USING UNIFIED INBOX - Training new team members

Unified Inbox was developed to help team members who are spread out over different geographical locations manage the different communication streams they use in their day to day business.  When we talk about communication streams we're talking email, Facebook and Twitter messages.  In this blog series, we'll be looking at ways different users have used Unified Inbox in their businesses.

Training new team members

The Unified Inbox founders have recent experience in bringing on new team members and bringing them up to speed with Unified Inbox.  In fact, they found Unified Inbox was the key tool that allowed them to do so without being physically present.

It's always tough when you're the "new" member in the team, especially when there is nobody sitting there next to you to help you out when you have questions on how certain things are done, where the person before you left off, whom to ask for permission, when and so on.

Over the last eight weeks, we've added new team members in China, Romania, Germany, India, New Zealand, the UK and the Philippines - while we ourselves were travelling between the countries. All of our new team members had to deal with the problems listed above but we've found that where they have access to Unified Inbox the induction process was that much easier on all of us.

Our new team members were able to quickly skim through the comments of previous team members, assigning messages with comments to colleagues worldwide and ask them their experience and feedback and finally, get our approval within seconds of sending an email or posting a message.

We cannot envision leading a global company across several verticals without the help of Unified Inbox. It has assisted our company leaders as much as ourselves in teaching and guiding each other and the people we work with on a daily basis, reducing the time it usually takes for somebody to be accepted in a team and be confident in what they are doing without even being physically present throughout the whole year.

The key features mentioned above are:

• access to team inbox so full communications history is available as the new person starts
• comments and assigning - Unified Inbox separates out the external message from the internal conversation - so at any time our people can assign a message, with a question to a colleague, safe in the knowledge that that the communication is safe and secure.
• send after approval - when you have people who are still learning the ropes of a business, you can ask them to use the "send after approval" function on any emails they send out.  This means they can do what they know how to do and allow you (or other supervisor) to check the work and comment on it before it goes out.