A flexible work culture thanks to rigorous collaboration: the TNW balance

You probably know TNW from stumbling across one of their articles about tech news, culture or even from attending their annual tech festival in Amsterdam. Behind this media company is a dedicated 12-people Sales team developing partnerships with clients: from sourcing them, to closing them and following up on them.

We talked with Markus, who runs Global Partnerships at TNW, about:

• Why they encourage and value a flexible work culture
• How they ensure they deliver their clients all over the world the best possible experience.
• How they use Slite to keep tabs on each other and their tasks with their template (which they share!)

Coupling employee freedom with a consistent weekly rhythm

The Sales team at TNW is based partly out of their Amsterdam HQ, partly in remote and their clients are all over the world. Markus tells us the team is almost never entirely at the office at the same time: whether it's someone working remote, attending a conference or visiting a client. This is in large part because TNW values a flexible work culture and individual freedom for their employees. "It works because we make good and full use of a tool that keeps our collaboration fluid and coherent," Markus said.

To keep a weekly rhythm and stay on top of all the stages of their clients' lifecycle, they meet twice a week, one time in smaller, sub-teams and another in an all-hands meeting. The all-hands meeting happens every Monday afternoon to discuss results, macro activities and individual updates.

Coherent and fluid and collaboration on Slite

As mentioned above, their weekly rhythm happens in large part on Slite where they centralize weekly updates that they can refer back to. "We are able to collate all the meeting minutes in one place and create tasks that we can follow-up on a weekly basis." It's also where they can craft their SOPs where everyone can document, organize and find them.

Explore meeting note templates.

Before they started centralizing this information in Slite, they tried Google Docs and Cisco Spark, both of which failed to provide a simple place to "collate all the meeting minutes in one place and create tasks that we can follow-up on a weekly basis," explained Markus.

Slite has made it easier for the TNW Sales team to create a structured template to save time, make it more visually pleasing to gather notes and assign tasks and, eventually, get everyone to fully contribute and collaborate.