Teamon.live - service for remote employees
Hello, we are Teamon.live! In this article, we will tell you how we switched to remote work, discovered its shortcomings for companies and employees, and developed a service that could provide comfortable remote work.
Idea of creation
In the spring of 2020, most companies were forced to make the decision to switch to remote work. Our team switched to remote control 2 weeks before the official order about it. It should be noted that some of our employees have always been telecommuting, and some worked in the office. We are engaged in the development of software for Russian and Western customers.
During the transition to the new regime, we had to solve the following issues:
• how to ensure employee interaction at the office level?
Remote employees must keep in touch with colleagues to discuss ideas, solve problems, and communicate.
• how to set work tasks for employees and see the process of their implementation?
In the office, as a rule, all tasks are discussed through live communication. Any question on the assignment can be asked to the supervisor, or you can show him what exactly cannot be done in the current task.
• how to control the activities of employees?
The big fear of a manager is not knowing what the employee is doing during working hours. If in the office the employee's activities were somehow monitored, then at a remote location the employee can deal with his personal affairs.
According to statistics, an employee of at least 30% of the time is engaged in distracted from work. In a remote location, this percentage grows due to the discrepancy between employees' time schedules, approval issues, etc. With a salary of $ 2,000 per month and 10 employees in the state per year, the employer loses $ 72k or 5.4 million rubles. to which you can turn a blind eye at normal times, but not in a pandemic and a million bankrupt companies. In addition to this amount, costs for office, taxes, marketing, etc. are added.
• how to train new employees?
Over the 10 years of our work, we have trained a lot of employees, many of whom work in international or top Russian companies. The inquisitive junior grows very quickly in the team of other developers, but what to do on the remote?
Problems that had to face at a remote location
Now there are a sufficient number of different services for remote control: software for online monitoring of employees, task managers, platforms for creating online conferences, and instant messengers. If you implement all the tools separately, then the employees add work in new services to their main activities, the development of which will take employees time, and some a lot of time. Also, the use of various services creates a patchwork of the company's information infrastructure, which makes business processes even less transparent. Hence, another problem follows that we wanted to solve:
• how not to burden employees with dozens of new services and create a unified information ecosystem.
In addition, confidential data leakage is becoming an acute problem in the transition to remote control for many companies. Now, many employees store data wherever they need it. Much of this data is most often stored in clear text due to the free screenshot services. When such a service is hacked, and sometimes just by choosing an address, private, including financial, information can fall into the wrong hands. So, we can identify another problem that needs to be addressed:
• how to ensure the security of transmitted business data.
To solve these problems, we have developed Teamon.live - software aimed at managing a remote company from anywhere in the world.
Product
This is a SAAS platform that provides a comfortable transition of most of the company's business processes online, allowing not only to maintain the normal working activities of the company but also to increase its productivity.
The following solutions are currently available:
• Screener application (Win, Linux, Mac) allows you to share your screen with anyone on the Internet in one click.
• Online monitoring of employee screens
• Communication of remote employees (Virtual rooms, Chats, Calls, Group calls, screen sharing)
• Employee working time control (Time tracker with reports in the context of tasks and screen recording)
• Task manager (Trello and Jira integration)
• Cloud storage
• Screen recording - works cool for online tutorials
We made these workflow patterns primarily for ourselves and are now ready to share them with the world so that companies can quickly master the remote format, implement tools in their activities, and people who have been left without work can become in demand in the remote labor market.
The registration process for the service is the creation of a real company. The user registers create his own company, invites employees there, and distributes employees to rooms. The room is the prototype of a real office. It displays screens of employees, their status, and company chat.
Team
The main part of the team is made up of developers. In particular, backend, frontend, and machine learning developers are working on the implementation of the project, a total of 7 people from the company www.zavode.ru.
Work on the creation of software began in March and continues to this day. In general, at the moment, about 2.5 man-years of programmers have been spent on the project. Also, the next 4000 man-hours have already been budgeted for the implementation of the following tasks that are already in our Roadmap, including artificial intelligence.
What turned out to be the most difficult development?
We developed the project primarily for ourselves, in order to remain productive in the current conditions of the pandemic. When it came time to share our development with other companies, we realized that the product would be quite difficult to use for non-IT organizations.
Initially, we implemented a complex system of distributing employees to rooms, since in addition to these rooms there were also teams. The scheme was as follows: creating a company - inviting employees - assigning employees to teams - assigning employees to rooms - assigning rooms to teams.
Now the scheme for distributing employees has been simplified: creating a company - inviting employees - distributing employees to rooms.
We have simplified the registration system but left an extended view for companies who want to understand how rooms and teams work.
Who is this product for
Our solutions are suitable for any company that employs computer staff. This is a SAAS product, so you can start using it right after registration using a free trial period. For corporate clients, we also offer to deploy our cloud in their closed server infrastructure.
Further development plan
We have a plan for the next 9 months. We want to devote a significant amount of the planned time to machine learning and artificial intelligence in order to introduce new solutions, thanks to which some of the manual tasks will be replaced by machine ones, and beginners will be able to join the workflow even faster. We position the product as a conveyor for the creation of new remote specialists, allowing us to save a significant budget.
What are we looking for now
At the moment, we are trying to make the service as convenient as possible for new users and companies. Now we are not looking for a large number of clients - 1-2 companies will be enough to launch a pilot version of the software.
Our team still has a lot of work to improve the service. Ask your questions, leave comments, and suggestions for the improvement of our Teamon.live project.
P.S. Also, for VC readers who become our new customers, a bonus in the amount of a free month for any of our products will be available. To get it, it is enough to write to the technical support the phrase "Bonus from VC" after registration.