The New World of Work.

Technology is improving at a rate unlike anything we’ve ever seen before, and the COVID-19 pandemic showed - if still needed - that humans had a profound capability to adapt quickly to new norms and new environments.

The coming decade will see the emergence of a “new world of work”, the “future of work” or what the World Economic Forum calls the “4th industrial revolution”. Remote work is not seen as exotic or a nice perk by white-collar workers anymore, and hybrid work - a mix of remote and in-office work - will become the norm for the majority of companies.

Your business, like any other, needs to think of and apply new models of (workload) management in order to remain competitive and productive within this new world of work. From the restructuring of your workforce in terms of skills to the implementation of new tools that support the changes in your work processes, any company in the world is currently facing the same exact challenges.

At Gmelius, we believe that scientific management or Taylorism made the second industrial revolution, and that workflow management will define the fourth one! Our mission is to give you the tools you need to move your business to this new world of work as efficiently and quickly as possible.

Integrated Collaboration Platform

In order to smoothen the transition for your teams to this new era, we've been busy developing a unique integrated collaboration platform over the last 2 years. That is, a collaboration tool that seamlessly integrates into your major work applications whether it's Gmail, Slack, or Trello. The goal was to prevent any data migration issues and ensure a better adoption of the solution by your teammates as this did not require the switch to another ecosystem and the training such moves always imply.

In 2020, we also focused a lot on supporting new methodologies of work, e.g., the Agile framework, by offering flexible Kanban boards which can be linked to Gmail labels or Trello boards. We designed a powerful automation suite to complement our work on the way teams manage their workloads, and make it possible to automatically delegate work, classify information, or contextualize communications. Over the different product iterations, we learned a lot about your workflows, business cases, and this helped us identify key initiatives and areas of focus for 2021.

In 2021, we'll focus even more on the two key dimensions that make Gmelius: (i) workflow management, and (ii) collaboration. So, let me present the major releases you can expect from the team this year with respect to these two dimensions.

Workflow Management

An increasing number of you have adopted our boards; we actually saw a 700% usage growth over the last 9 months! We want to ensure you can do as much as you want from your Kanban Boards, and we'll then release a few key improvements this year.

In February, we'll start by making it possible to reply to an email directly from a card without being redirected to the actual Gmail conversation. In the same month, we'll also release a new version of the "Assigned to me" nav section that will feature both assigned conversations and assigned Kanban cards.  By the end of Spring, we'll offer a way to attach documents (e.g., images, PDFs, ...) to Kanban cards.

Besides, we'll continue our stack consolidation efforts by offering bidirectional integrations between Gmelius and Asana, and then ClickUp. Speaking of which, we released last December our public API so if you wish to build other native integrations with your favorite Project Management tools, now you can 😎

To help you manage your workload and optimize your processes, the team is currently busy developing brand new versions of our reports and automation rules. In February, we'll release new Analytics dashboards that will replace our current reports. The objective here is to offer one of the most powerful analytics suite on the market, giving you ways to identify patterns in your company's processes and implement positive changes... and yes you'll be able to get analytics on your tags, finally!

In Spring, we'll release a newer, fresher version of our rules to help you and your teammates remove as much grunt work as possible thanks to a more intuitive interface. Speaking of automation, I almost forgot to mention that a first version of our Zapier app is in the works and should be available in the coming weeks.

Collaboration

In terms of collaboration, our first objective is to complete our email collaboration suite. Gmelius is the only solution on the market to offer such a granularity in terms of email sharing. You can share a whole inbox, a Gmail label, or just a specific email. In 2021, you'll be able to share your email drafts as well! The first version of shared drafts will be released this Winter.

Besides email collaboration, our platform already supports project collaboration with our Kanban boards and their 2-way integrations, e.g., Trello. This year, we want to give your teams a flawless collaboration experience. To do so, we'll expand the collaboration capabilities of the platform by making it possible to share and synchronize your lists of contacts with specific teams or teammates. This is exciting as it will open the door to other powerful bidirectional integrations... CRM ones such as HubSpot and Salesforce 🚀

Finally, daily collaboration is made of small things. Working remotely increased your needs to efficiently and quickly communicate about a specific client, project, task. Gmelius' Email Notes have been designed for this very purpose but we feel we could make Email Notes even more adapted to your new work habits by offering video and voice notes ⏯️

Voilà, I hope this post was helpful in giving you an idea of what you can expect from Gmelians in 2021!

If you wish to share with us how Gmelius is used within your company or react to this post, please send an email to [email protected] or join our public product roadmap.

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