Happy Monday <!channel> 🎉 We're 

pumped

 to start the week by announcing that... 🥁 Our sister-community COO Stories is launching a new initiative, Mentor Stories 🥳   ⭐  Mentor Stories exists to inspire the next generation of COOs, to help those who might not have access to the career path of COO, to give COOs a way to pay it forward, and because 'how to find a mentor' seems to be a popular question in both COO Stories and Ops Stories communities. 🤔  They have given a lot of thought to how to maximize this relationship. From introductory scripts to the matching process, or guidelines on 'what makes a good mentor / mentee' to meeting forms that guide your sessions. They want this to be tailored, specific, and really value add! 🤝 Mentor Stories is launching with a closed beta, running for three months from December '20 to Feb '21. There will be 5 pairs in this beta, so they can really maximize the feedback loop, learn, and iterate for the full roll out in '21. So if you sign up and don't get matched this time round, fear not, your perfect mentor IS out there! 📧  

How to sign up?

 Fill out this Typeform HERE by November 16th. COO Stories will revert with the outcome of this rounds' matching by the end of November. They are looking forward to receiving your applications! If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to Jess Ruben, COO at Judopay and one of the organisers of COO Stories. We're incredibly excited that Ops Stories gets to be part of this amazing initiative, and hope you are too! Astrid and Aušrinė 🙂

Hi All <!here> a bit of general question re: sickness and absence policy - we have Statutory Sick Pay but looking into having Company Sick Pay as well so people aren’t just left with SSP when off sick for longer term - we are very early stage and I wonder what other companies are doing for Company sick Pay especially if in early stages?

Hi <!here>! I am trying to implement a regular management meeting as we currently don't have a forum for managers to come together and would love to know how you all do this. How often does your management team meet? Who does this include (e.g. all managers, HoDs, clearly defined leadership team etc.)? And what broad format does this take?

Guess until we have #compliance (or something similar) this topic goes here? We are looking to update our Business Continuity Policy now that we are working remote and no longer have an office, but I'm having a bit of a hard time thinking through what the scenarios for this should be. Does anyone have a BC policy they are proud of, especially one that takes remote working into consideration? 📜 🏡

What’s everyone doing for Christmas Parties? Any wonderfully creative ideas/suggestions?

Thanks for the prompt @brief-lizard-30042 and for the initiative @nutritious-postman-47391! alert It's official - we now have #legal-compliance channel for all things legal and compliance party unicorn Join now, otherwise I'll be adding everyone shortly (but if it's not relevant for you, please feel free to leave).

Hi everyone! I am looking for an inventory management system as we are jumping from 3 SKUs to 15 spread across 3 warehouses plus 4 Amazon marketplaces and our excel spreadsheet will no longer do the job! Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated 😊 (I am currently looking into https://www.inventory-planner.com/ as it was suggested on an article someone posted here a while ago: THE 37 SOFTWARE TOOLS WE USE TO RUN OUR 7-FIGURE ECOMMERCE BUSINESS)

posted in #ops-tools yesterday but reposting here just in case as it's a bit on 🔥 for me - can anyone recommend sales/marketing CRM that would: - Do bulk emails / mail merge (we're currently using YAMM; I've explored Pipedrive and Hubspot. Pipedrive is nice, Hubspot doesn't seem to have the ability to send bulk emails without adding marketing opt-out footer, unless I'm wrong) - Have per-campaign analytics and generally flexible reporting features (we send multiple tests/campaigns and want to compare results; unfortunately Pipedrive only allows analyse email open/interaction rates by date, user and team) - Have a visual kanban / pipeline (similar to Hubspot / Pipedrive) - Would be standalone (e.g. not Streak) - Would integrate with email - Be easily customisable (e.g. I love how easily new contact/org fields can be added to Pipedrive by admin users) Hubspot doesn't work for us because bulk email / mail merge isn't possible without marketing opt-out footer. Pipedrive would be awesome but their campaign analytics aren't very useful. Any other contenders out there that you can recommend? Thanks so much!

Hello, I was wondering if anyone has any useful guidelines they follow for meetings? Or something on meeting etiquette? We are looking to retrain everyone on best practices for meetings, especially whilst working remotely

Hi all. I wonder if anyone has any hiring guidelines they'd be willing to share? Currently our hiring process is very chaotic... actually there's no 'process' at all! Thanks in advance

A really great morning roundtable on Firefighting vs Strategy this morning, a topic brought by @fresh-bird-30742 (thanks so much for initiating it, Kirsty! ❤️) We tried something new this time and split into breakout groups to discuss. You can see some rough notes here - feel free to add any comments 🙂 Thank you EVERYONE who woke up early this morning to share their experience and ideas with their fellow Ops Stories folks! pikachu amaze 🌅 And we also really appreciate @average-engineer-68305 who volunteered to facilitate one of the groups 🙏🏻

Good morning all! Does anyone have any experience with the service a national 3PL (third party logistics) such as Rico or CitySprint - keen to understand tech-capabilities (integrations) and service levels 🚗

Can’t recommend running enough - it’s such an amazing way to clear the head (especially if your running ops - meaning doing everything 😂) havent been running for months until last week so not that quick as you can see 🏃‍♂️🚀😂

