the great work from home experiment · working age brackets. the largest group lived with their...

THE REPORT

THE GREAT WORK FROM HOME

EXPERIMENT

FLUXX THE GREAT WFH EXPERIMENT. THE RESULTS.01

Jenny Burns, Fluxx, 2020

Overnight, literally millions of people started working from home. We’re all human and are all different, so the way we approach it, cope with it and come through the other side will be different. There is likely to be a deep mental, physical and social impact, as well as some huge learnings from which new ways of working will become the norm.

Since lockdown began, lots of people and companies have been sharing some great tips and tricks on home working (including us), but we wanted to go a little deeper, so we used our human-centred research techniques to understand more about the impact remote working is having on behaviours and habits in order to provide a view on the future of work post C19.

THE WAY WE SOCIALISE AND THE WAY WE WORK WILL BE CHANGED FOREVER.

The notion of business being built on handshakes, face to face meetings, travel and networking has all been curtailed by C19. The pandemic has forced many businesses to implement remote working. Companies now find themselves having the responsibility to protect their workforce; to keep them healthy and productive in different ways. This coupled with uncertainty about the future makes employee engagement an even bigger challenge than before.

It’s pretty impressive how even large and complex companies with legacy systems have, when forced to, managed to get their entire workforce working remotely. Overnight, literally hundreds of thousands of employees have converted their dining room, living area, box room or even in some cases their bedroom into a space from which they can work.

But there’s not much consideration being given to how businesses can sustain this way of working into the longer term.

The world’s biggest work from home experiment


Wishlist of needs

Working from home frequency prior to lockdown

Personal development time

Given the effort that’s gone into setting employees up - from adapting and improving technology through to providing suitable equipment like screens and chairs, it’s easy to see why it’s tempting to take advantage of reduced physical office space overheads.

Offices will shrink and become places to pop into a couple of times a week for a catch-up - at best, rather than somewhere to spend 40 hours sat in front of a computer.

Aside from technology (which has now proven to be a myth), one of the things that stopped people working from home before [coronavirus] was the fear that it gave the impression they weren’t committed. Old school management styles rewarded presenteeism rather than outcomes, so a new modern leader is emerging; somebody with acutely good social skills to manage the dynamic of virtual teams and a visionary who is able to paint detailed ambitions for the short-term future but let go of the delivery.

Differing levels of motivation

Our study involved over 100 participants - from a TV historian to a policeman - who volunteered to complete a twice weekly survey. We also encouraged them to send us pictures and video diaries.

Each working age group was represented, with 59.2% between 26 and 40, covering all other working age brackets. The largest group lived with their partner and 21.4% lived with school aged children - having to manage working from home and homeschooling kids. Over 75% of participants either never, rarely or sometimes work from home, however despite all this, most felt comfortable at the prospect of working from home.

But, what did they want to get from taking part?

Some wanted to understand the impact on companies...

“I want to understand how this social isolation that’s forced on us will have an impact on how remote work is perceived by companies. Up until now many companies were still seeing this as something people do when they don’t want to work much, that it impacts negatively on productivity, that you can’t work remotely when you get to a certain hierarchy in a company or that it’s hard to manage teams that work remotely or have meaningful conversations remotely.”


What does your household look like?

Others were keen to understand the behavioural changes that could result from WFH...

“To learn more about how people adjust to different working environments and to look out for behavioural changes in myself and others. I’m interested in how people will adjust when we go back to office based working, which we inevitably will when the crisis subsides, and how the findings Fluxx gather can influence stakeholders to embrace home working.”

Some wanted to learn how different personality types will cope...

“I’m curious to see how introverts and extroverts respond to this situation.”

And some are just cute!

“To help my son (who works @ Fluxx)!”

Who took partAre you an introvert or an extrovert?


Communicate often.Not just about work stuff either. Ask people how they really are. We’re in the middle of a pandemic — people need more support than normal. Make sure the water cooler conversations still happen digitally and help your team stay connected.

