Creating a virtual office for remote teams
www.hiyodesign.com

HIYO Design, global creative brand agency, is all about helping brands discover their story and start conversations with the world. The agency was founded by the Jayo sisters with the aim of doing some amazing, creative work without being tied to one place.

Today, HIYO has a global team of designers, writers, UI experts, and many more creative brains working from across locations, including Miami, New York, Puerto Rico, and all the way from France. And to get work done - they all swear by Flock.

Need for a virtual office

HIYO is built on the idea that customizing brand strategy not only takes time, but also a well-connected team of people bursting with ideas and inputs. And for Cristi Jayo, it’s important to amplify creativity by allowing her team to work at their preferred time and location.

For a team that’s working asynchronously, email and phone calls make it impossible to collaborate in real-time, with information being lost in long email threads. So, to stay connected with her entire team, Cristi started experimenting with a number of team collaboration platforms and apps, before finally making the switch to Flock for good.

The team at HIYO previously used Slack and felt that the interface was very ‘techy’, restrictive and they just couldn’t connect with the app. In comparison, Flock’s friendly and intuitive interface made team onboarding and collaboration much easier and a million times faster.

Quick turnaround time

HIYO works with clients located across continents in different time zones. That’s why it’s so important that their team of digital nomads is always available to connect with their clients.

“Our clients love us because sometimes we have projects that need a quick turnaround. And we have people on the other side of the world who are awake and ready to work.” - Cristi Jayo, Co-Founder

With Flock’s video conferencing tool, the team can collaborate with each other and their clients in a single video room, a feature other collaboration platforms charge a premium for. They also swear by Flock’s mobile applications for Android and iOS, as this helps them work remotely in the most true sense.

For instance, Andre Justiniano, a copywriter and social media strategist at HIYO, had to revamp the social media advertising strategy for a client and said he couldn’t have done it without Flock. The project was quite challenging as Andre’s client had quite a few last minute requests. But Andre was able to rise to the challenge and used primarily Flock to collaborate with the rest of the team.

“I was able to get things done faster and more efficiently because of Flock.” - Andrés Justiniano

To begin with, Andre connected with the client via Flock’s video conferencing tool. He then shared their conversation as a Flock Note with the team in a channel created for the client. The team then set targets via the Shared To-dos app and Reminders for one another to keep the team updated. They used Flock’ Google Calendar integration to track meetings and shared design files from their Google Drive and Dropbox accounts in the channel for everyone to see.

The team needed one tool for everything and that’s what they got with Flock.