How Workist's Head of People effortlessly manages their IT with deeploi

Executive summary

When expanding to 50 employees without a dedicated IT team, Workist faced several IT challenges. Miriam, the Head of People & Culture, took on IT tasks in addition to her main role to support the CTO together with Office Management. By partnering with deeploi, Workist introduced best-practice IT tooling and expert IT support, greatly easing Miriam’s new IT workload and enhancing IT operations. The partnership boosted productivity and employee satisfaction, demonstrating the benefits of outsourcing to specialised IT partners like deeploi. Easing the IT burden on HR leaders like Miriam enables them to focus on their core responsibilities and scale their business efficiently and securely.

IT challenges

After Workist scaled to 50 employees in a short period of time, the company realised there were gaps in their IT infrastructure and operations. As the company had not hired a dedicated IT admin, the People team had to step up. Miriam, Head of People & Culture, was in charge of setting up laptops, creating email accounts, and acting as IT support – in parallel to her demanding leadership role. This caused the following challenges:

#Problem 1: Handling a company’s entire IT is a full-time job, requires expertise, and cannot be done alongside other duties.

Miriam unexpectedly found herself responsible for managing several IT processes, a task that required a lot of her time and energy alongside her main duties – bearing in mind also that she doesn't have an IT background. Trying to handle IT on top of everything else became a burden and distraction. It was almost impossible to allocate enough attention to IT, creating the need for a dedicated IT function.

#Problem 2: Being responsible for fixing devices and solving IT questions can be challenging, especially if you have little to no IT background.

As part of her assisting IT role, Miriam was also often the main contact person for IT issues at Workist. As a result, employees turned to Miriam with technical questions or problems. Put yourself in Miriam's shoes: you joined a company to build a stellar team and follow your passion, and are now the go-to person to assist with fixing laptops. Understandably, this set up is inefficient, unenjoyable, and unsustainable in the long term.

#Problem 3: A lack of transparency regarding company devices led to a loss in productivity at Workist.

Miriam made it her goal to make all devices, including their status, ownership, and replacement needs, transparent. Therefore, she and her team recorded the device details manually in a spreadsheet, which was very time consuming. Also, devices were required to be up-to-date and high performing. However, without a clear overview or remote control, it was impossible to monitor performance or manage software updates. As a consequence, employees used slow and outdated devices, posing risks to company data and productivity.

#Problem 4: Onboarding and offboarding new employees every month was challenging.

Another difficulty Workist faced was effectively managing the onboarding and offboarding of employees. What used to be a simple task when the company was smaller started taking up more time than expected. Every new hire created more work for Miriam and her team. Besides ordering new laptops, they had to manually set up logins and make sure all the necessary tools and software were installed. On the first day, Miriam spent one hour with each new hire to set up their accounts and devices. Offboarding was equally complicated, especially when it came to keeping devices and accounts secure.

Workist teaming up with deeploi

When trying to solve the problems mentioned above, Workist found deeploi to be their ideal partner. In the initial rollout phase, deeploi introduced several powerful tools: A Mobile Device Management system now automates the enrollment, management, and security of corporate devices such as laptops, which saves time and resources. A cybersecurity tool protects devices from attacks and finds and prevents vulnerabilities. The ticketing tool became an easy access feature for employees to quickly reach deeploi IT support. In addition, Workist’s HRIS system, Personio, was connected to the deeploi platform.

After the basic infrastructure was set up, all devices were enrolled in the deeploi platform, making device management easy and automated. Using the deeploi platform, Miriam configured software bundles to automate software deployment and patching. As a last step in the onboarding process, deeploi helped Miriam to optimise the employee onboarding process, including the configuration of the Apple Business Manager. During the rollout phase and beyond, Workist has a dedicated Account Manager from deeploi to assist with all queries.

Achieved results with deeploi

#Result 1: Since teaming up with deeploi, Miriam has been able to step back from several IT topics and can focus on her actual tasks again.

Comparing her situation today with before, Miriam primarily recognises the benefit of having an experienced partner on her side. Problems that she had previously solved together with the CTO and Office Management are now solved by experts, from simple problems with M365 to difficult choices around compliance. Working with deeploi has not only freed up Miriam’s schedule, but also her satisfaction with overall IT at Workist has doubled.

#Result 2: An experienced IT support and clear communication channel for all employees.

deeploi’s specialised IT support is available to answer technical questions and fix IT problems. Employees who have a technical question receive an answer from deeploi within 30 minutes, without wasting any of Miriam’s time.

#Result 3: With deeploi, Miriam has created transparency over the company’s IT and easily ensures that hardware is always up-to-date.

Implementing an MDM system has automated inventory management. Miriam now has a clear overview of inventory in the deeploi platform, where she can view all used and unused laptops, their serial numbers, and other relevant stats. Using deeploi’s software bundles, Miriam also has automated software and patch management, minimising her operational overhead.

#Result 4: Workist now saves at least one hour per onboarding.

Workist has optimised its onboarding process, saving up to 2 hours combined per onboarding for the new employee and HR. deeploi installs the right software and tools according to Workist’s templates. So instead of spending the first hour of every new joiner's first day setting up their IT, Miriam can use this hour to talk about important company matters, such as values and culture.

If you're dealing with similar problems, reach out to us for a free consultation on how deeploi can assist you.

Client overview – about Workist

Workist was founded in Berlin in 2019 and has quickly grown into a team of over 50 professionals. Founded by Alexander Müller, Tim Wegner, and Fabian Brosig, Workist aims to revolutionise B2B transactions worldwide by automating manual document processing. With its innovative, AI-based SaaS solution, Workist seamlessly extracts, validates, and integrates data from various documents, such as PDF and Excel files. As a result, it minimises repetitive workloads and processes and increases the efficiency of companies worldwide.

·     Client since: May 2023

·     Industry: Software Development

·     Location: Berlin

·     Employees Supported: 48

·     Devices Supported: 84