Be crystal clear.Be transparent with your people, customers, and stakeholders; in times of uncertainty when we’re all craving for direction and leadership, it’s okay to not have all the answers. But, it is important, to be honest.

Purpose-driven activities.Lots of our old office rituals might be less applicable in the new online working world. Avoid death by Zoom by being clear about the point of activities, and the value derived. It goes hand in hand with clear and constant communication. Don’t just continue to ‘do it, because you always have.’

Innies & Outies.The best teams are cognitively diverse, bringing different perspectives to your business challenges. Diverse teams also require different leadership or management approaches. Members of your staff that you assume are ‘doing okay’, might just be really good at hiding it. It’s everyone’s responsibility to look out for each other, making space to ask the tough questions. We can’t assume someone else will pick it up.

The ‘F’ word.As we begin to think about the return to work, businesses are making decisions about where they can cut fixed costs, more offices will close and flexible working will naturally be part of the new normal. Company culture and inclusive team rituals have to be in place to support a happy team to have an appropriate work-life balance.

Invest in your team’s development. Workloads seem to be increasing with little space for learning and development. Now, more than ever, is the time to invest in training and this has to be prioritised by business leaders. Investing in and developing your people is always important, but at a time when it’s hard to maintain engagement levels it’s even more important. Additionally you might need new and/or different skills in order to adapt your business for the new future.

It will take creativity and innovation to get us out of this recession.Allowing your people to train, develop and think creatively will help you out of this mess. Many businesses have had to be creative in how they’ve navigated the crisis. Whilst nobody knows what’s around the corner, we can make some pretty good bets, with quick, deep diving customer research and foresight work. Businesses that have had to pivot and adapt quickly can take this behaviour forward, adopting a more agile approach.

Reflect on what sticks.Don’t just go back to old ways, take time with your team to figure out and navigate what behaviours and changes you’ll continue. One of our healthcare clients commented recently that digital adoption has moved forward by 10 years for their business. Why go back to slow, clunky decision making and hoop-jumping? We’ve had a taste of a digital-first approach — it’s in our hands as to what new behaviours and practices stick.

Corporate responsibility now extends to our homes.We’ve proven over the past few months that remote and flexible working works. HR teams across the country have quickly mobilised to support their staff. As well as paying particular attention to mental health, on a logistical level, businesses have a responsibility to set their employees up to work safely at home with the correct equipment. Online, it’s not good enough to just provide employees with the tools and platforms they need, they need to have the confidence to actually use them.

Breaking down hierarchy.It’s been a real eye-opener seeing people in their home environments. We’ve seen dogs, cats and fami-ly members all appear in Zoom or Teams calls, we’ve seen leaders and colleagues in their home environments and it’s reminded us that people of all levels are human, have responsibilities, lives and thrive in different environments. It’s made us a lot more empathetic, real and it’s breaking down hierarchies. This needs to continue.

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10 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW TO MAINTAIN HAPPY, MOTIVATED, AND PRODUCTIVE PEOPLE

Key finding 1DIGITAL ADOPTION FAST FORWARD

We’ve heard from our study participants that the outbreak of the coronavirus has transformed how their businesses operate, with the majority forced to transition to a remote working model with little preparation. Employees are performing their roles from their domestic environment, and as well as having to adopt new technology, security has become a much larger challenge as well. It’s not just home working though, according to our participants, there has been a boost in e-commerce too.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, referred to “two years of digital transformation in two months.”

This digital acceleration - both collaboration tools and e-commerce - has left almost all of the companies our participants work for considering how much office space they’ll need in the future, if any at all. Companies like Twitter, which let’s be frank were already ahead of the flexible working curve, have announced that “employees will be able to work from home forever”. However, more traditional companies are finding things a bit more challenging.

We’ve observed that before the crisis, homeworkers tended to be older, hold more senior roles and were concentrated in sectors like IT, professional services and real estate. The lockdown has widened the age range and skills of those who work from home. Some service sectors like retail, education, entertainment and healthcare have adapted rapidly in order to continue operating.