Morning All. Anyone have any recommendations for a telephony solution that also has a PCI solution. We have Natterbox https://www.natterbox.com/ integrated however they’ve now come back to me and said they won’t have a PCI solution until the end of next year. Now have to make a decisions to not renew our agreement with them and find a new solution. Thanks, Misbhah

Biggest congratulations 🙌🏻 go out to our two amazing members @acceptable-analyst-30198 and @acoustic-actor-92013, the winners of 2020 TechWomen100 Awards. ⭐ You're both awesome and we are super proud to be able to celebrate you in Ops Stories!!! party catparty unicorn

👋 Does anyone have experience setting up Guideline for 401k in the US? Looking to speak with somebody who has gone through the process 🙂

Hello all - if there are any ex-Strategy Consultants here (esp. ex-MBB) who would be willing to spare me half an hour of their time, I would love to discuss all things consulting and consulting applications. Any help very gratefully received! 🙂

Hey all! 👋 Hope everyone is well. I wonder if anyone has any recommendations for how to handle this.. We currently offer £500/year for health & wellbeing, and £500/year for learning & development. We also offer a one-off £500 WFH office allowance. At the moment, people just send me what they would like to purchase, I approve, they purchase & get reimbursed. As we're growing, this is becoming very admin-y! I suppose I wanted to ask two things: 1. For those of you who offer, let's say, a health & wellbeing stipend - do you limit what it can be spent on? Do people get to choose or are there just a few options? and 2. Is there something you would recommend to help streamline reimbursing expenses? Without having to give everyone their own card, as it's mainly just to reimburse the allowances I mentioned above. Thank you! 🧡

<!here> - has anyone done an "exit interview" with someone that decided to leave/you've let go? If yes, anyone can share questions / best practice tips pls? Thank you!

Good morning! ☀️ Does anyone have any experience with, or recommendations of companies to work with on: Carbon Foot-printing (Scopes 1/2/3) their business. 🌱

@quaint-coat-3885 has a polly for you! Votes in this polly are anonymous 🔒.

Hey all, hope this is the best channel for it. Can you please give me recommendation for a UK/Intl. courier company? I want to be able to get quick quotes online, reasonable prices, good support and accurate tracking. Ideally, an account manager would be nice :) We don’t have a lot of parcels to send but we need a reliable service for when we do. Any personal experience recommendations? 😊

👋 US healthcare & dependents contribution - Does anyone have any information what would be a good % in tech companies for dependents cover?e

Hello, could anyone share their thoughts on best practice for managing a post-merger integration? We’re a team of 20, acquiring a smaller business with a team of 3 - so it’s not on an enormous scale but still lots to think about. Would be especially grateful if anyone can point me to an integration template/playbook relevant to SMEs (the ones I’m finding through research are more geared towards corporates). Thank you!

Hello <!here>,  On the 1st of October, we had our Ops Stories board meeting discussing Q4, and we wanted to share some of the outcomes with you. It definitely took us longer than expected to create a coherent report, but it should be faster next time 😅 Since this could become very long and challenging to read, we’ve decided to create this report on Notion.  🐰 Follow the white rabbit and find out what we discussed. 🐰 👉 If you have anything to tell us, send us an email, reply to this one or send us a message on Slack, we always want to hear from you.  👉 If you want to join our next board meeting as a guest, reach out to @quiet-orange-43581 or @adventurous-action-89434

<!here> apologies in advance if I missed an existing thread but is anyone doing Corporate Xmas Gifts this year? Considering everyone's at home - anyone came across any good ideas that can be sent via email (aside from things like vouchers), or a platform where you can "redeem a gift" by entering your home address? TLDR: Basically I'm in need for Xmas gift ideas for our customers and/or team members! 🎄 Thank you! P.S. Pls point me into the right thread if I missed one!

🚨Last call, <!here> 🚨 We have our end of the year “social” tonight! I just came off of a call with the resilience coach and I couldn’t be more excited. It’s no traditional Christmas 🎄 Drinks 🍷 in Shoreditch with pizza 🍕, but we hope you’ll enjoy this change of plans just as much! 🎟️ If you haven’t grabbed your ticket yet, you can RSVP using this link. 🎟️

see you tonight

Hello everyone 👋,  🙇 We had a wonderful event last night thanks to Anise Bullimore. She generously joined us to lead a Resilience session to allow us to be in the now and to guide us into a reflection of the past year so we can start 2021 in the right way. 🙏 We also wanted to thank everyone who joined us and was open to a different kind of experience in Ops Stories.  If you weren’t able to join us, we still got you. 😉 Below you can find the 2020 Feel Good Review worksheet so you can do this in your own time.  🤔 If you’re curious to learn more about Resilience, don’t hesitate to follow Anise on LinkedIn or to send her an email, anise@walkcoachlearn.co.uk. She also does similar sessions for teams and companies in case you’re interested. 🔋 If you have other methods that re-energise you or that makes you focus on keeping a balanced lifestyle. If you believe that this is something the wider community could benefit from, don’t hesitate to reach out and we can organise something in the future.  Have a great Friday and a lovely weekend,  Aušrinė and Astrid