At Sprint Education, we leave no stone unturned in the pursuit of 100% marketing to schools efficiency. If a member of the team encounters a bottleneck during their ruthless quest for perfection then we all brainstorm how we can eradicate that bottleneck moving forward. It’s these little 1% improvements that help us to remain the super-streamlined, fast, and efficient beast that we are!

But it’s not just work-based processes that we look to streamline (Kelly has already shared many of these in this fab little blog). In this blog, I’m going to share a handful of ways that we’ve overcome even the most mundane and fiddly daily challenge with a little bit of outside the box thinking.

1. Extending IT Equipment Lifespan with Nail Varnish

Depending on who you speak to at Sprint Education HQ, John either types a heck of a lot more than any other member of the team (John) or has an unusual skin condition that causes acid to seep out from his fingertips, resulting in the letters on his keyboard keys disappearing (the rest of the Sprint team).

Either way, John was getting through keyboards quicker than Donald Trump can dish out Executive Orders. So, faced with the option of either sending John for some expensive and experimental hormone therapy or stocking up on keyboards, the Sprint Team dug into their box of tricks and found a third way.

Half a bottle of nail varnish later and John’s keys are now coated with a protective layer that will keep his keyboard in pristine condition for years to come.

2. Faster Coffee Making with Twin BIBO Set-Up

Brew making. It’s one of those unavoidable, everyday tasks that affects all members of your team. In fact, it’s estimated that each member of your team spends 24 minutes every single day making, fetching, and carrying hot drinks!

At Sprint Education, we’re split into three brew making teams, each comprising of between four and five brew consumers. This means that, with just one BIBO at our disposal, each brew maker used to have to wait 60 seconds for a re-boil every time they made a round of drinks (as a rule, you can only make three brews before the hot water runs out).

Now though, with the new twin BIBO set-up, there are no such delays. Problem solved.

3. Lunch Ordering Made Easy with Google Forms

At Sprint Education, lunches are paid for by the company and ordered through one of our local suppliers. With an extensive menu, and a team full of foodies, it was initially a full-time job collecting and confirming everybody’s order.

Cue the Sprint Education online lunch ordering system created in Google Forms, where each member of the team selects their desired options from a series of pre-programmed menu choices. These choices are then automatically emailed to our lunch provider at the stroke of 10am (if anybody forgets to place their order then they default to their lunch from yesterday and if you exceed your lunch budget you get an instant notification!).

Like the sound of it? Well, there’s some talk that this could be incorporated as a new module in our Campus software for education businesses so watch this space.

4. Ping Pong League Table Live Updates

It’s a challenge that has plagued the workplace for decades and hindered the efficiency of many an education business; how to quickly and easily record the scores from the day’s table tennis matches and feed these into a ranking system so that there’s no arguing about who the office top dog is.

Well, at Sprint Education we use Ping Pong Ninja’s in-office ping pong ranking software to take all the faff from this process. With the match table situated downstairs, the team can input their scores via their mobile phones on the way back up the stairs and the updated league positions can be calculated by the time their bottom hits their seat!

Another Campus module in waiting perhaps.

5. Automating the Soundtrack to our Day.

Any efficient office needs a suitably motivational soundtrack in order to help sustain peak performance. Therefore, the last thing you need is the music to let you down at a crucial part of the day. Yet this horror situation was occurring on a regular basis at Sprint Education up until 3 months ago.

The day would start off with a bang with Chris Evans, then the dulcet tones and wry humour of Ken Bruce would keep us ticking over nicely until lunch time, but then disaster would strike! Just as the team were settling back to work (slightly bloated after their lunch) on would come Jeremy Vine with another slightly dull and depressing debate. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got a lot of time for Jeremy, but there is a time and place, and midday in our office is neither the time nor the place!

So, to prevent our team losing steam post-lunch, we’ve scheduled an upbeat playlist to come on through our Sonos speakers at exactly midday. It’s got just enough power ballads on it to take us through to the Steve Wright show.

Of course, some of these time-saving tips might not be relevant to you, however the principle remains the same; do not accept the norm if the norm is slowing you down. Look for improvements anywhere and everywhere. It will leave you more time to focus on your marketing to schools.

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