Consider, for instance, the almost wholesale adoption of telephone consultations with GPs or the doubling of online grocery purchases.

In May, Microsoft announced that it now has 44 million users of its Teams platform globally, compared to 13 million users in 2019.

For some businesses productivity, and profits, will suffer as operating models designed for a pre-C19 world adjust to social distancing and enhanced hygiene standards. But in the long term an acceleration in technology adoption, and a necessary reorganisation of work, would raise productivity. The UK’s poor productivity performance partly reflects a “long tail” of low-productivity firms that do not implement the organisational changes required to exploit technology. The lockdown could be a catalyst for some to change.

We are witnessing what will surely be remembered as a sudden and historic deployment of digital access to services and remote work across every domain, including education, entertainment, government, medicine, and retail. And even as

we see hopeful signs of economies slowly reemerging, we can only anticipate that more and more services will undergo further digitalisation as the work-from-home population remains mobilised.

Visa recently reported that in Latin America, the number of people using Visa credit cards online increased by 20% (13 million people) in one quarter. This means the pandemic and resultant economic recession is likely to advance how technology supports creating solutions for broad societal issues:

● Inequality – especially via better access to broadband and financial services and banking

● Renewable energy – harnessing solar and wind energy to power the data centres behind the cloud

● Increasing the capacity of the healthcare system cost-effectively – technology can monitor a patient’s health at home while telemedicine can help to treat the sick at home

How people have adapted to working from home

FLUXX THE GREAT WFH EXPERIMENT. THE RESULTS05

The vast majority of participants and particularly those who had worked from home less frequently in the past, experienced mood swings throughout the six weeks that the study took place. From sadness, loneliness and isolation to euphoria, camaraderie and inspiration. Quite extreme and contradictory, and changing from day-to-day. On digging a little deeper, we found there were a few things colliding.

• Any crisis is unsettling, but when it’s one impacting everyone and everything, as well as people’s personal financial situations and potentially their health, this has made people feel a level of anxiety never before experienced

• With less physical facetime with leaders and managers, employees are having to become more self motivated

• High levels of anxiety coupled with working remotely, away from colleagues with no opportunity to socialise with friends and family, creates a

pressure cooker of emotions - feeling like you are in a vacuum with no way to release the steam

The pandemic, along with accelerated digital adoption has seen the dawn of a new era of leadership. Research on leadership in the digital age reveals that certain qualities such as deep domain expertise, decisiveness, authority and short-term focus are giving way to softer skills and 4 agile leadership competencies that will outlast C19 - humility, adaptability, purpose, and communication.

Being humble

In times of rapid change and uncertainty, knowing what you don’t know is as valuable as knowing what you do. Humility removes the need for leaders to have all the answers. As data continues to grow exponentially, it’s no longer possible to know everything. Humility has come to the forefront for many leaders during C-19.

“It’s time to move from being know-it-alls, to learn-it-alls,” remarks Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella who describes the importance of humility in learning. Since his promotion in 2014, Nadella has been credited with defusing the highly combative, silo-orientated organisation of his predecessor by building a culture of listening, communicating, learning and sharing view-points.


Mood on Thursday

Forge an adaptive culture

New working norms are built and reinforced collectively. And while it’s not clear what the world will look like, accepting that change is the onlyconstant helps individuals to adapt as new information arises. Having a “fail often to succeed faster” mantra encouraged by Tom Kelley of IDEO and others, is helpful to keep in mind.

Create purpose

Having a clear sense of long-term direction, even in the face of short-term uncertainty, can compensate for many minor short-term changes in direction. Being visionary in the workplace means setting long-term and competitive goals that inform short-term adjustments.

Continuous engagement

Agile leaders need to stay engaged, but they also need to find ways to keep their teams engaged, particularly when the going gets tough and the path becomes challenging. It involves a willingness to listen, interact and communicate with a strong sense of curiosity.

