Answers to your questions.
We love M365 because it definitively owns the productivity landscape. Due to decades of development, starting from the original Office Suite, it is designed to integrate seamlessly with most other tools and apps. It also acts like molding clay that can be adapted for your needs, rather than a rigid, pre-built tool with limitations.
License sprawl is a huge issue for growing organizations – where does one tool end and another begin? What happens if you have two tools that offer competing features, like two places where staff can chat internally? With each new tool added to the roster, it becomes more difficult to develop consistent rules and processes amongst your staff. With files shared in multiple locations, communication scattered across various platforms, and ad hoc processes taking over, simple daily tasks can quickly become a nightmare.
Maintaining multiple organizational, project management, file sharing, and communication tools also means higher monthly costs with each tool you pay for – and that money doesn't go as far as it should! Off-the-shelf products are limited in that you must adapt your processes to fit their capabilities. This will only ever lead to additional tools to plug the gaps, not better processes. With M365, you can develop the most effective processes for your company, and then adapt the tool to support those processes. M365 is not only a single license, but it is extremely adaptable and can greatly reduce or even eliminate the need for more apps and tools, reducing complexity, frustration, cost, and the sacrifice you must make when it comes to efficiency.
This is our bread and butter. Every organization we work with comes to the table with challenges that can feel impossible to overcome. For example, some industries have high staff turnover, which causes an ongoing personnel organization headache. Others manage multiple contractors and vendors. Some of our clients manage various facilities and experience scheduling, onboarding, and training complications.
If you have multiple internal parties who must be included in communications and decision-making, you are probably frustrated with the inefficiency, delays, and miscommunication that happens every time something needs to get done. What about budgetary processes that require a stamp of approval from several members along the chain of command? The truth is that while your company is special, your challenges are not unique. We have devised solutions that can be tailored to fit your needs.
We are not here to find or develop a tool that requires you to adapt your processes to fit within the confines of that tool. We do it the other way around. First, we audit your current tools and learn your key processes (or the gap where you wish there was a process). We ask – how have you been let down by your current platforms? How have you tried to fill the gaps? Without limitations, could this process be done better and more efficiently? Once we understand and help you update your processes to save time, needless extra steps, and complexity, we determine how M365 can make your dreams come true. By using a "process before solution" strategy, our goal is to get you off the band-aid wheel, instead creating process and tech solutions that will serve you for the long term.
M365 offers a secure, back-end operational environment that houses sensitive and confidential information; only the information you want to be public is automatically updated to a wider internal audience. This saves a huge amount of administrative time and energy. We built the HR specific components on top of AD with appropriate restrictions for HR specific personnel.
We have a beef with traditional HR tools, because they tend to have a self-centered approach to employee information. This means that all employee information is contained and owned by the platform – which is fine, until you want to share some key staff information publicly across the organization like names, roles, and basic contact and location information.
To migrate this key public information from a secure HR platform to a public contact hub typically requires an administrator to manually keep track of staff updates and copy it over. This small job can become unruly as your staff numbers increase – with more people in the company, there is also a higher rate of turnover (adding and removing staff information), more people moving to new locations within the company, more promotions that require role updates, and more people getting married and changing their last names. Many updates don't happen at all.
Beyond functionality, we also have your budget in mind. Unlike most HR platforms, M365 does not have repeating licensing fees. Our fee for developing this tool to fit your company's needs is also a one-time cost.
In terms of other HR processes, M365 has the capability to handle HR data & reporting, maintain employee records, document employee interactions and disciplines, house hiring and onboarding information and training material, track hours worked, automate time off, time tracking, and other scheduling processes, make payroll simple, and enhance employee satisfaction, engagement, and culture
While M365 cannot replace your financial management or accounting system, it serves a critical role in bookkeeping and budgetary processes that feed your financial management system with accurate information.
Many of our clients approach us with complaints about their scattered bookkeeping processes – in most cases, certain staff may have company credit cards, and while some transactions must be approved by certain parties, others don't need to be. Sometimes it's unclear who is responsible for paying certain bills, especially when one-off services are required. This is when transactions get lost, unpaid bills are unearthed, or it is discovered that bills have been paid twice. This is super common, and something that M365 can solve.
