Ridestore: retail specialist

Everything's accounted for and out in the open - it shows our partners that we're an honest, decent employer.

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Hey David! Tell us a bit about what you do.

I’m the Content Marketing Leader for Ridestore, a Swedish e-commerce company founded about a decade ago. We specialize in products for the skiing-and-snowboarding lifestyle, supporting big brands like Burton and Adidas alongside in-house ones like Montec and Dope. I lead a team of 8 freelancers, and our other departments work with a further 23. We’re spread all around the world – half of us work from our Swedish office, and half remotely.

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What brought you to the world of time tracking?

We work with a ton of fully-integrated freelancers and were looking for a powerful tool to optimize the way we all work together. Time tracking was an obvious choice, since it lets us know exactly what every crew member is working on. Even in a company like Ridestore where there’s no control culture, it’s still important to know what occupies your employees.

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Even in a company like Ridestore where there's no control culture, it's still important to know what occupies your employees.

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Does your freelance team also like time tracking?

Yeah, because it provides a huge benefit to them too. Professional relationships are always two-way and we need everyone's expertise to grow. A big part of that is providing employees with a supportive work environment they can thrive in, and for us fair remuneration is central to that. Time tracking lets us do just that by giving our freelancers full transparency over their total hours. Everything’s accounted for and out in the open – it helps us reassure the people we work with that we’re an honest, decent employer.

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Why did you choose Timely for the job?

We know freelance work can quickly change format and context. Client phone calls can take you away from the office, and tasks like content analysis and research can be hard to quantify. But with Timely’s Memory Tracker feature, we can capture and understand all that time. Our employees can measure the time they spend on each application in order to log hours as accurately as possible. It can even capture their GPS location for when work takes them away from their desk. And it’s all working automatically in the background – they don’t even have to think about it.

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Timely has such a wide and flexible application - for example, following tasks and activity, tracking total worked hours, or monitoring overtime.

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What are the biggest benefits of Timely for Ridestore?

Timely really helps give us a global view of our projects, and it’s especially useful for comparing targeted budgets against real budgets. It has such a wide and flexible application that each leader has the opportunity to use it however he or she wants – for example, following tasks and activity, tracking the number of hours worked, or capturing and monitoring overtime.

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Tasks like content analysis and research can be hard to quantify. But with Timely, we can capture and understand all of it.

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Would you mind sharing a Timely screen you find particularly useful?

This is one of the dashboards I check the most. It allows me to follow work hours against “allowed hours” the company budgets for the team. It also lets me quickly see who is available for working when I need support for random tasks. 🙂

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