Mood on TuesdayKey finding 2THE DAWN OF A NEW ERA OF LEADERSHIP

MEET KAYLEY MARCHANTWhen navigating a crisis like C-19, the role of communications feels more important than ever before. We interviewed Kayley Marchant, a participant in the WFH study, who has 8 years of experience working in internal communications. She currently works in a team of two as a Senior Internal Communication Manager for London North Eastern Railway, responsible for keeping the 3,500 workforce informed in a clear, succinct and timely way. She believes ‘there is no such thing as too much communication at the moment’ as long as it’s clear, informative and has a clear purpose. She has seen her colleagues and stakeholders really valuing her advice and what she has to offer and her role has even transformed into more of a supportive, advisory and counselling role throughout this crisis.

‘It’s amazing to see the penny drop in other people’s eyes - my peers have really understood the importance of internal comms over the last few months.’

Kayley’s team have spearheaded a (very necessary) digital first approach which has seen the organisation (and their love of printed collateral) adapt quickly in lockdown. Swiftly realising that a slow, out of date and fairly inaccessible intranet was subpar, a microsite was born and launched within 24 hours. This internal site is now used daily across the entire workforce and has had over 50,000 hits in the first three months. LNER has also seen the read rate of emails from internal comms vastly increasing and the internal Yammer site is busier than ever.

With unprecedented levels of uncertainty and anxiety, internal comms teams have been a vital cog in the wheel when it comes to employee mental health and retaining a calm workforce. Kayley and her team have used internal channels to connect with employees around their mental fitness. As well as a new ‘Monday Motivator’ channel which is a light-hearted weekly email for all LNER employees, a weekly internal health and wellbeing survey gathers employee feedback to ensure appropriate support is being provided throughout these changed times. In addition, every LNER employee and their family members were given a free Headspace account at the start of lockdown to ensure they had the tools at their fingertips to support things like anxiety, resilience and better sleep..

All in all, Kayley feels that they ‘have proved that going digital can work for LNER and [she] hopes this can continue in a post-COVID world.’

FLUXX THE GREAT WORK FROM HOME EXPERIMENT. THE RESULTS07

A born storyteller with a passion for writing. After gaining a First Class Journalism degree, Kayley began working life at global insurance company RSA. It was here she fell in love with all things communications. Helping stakeholders tell their stories, transforming the complex into simple and developing new, impactful channels quickly became her passion. After helping deliver a digital global upgrade, she made the move to the railway industry. Here Kayly has communicated big change, implemented new channels and led on the transition from Virgin Trains East Coast to London North Eastern Railway. And she’s never lost her journalistic nose for a great story.

Who are LNER?LNER is the rail company that operates on the East Coast mainline.They took over after Virgin Trains East Coast in June 2018 and have ambitious plans to change the face of train travel.

“We want to create a service everybody loves, that our people are proud to work for and that helps the communities that we’re part of to flourish” says Kayley.

“We kept our promise to maintain a seamless transition between old and new. While doing that, we launched the future of rail travel, with our new Azuma train. It’s already a great success, introducing more seats, more space and above all, more reliability.

Whether you’re nipping to your auntie’s for cake and a cuppa, braving a meeting with the boss or treating the kids to a day of candy floss and sandy toes. We’re with you. Making it happen. Connecting towns and cities, people and places with pride.”

“ It’s amazing to see the penny drop in other people’s eyes - my

peers have really understood the importance of internal comms over

the last few months ”

“ There is no such thing as too much communication

at the moment ”

I think it probably goes without saying, but all of our participants were increasingly missing human contact. Those living alone especially, which was 13%. However, as a large chunk of the global population hunkered down in isolation away from their friends and family, technology, and in particular social media and conferencing platforms have become the next best thing - a crutch for human connection.

In March of this year, Facebook’s daily active users increased by 11% and 10% year-on-year respectively, according to its Q1 2020 results, reflecting an uplift in engagement triggered by users following stay-at-home orders. Video calling on Facebook Messenger and sister brand WhatsApp has almost doubled in some areas hit hardest by the virus.

