How a not-for-profit uses Timeular’s insights to inform decisions

Mattis Steib is a co-founder of Robin Hood Store, a project on a mission to try to create an economic structure that would be able to replace capitalism as something that can solve the global problems that we face as a society.

As part of this project, they have set up a small, community-driven chain of organic grocery stores that aims to build a system to show what the economy could look like if these problems were solved. There is no private ownership involved and all profits are donated towards fighting extreme poverty and climate change.

The store is run on a membership model: members can participate by spending three hours a month volunteering in the store to support the movement and receive a discount on their shopping.

The challenge: finding a way to maximise efficiency

The Robin Hood Store team consists of multiple volunteers and also 11 employees who work at least 15 hours a week. As the team began to grow the system that they are aiming to build, they realized that they needed an easy way to track their time to help them understand where it’s going and how they can maximize efficiency. They also needed a way to manage the HR organizational parts of a growing business, including recording paid leave, sick leave and staying on top of over and under hours.

The solution: harnessing the power of Timeular’s data

All employees who work at least 15 hours a week now use Timeular. They were drawn to Timeular’s Tracker and the QuickTrack shortcut to quickly create time entries for their activities and to create a record of their working hours and time off.

The team operates with a holacratic structure and is divided into different teams, which is represented by the folders within Timeular. Each team uses two activities: one for ‘recurring tasks’ and the other for capturing ‘improvement tasks.’ They also use hashtags to define the specific tasks they are working on.

Mattis uses the data to understand how they are spending their time across the recurring tasks and uses this to inform his decision about whether to invest time automating certain tasks going forward.

One recent decision Mattis made was informed by Timeular data: “as weekends are busier in the store, we have a separate stock ordering process to support this. Thanks to the data in Timeular, I was able to easily understand how much time this recurring activity was absorbing and made the decision to invest an hour into automating part of the process. This has saved us at least 30 minutes every week, which really adds up over time.”

Mattis exports the data from Timeular into a G-sheet that is set up to calculate the data according to the hours each team member is set to work and ensures that they do not owe any time. This sheet also helps them identify whether the team has used their holiday allowance or if any time off in lieu is owed. This also easily enables employees to adjust their hours over several days depending on if they have over or under hours.

Another part of Robin Hood Store’s mission is to grow the system that they are trying to build. There is no private profit involved but they instead reinvest the bigger part of the profit in order to grow. It’s important for them to be able to know how much they’re investing in terms of time and what they are doing with the time spent on a daily basis.

The outcome: supporting growth with Timeular

Thanks to Timeular, Mattis and the team are now able to accurately calculate over and under hours, which is important to them when operating as a professional organization.

Before introducing Timeular, Mattis describes the way that they were trying to keep on top of hours worked and leave taken as chaotic: “everything before was vague and operated on a trust base. We needed a proper solution to support us as we grew.”

Going forward, Mattis and the team will be using Timeular’s leave tracker which can replace everything they have been doing in the G-sheet with their exported data.