4 Ways Topics Streamline Work

Topics are one of Eko’s core features. They’re threaded chats that help you organise complex discussions and prevent conversations from overlapping each other, no matter the size of your project or organisation.

We’ve already covered the basics of Topics, and given you an example of how a hotel chain is using Topics to increase delivery speeds. However, we wanted to explicitly state how Topics can transform the way you work by coupling each advantage with a real-life scenario. Doing so shall give you a good idea of how you can adapt the feature to your field of work.

1. Topics structure conversations

You work with employees spread across several departments and locations, on several projects at once. And as your business expands it can get tough to keep track of the many projects, reports, and discussions.

By creating threaded conversations for every function, project, or subject matter, you can organise ideas in a way that makes sense to you and your team.

Topics are created within a direct or group chat, in a separate chat box. This gives you more space to work and ensures direct communication with involved team members, without having to sift through the many messages in the main chat box.

Scenario:

You’re a regional retail manager looking to analyse and discuss employee attendance reports from HR departments across all your branches.

Traditionally:

You would send out one email including all HR managers from every location asking for the report. Once you’ve collected all the reports, you would email each manager individually to discuss anomalies in attendance figures and brainstorm an idea that fixes the issue.
If you have a lot of retail branches, the many email responses can become too time consuming to read through and too difficult to keep track of.

2. Topics act like a Document Management System

Working in Eko means all your conversations and documents are saved. And with Topics helping you organise everything systematically, you can search for messages and files posted within them predictably and logically.

Scenario:

You’re a salesperson looking for a Lead List sent to you by the sales manager.

Traditionally:

You’ll head into your inbox, try to remember the name of the document and search for it. If that fails, you’ll have to comb through your Google Drive looking for any document slightly resembling the Lead List. You might also have to run a quick search on your laptop for the sheet.

3. Topics accelerate employee onboarding

At a growing company like yours, you’re constantly hiring new employees, and getting them up to speed can be difficult. With Eko, when you invite a new team member to a group chat, they’ll have access to all the previous Topics created within it. They can also view documents, images, and videos previously sent in each Topic.

Scenario:

You’re a business development manager and want your new employee to go through partnership leads, pitching decks, and proposal templates. You’re also looking to share yearly budget, sales forecasts, and branding guidelines.

Traditionally:

You’ll have to spend your time combining all these files into one email. And although you could create a preset email for employee onboarding, you have to constantly update the files within the email to the latest versions. If you’re sharing documents created by other departments, you’ll have to wait to gain complete access

4. Topics help you concentrate on work

It can be difficult to focus on your main tasks when you have to constantly answer to notifications on different devices and platforms. The mute option can be employed, but you don’t want to miss out on anything important.

Scenario:

You’re a Marketing Manager who has to supervise the design team, the content team, and the project management team to ensure all campaigns are on track.

Traditionally:

You might have to set up weekly meetings with each department to check on progress. Alternatively, you could converse with department heads via email. If you’re using a consumer-based messenger app, you’ll have to read through conversation history to understand the most recent developments and provide your input.

To Summarise…

With Topics, all the information you need around any subject is structured and present through a quick search. What’s more, Topics give relevant team members context on the latest developments without bombarding them with notifications across various platforms. This added structure and clarity helps your entire business improve on productivity and efficiency.