Because M365 is so versatile, we have designed and implemented simple bookkeeping tools that act as triage before any information is entered into an accounting software. With a defined process, it is clear which transactions have occurred and by who, and it is simple to trigger a process for transactions that require approval, bills that need to be paid, and tag whoever is next in the process. With a simple filter, it is easy to see at a glance what is outstanding. No more confusion!
Our process begins with developing a centralized system and hub for your organization (see our Services page for more information). Completing this first step takes only three to six months, and includes migrating the core of your organization over to M365. This timeline is average but may change depending on your organization’s momentum and readiness to implement changes.
Our second step is to tailor M365 tools for your organization’s needs. This step is rarely swift and simple. Just like a kitchen renovation, the migrating process often reveals further inefficiencies, areas for improvement, operational bottlenecks, and “dark processes”, which is what happens when a task is getting completed, but the staff member or team responsible has created their own offline process for getting it done.
Because of the problem-solving nature of improving and automating existing processes, and creating new ones, this second step can take weeks to months, and even years. This is why we prefer to work closely with leadership teams, as further organizational growth can prompt more places to expand and streamline.
There’s no sugarcoating it: Projects like this impact the whole organization, from culture, to operations, to quality of service and care. This means it will never be an overnight fix or a one-and-done, but rather the work of continuous improvement and collaboration. We’re proud to say we’ve worked with our organizations for years, helping them maintain, improve, and solve problems as they grow their mission and make a greater impact in the community. We’re proud to be by their side, in a manner that fits their annual funding priorities
We love M365 as a solution for healthcare NFPs. The first big win is cost. The Business Basic license for M365 is free to NFP's and doesn't cost anything to create a tenant. When you register as a not-for-profit, you receive 300 users for free and up to 75% discount for other product licensing.
M365 solves many common problems that growing not-for-profits face:
Putting out daily fires instead of anticipating future opportunities
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Addressing accreditation & funding opportunities as they become absolutely necessary, rather than having all relevant information at the ready
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Spending excessive management time solving internal miscommunications and trying to get everyone on the same page
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Increasing frustration among staff when simple tasks take a long time, cutting into their core work
Juggling various onboarding processes & documentation between facilities
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Navigating a situation where each facility has its own training systems, making it difficult and costly to cross-staff
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Onboarding staff who don’t have a clear idea where they fit in the organization and have little interaction with colleagues in other facilities
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Knowing that the current system will prove to be a significant bottleneck for growth when an influx of new staff needs to be onboarded
Relying on information & communication systems that are still manual and paper-based
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Seeing evidence of human error when paper documents, as well as Word and Excel documents, only exist in someone’s desk drawer or on their personal desktop
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Knowing that staff are shortcutting or skipping processes and communications to save time, or just because they are confused
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Mitigating internal conflict amongst staff when documentation goes missing, or when it becomes clear that individuals are working off different versions of the same file
If any or all of these are relevant for your organization, we invite you to book an initial consultation call with us. We are confident that our skill in process management, business strategy, and M365 can help you solve these problems.
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You may currently be paying higher monthly costs than you should be to maintain multiple organizational, project management, file sharing, and communication tools– and that money doesn't go as far as it should! Off-the-shelf products are limited in that you must adapt your processes to fit their capabilities. This will only ever lead to additional tools to plug the gaps, not better processes. It also means you must face increasing fees when your existing platforms update their pricing.
When you work with us there is an upfront, one-time cost; however, you save money by not having repeating license costs. You may also already have M365 for your organization and it is simply under-utilized. In this case, our work is to refine and optimize a comprehensive tool you are already paying for. That sounds like a win-win solution to us!
We love working with NFP organizations and understand that your funding is often annual, and that it is difficult to estimate a budget ahead of time. Due to the changeable nature of funding, we offer flexible solutions, some out-of-the-box thinking in terms of how to make your budget go further, and collaborate closely with your leadership team to prioritize the most important fixes first. Please book a consultation to learn more!