Simply Social Work is a private social work company that provides a range of social work services, for children and adults. They work directly with solicitors, local authorities, and direct families to provide assessments and reports that range from care needs reports, mental capacity reports or just bespoke reports that are instructed by the courts.
Gary Crisp, Director at such an organization, clarifies how Thread has been a comprehensive and easy-to-use solution, and helped Simply Social Work to operate their business in a fully remote way, as well as manage all their work through a centralized system.
The Challenge of Simply Social Work before Thread
Before implementing Thread, the main challenge for Simply Social work was working remotely and the time and disruption that implementing a new system would require.
“The biggest challenge we had was working in real-time with documents. It’s three of us managing the business, and we all live very far from each other. All our work had to be done locally on computers and then emailed to each other, which was not optimal.
“We were looking for something that works as a central place that we could go to for as many business operations as possible. Neil, the other director, and I both worked with local authorities, so we’re quite familiar with different case management software used by them. Usually, such software is very complex and takes weeks to get used to and just often creates more work and you find yourself sitting in front of the computer quite a lot.
We wanted a solution that was going to achieve the same outcome by just having somewhere central where everything could be stored, and that was simple enough to learn and to use without it taking up too much of our time.”
Why did Simply Social Work choose Thread?
“We looked at a couple of different options and it was the simplicity really, that attracted us to Thread.
Another main reason was the integration with Microsoft. We just really like the fact that we could work on a document or an email and it was available everywhere we looked for it. So we weren’t having to flip from one application to another. It’s literally just all there in one place and any updates are made across the board. So technically like Outlook when you’re using emails then it’s sort of updated in the thread as well as on if we’re using the desktop app as well”.
The Results
“We spent less time in front of the computer and more time with clients”
“Working remotely has been brilliant because it literally just allows us to work on documents together. We’ve got a centralised spreadsheet that we use, and we don’t have multiple copies saved everywhere. Documents can be worked on in real-time and we can chat through Microsoft teams. It’s as good as just being in the same office really, which is what we were hoping it would be.”
We’ll very often have our laptops when we go and visit clients in our car and be able to write up sort of things from there. It has helped us to go completely paperless now so we’ll take handwritten notes when we’re out, and we can scan those straight into the clients’ files thanks to Thread. Again, it just enabled us to just be completely paperless and just work from anywhere really”.
The personalized dashboard particularly helps us with keeping track of time, and we can visualize the type of work that we do. It helps both Neil and I look at what areas we both concentrate on and the time spent on each.
The email management feature is a great one as well as it allows us to keep track of emails in client files, rather than just having them all in Outlook on a desktop app, and having to sort them out”
“We definitely recommend it. I think for us, the biggest thing we would recommend is just the simplicity of it. It is quite a comprehensive system, but in terms of user interface it’s really simple and really easy to get the hang of pretty quickly”
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