Kuvio Creative is a full-service, innovative agency supporting website development, marketing, branding, and app design.
The team is small, with less than 30 members who work all over the world, including Brazil, the UK, Canada, and New Zealand.
“Kuvio does a lot of work in the social justice space,” explained Director of Marketing Lia Fialho. Through their Changemakers Initiative, they’ve helped organizations like Eliana’s Light, a non-profit that supports children with complex medical conditions. Kuvio Creative is all about doing good — on an employee, client, and global scale. As part of that mission, Kuvio has implemented a 30-hour work week.
Clockwise has helped Kuvio do right by their clients and employees by streamlining scheduling across time zones while supporting flexible and short workweeks.
We had the pleasure of speaking with Lia Fialho to understand how Clockwise helps Kuvio achieve their goals.
The challenge that sparked a need for change
The struggle of coordinating meetings across countries sparked the need for a solution like Clockwise at Kuvio. The team needed a more efficient way to conquer their meeting challenges and find alignment across the globe.
“It’s not just people in different cities; people are in different countries,” Lia said. “Scheduling a meeting can be a challenge when you have people with different work styles and schedules.”
“And because of the nature of our company — having flexible hours and working 30-hour workweeks — not everyone’s hours are fully aligned. That’s when we started looking for a tool to make it simpler for us to coordinate meetings and collaboration.”
How Kuvio Creative uses Clockwise
The operations team introduced Clockwise to provide better visibility into the team’s calendars. “They’re always looking for tools to create a structure, make us more efficient, and make collaboration easier, especially with the struggles we have as a global team.”
As people started using Clockwise, they realized how easy it was and how much time it saved. They were most impressed with how Clockwise alleviated the stress of trying to pin down a meeting time with a team member on the other side of the globe.
“I want to meet without interrupting my colleagues’ lunches or focus time,” Lia said. Focus Time increases productivity, reduces distractions, and gives employees the time they need to do meaningful work. Clockwise automatically adds Focus Time into schedules to protect and save that time.
“We want people to have the time to do the work they need to do. If I were to reach out to someone and ask them to meet during a certain time, they might still agree to meet with me even if they had planned to have focused work time.”
Clockwise Scheduler is one of Fialho’s favorite features for several reasons. First, it removes the manual process of going back and forth with a coworker to identify a time that works best for everyone. It also allows Fialho to schedule meetings with her colleagues without interrupting their Focus Time or lunch break.
Where efficiency, communication, and company values meet
Clockwise has enabled Kuvio Creative to be more efficient and maintain shorter workweeks while allowing the team to still find time for meaningful conversations.
“The biggest challenge for our team is finding communication and collaboration time while staying true to the ethics that we’ve outlined with people having a healthy work-life balance of only working within 30-hours per week and staying true to the time that they have allotted.”
Since implementing Clockwise, Kuvio has been able to work together collaboratively despite being globally-distributed and working shorter weeks.
Before Clockwise, Lia was regularly working more than 30 hours. “I’d work a couple of hours later if it meant that I was meeting with someone who might be overseas in a different timezone,” Lia said. “Clockwise doesn’t let me do that. Instead, Clockwise finds the meeting time that works for all.”
Thanks to Clockwise, the team can stick with 30-hour weeks and avoid meetings on days off. Best of all, communication is better than ever.
“We’re able to have the important conversations, whether it's if we want to take on a new client or where we want to go as a company. Company-wide conversations are simpler to have, and Clockwise makes it so that we can include everyone, which is important to us. Everyone has a voice in our decisions because we can find times that work for everybody.”
