Imagine running a business that is heavily reliant on people working in offices and businesses looking to grow their teams. Well, during COVID, the impact on these types of businesses – co-working and office rentals, was significantly impacted. However, amidst the challenges, one company preserved and even managed to come out stronger after the restrictions were eased in Malaysia.

That’s exactly what WORQ, one of the largest co-working communities in Malaysia, did and they were able to flourish during the MCOs (lockdown periods in Malaysia). At the forefront of their success was Stephanie Ping, the co-founder & CEO of WORQ.

We wanted to find out what tech tools Stephanie used with her team to help manage and grow the business during this period. She graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in Economics and M.S. in Management Science & Engineering, where her experience with Stanford’s entrepreneurship community played a significant role in shaping her vision for WORQ’s entrepreneurial community.

Stephanie is also an award recipient of the Malaysian Venture Capital Association’s Outstanding Female Entrepreneur of 2019. To date, WORQ has bagged 5 prestigious awards, including the coworker member’s choice awards for two consecutive years.

Simon Dale, Managing Director, Southeast Asia, Adobe, shares the tech tools he uses to make his life easier

WORQ currently has four locations (three coworking spaces and one enterprise workspace) located in Kuala Lumpur and is aiming to create the largest and most productive coworking community by taking care of all your workplace needs and facilitating deeper connections.

Boost task management and collaboration with Asana (Paid)

At WORQ, we use Asana to organise, track and manage projects and tasks. We find it useful for project updates, because it ensures that everyone is updated about work progress, allows discussion, and clarifies doubts. This makes collaboration easier when everyone is on the same page. This helps us be productive.
The dashboard allows us to have a clear view of what needs to be done based on priorities, which enables us to manage deadlines effectively. This is useful because the company practices the agile working method.

Office RND for ERP management (Paid)

This is our Enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform. We use it for membership and invoicing management. Meeting room bookings.

It helps with automatic invoicing and reduces administrative tasks, improving our operational efficiency.
Using Office RND helps us to make data-driven decisions through the analytics provided covering membership revenues and product utilisation. Based on this data, we are able to optimise the space usage.

Use an all-in-one solution with Google Workspace (Paid)

Google Meet enables the team working in different outlets to participate in meetings virtually. During the lockdown, we utilised Google Meet for engagement activities for our team and community.

This included employee engagement activities such as virtual team lunches, town halls, and even team-building activities. We also organised community engagement activities, including games night and virtual lunches.

We use Google Data Studio and Google Big Query to create reports and dashboards for each department. Through the dashboard, we keep ourselves updated with important numbers from each department. Eg. Marketing (paid ads performance, website traffic), Sales (no. of leads, no. of deals closed), Operations (outlet occupancy rates). In doing so, immediate action can be taken based on the data.

Scale up lead generation and management with Hubspot (Paid)

We use Hubspot for lead generation and lead management. It helps us to better track, measure, and improve our overall sales and marketing efforts. On the sales side, we use it for lead management and sales follow-up especially to track and manage the number of leads per month and the number of deals closed.

On the marketing end, we opted for Hubspot to consolidate all marketing processes into one platform for easy management and reporting of marketing results.

Upskilling the team with Master Class (Paid)

Everyone in the company is encouraged to stay hungry for knowledge. This is important as the company grows and we want everyone to progress together.

Apart from encouraging knowledge sharing among the team & the community, we are fortunate to learn from international experts in their expert subject matter. Master Class offers a good variety of well-known teachers from various fields which the team is able to learn.