saw almost 700 people die at work. Now only around 100 die each year at work. That’s about 600 fewer deaths.

Map that back to 1974 and account for a fairly consistent downward trend and we can determine that about 13,500 people didn’t die thanks to improved workplace safety. And that’s just the UK!

Those lives are on you, safety inspectors.

To show our appreciation, we’re providing a whole bunch of safety inspection checklists – from the ones you expect to the ones you don’t.

In this Process Street article, we’re gonna cover:

• What is a safety inspection?
• Why use a safety inspection checklist?
• Over 40 safety inspection checklists to use today
• How to use Process Street for safety inspections

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How do you know whether you’re going to be successful or not with a new business or product?

Well, you’ll probably look to pour your heart and soul into it. You’ll work hard to make it the best product or service you can. You’ll endeavor to make each and every customer happy.

And well done to you for that.

But you’re not the only one who impacts on whether your efforts are successful.

It’s no secret that one of the hardest parts of business is the competitive nature of the market.

What your competition looks like, how it’s constructed, and what opportunities their weaknesses provide you, are crucial factors which can determine your success.

This is where you’ll need to do some kind of competitive position analysis.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at a framework which is designed to help you understand your competition called Porter’s Five Forces. We’ll cover:

• What is Porter’s Five Forces Model?
• Porter’s Five Forces – Force 1: Threat of new entrants
• Porter’s Five Forces – Force 2: Threat of substitutes
• Porter’s Five Forces – Force 3: Bargaining power of customers
• Porter’s Five Forces – Force 4: Bargaining power of suppliers
• Porter’s Five Forces – Force 5: Competitive rivalry
• Resolving the 5 Forces: An Economic Moat

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As organizations get larger they get more and more complex.

So many different people pushing and pulling in different directions.

This slows an organization down and makes it hard to operate. It makes it hard to achieve the best results.

Human resources departments should be the ones who sort out this mess. The ones who make sure everyone is working toward the same goals. The department which facilitates the other departments to do their best work.

But for many companies, HR isn’t working.

According to McKinsey:

1. 42% of HR professionals are not taking action against priority areas
2. 65% of HR professionals are not pursuing innovative approaches
3. and 68% don’t have confidence in their strategy

That’s why, in this Process Street article, we’re going to take this problem seriously and look at:

• What is HR management?
• What are the current HR best practices?
• How to manage digital transformation in HR
• Netflix and the modern HR revolution
• How to use Process Street for human resources

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Services, services, services.

We seem to be in a world of managed services.

Everyone’s outsourcing nowadays. And when they’re not outsourcing, they’re insourcing in an outsourced way.

It’s all very confusing.

That’s why we’ve decided to break down the core document which tends to regulate and organize this kind of service provision: the humble service-level agreement (SLA).

Service-level agreements, amongst other things, bolster trust in and between organizations – making it clear what needs to be done, to what standard, and when.

Trust is a hugely important thing in business. Accenture’s Competitive Agility Index found:

following a drop in trust, a company’s index score drops 2 points on average, negatively impacting revenue growth by 6% and EBITDA by 10% on average.

One of the main ways to keep trust alive in your business is to know what is expected of people and to hold them to it. Enforce reliability.

SLAs are one mechanism to help you in that battle.

In this Process Street article we’ll answer the following questions:

• Free SLM and SLA templates
• What is a service-level agreement (SLA)?
• Why do you need a service-level agreement?
• What are the different types of SLA?
• What is in a service-level agreement?
• What kinds of companies use an SLA?
• What are some SLA examples?
• What are the alternatives to SLAs?
• How you can use SLAs with Process Street

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Natasha Ponomaroff is the Senior Marketing Director of Instasize – a content creating tool-kit for anyone editing photos and online content on mobile. A weekly contributor on the site’s blog, Natasha tracks social media trends and updates the millions of “creatives” who are currently using Instasize to curate awesome online content.

Seeking to establish a well-rounded online presence?

There are many different digital marketing channels to choose from, and all of them contribute to a holistic online strategy.

However, to succeed you need to know how to pair the right kind of content with the most suitable platform.

For marketers, there’s a constant pressure to create new content while maintaining a high level of quality.

To alleviate that burden, look to social media content.

Social media content, especially the kind of content you’ll find on a visual-focusedchannel like Instagram, is perfect for repurposing. Consider the fact that not all audiences favor social media as their communication medium of choice.

While effective in its own way, studies have shown that email marketing is 40 times more effective at reaching target customers than some social media channels.

With that in mind, and to cover multiple audience bases at once, here’s how you can bring Instagram content into your email marketing campaigns and save time in the process.

In this Process Street article, we’ll cover:

• Embedding user-generated content into your email marketing
• Making the most of original content in emails
• How to save and share Instagram Stories through email newsletters
• Getting started with repurposing your Instagram for email marketing content
• Use Process Street for your email marketing processes and more!

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Automation has been one of the key emerging trends of the late 2010s, and will likely be a defining characteristic of the 2020s.

It’s something we’ve covered extensively at Process Street, and something we’ve taken huge advantage of internally as well.

The move from companies only providing enterprise-level API access to their software over to commercially available Internet of Things style mass integration has been a dramatic shift in the marketplace. This has opened up huge potential for individuals and small businesses; you can integrate with thousands of services in just a few clicks.

Now, so many services, SaaS products in particular, provide a means to integrate with other platforms that there are very little restrictions on what you can and cannot automate.

Tools like Zapier, Flow, and IFTTT have made these integrations so easy that anyone can set them up.

But they’re not the only ones – new connectors and middlemen are cropping up all the time, helping people without tech skills connect with APIs or Webhooks of their choosing. The No-Code Movement has gone mainstream and it now has a full suite of tools at its disposal.

Even in 2015, according to Chui, Manyika, and Miremadi writing in the Harvard Business Review, not only could a marketing executive be automating activities which account for between 10-15% of their current time using existing technology, but for 60% of existing US jobs, 30% of their time could be reduced by automation.

For those interested in that kind of thing, you should check out Four Fundamentals of Workplace Automation by McKinsey. An illuminating text which is already somewhat out of date!

Here at Process Street, we integrate with thousands of other apps and platforms via Zapier, we have large customers making use of our API, and we’ve now added webhooks to our array of automation options to try to cover the rest of the use cases our customers tell us about.

In this article, we’ll look at:

• What are webhooks?
• What do people use webhooks for?
• What is the difference between webhooks and APIs?
• How do I use webhooks?
• How do Process Street webhooks work?

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This is a guest post from Olivia Harp, whose easy-reading, approachable pieces help bring important business and negotiation skill-building content to new audiences in an accessible way. With a degree in linguistics, Olivia excels in creating her own engaging content.

Sustaining customer satisfaction can be challenging in business. However, there are several ways to improve your sales and customer satisfaction at the same time. Improving your sales negotiation skills is an overlooked low hanging fruit route to making a positive impact on your customer relations.

Through sales negotiation training, you can learn how to identify your customers’ needs better. Understanding your customers puts you in a position to offer better services. By improving your customer relations, you may be able to attract and retain more customers.

This article outlines practical negotiation tips to increase your customers’ satisfaction.

In this Process Street article, we’ll cover:

• Redefine your business strategy
• Analyze your sales negotiation tactics
• Review your negotiation style
• Additional negotiation skills for customer satisfaction
• Get it right every time with Process Street

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