The addictive escapism of short-form video is providing much-needed relief for TikTok’s users. Since the outbreak began, there has been a notable spike in global downloads – 315 million in Q1 2020 alone, in fact – making it the most downloaded mobile app in any quarter ever, according to SensorTower. It is now thought that TikTok has surpassed 2bn lifetime downloads. Partly attributed to its ability to connect friends and family in a fun and playful way during anxious times.

Despite many influencers having been forced to halt paid campaigns, engagement on sponsored Instagram posts significantly increased in March. Campaign impressions surged by

22% for Q1 compared to those of Q4. Meanwhile, Instagram Live has become particularly popular during the pandemic. For example, in Italy, one of the worst affected countries in the European region, Instagram Live views doubled in just one week during March. It’s also been a catalyst for the people behind brands to create emotional connections directly with their customers.

Twitter has seen much the same picture as Facebook and Instagram when it comes to levels of engagement and a dip in advertising revenue growth. It’s up 24% from 134 million in the first quarter of 2019 to 166 million in Q1 2020. Interestingly, the types of topics users discussed in the first quarter took a dramatic turn as populations acclimatised to the new normal. Global conversations about coronavirus quadrupled in the month of March, according to insight from SproutSocial, and tweets about cooking jumped by 60% in the US between 9th-22nd March compared to the two weeks prior.

Microsoft has reported that LinkedIn has seen ongoing growth in both total members and engagement. LinkedIn users are now up to 690 million total members, increasing from 675 million back in January. And, in regards to active usage, Microsoft says that Linkedin sessions

have continued to rise, up 26% for the quarter.

So, despite feeling lonely, we are all talking more virtually it seems. The key question is whether these volumes will be sustained, whether this is any kind of substitute for actually talking with someone and, what role social media can play in rebuilding the economy.


“ ... a large chunk of the global population hunkered down in isolation away from their friends and family, technology, and in particular social media and conferencing platforms have become the next best thing - a crutch for human connection.

Key finding 3THE POWER OF HUMAN CONNECTIVITY

”

LinkedIn moved fast at the beginning of the pandemic when many people moved to remote working environments almost overnight. They provided free job posts for all UK hospitals and nonprofits working on coronavirus disaster relief, as well as essential services (supermarkets, package delivery, warehousing etc) and platform members with information and access to free learning opportunities to support their shift to remote working. Much support and leadership was required internally to support their global workforce of 16,000 people with the transition. We interviewed Lisa Mudge, a Senior Director of employee communications at LinkedIn, who shared how her team and the wider organisation responded to the C-19 crisis.

Lisa and her team have played a front-stage role in providing opportunities for the entire workforce to feel more connected and internal communication has increased significantly as a result. Quarterly meetings are now monthly, and what was monthly has become weekly. At the beginning of C-19 lockdown, the internal communications teams, in partnership with HR, launched a weekly virtual meeting which all 500 LinkedIn managers in Lisa’s region (US and Canada) were invited to. This channel allowed managers to bring questions that were at the top of their team’s agendas and get relevant real-time information, in a format more akin to a chat show. The real-time Q&A nature of this format was hugely successful and as a result, these meetings between internal comms

and managers take place across every region of the globe.

Looking forward however, Lisa feels that once peers have settled into new routines and become familiar with working remotely, the frequency of communication can revert to a cadence closer to pre-covid times. But she’s unsure how sustainable this way of working is.

As a leader, Lisa recognises the negative impact that continuous remote working can have on employee wellbeing. With this environment likely to continue for some time, Lisa and her team believe mental health and sustainable working habits are crucial. She often tries to encourage less screen time, meetings without rigid agendas that build connections beyond the working day and makes more of an effort to facilitate them in an inclusive way. This allows everyone to feel connected, listened to and contributing.

It is clear that internal communication has played a fundamental role in every organisation in this C-19 world and it’s Lisa’s hope that ‘this field [she’s] so passionate about will gain visibility and respect far and wide’.


MEET LISA MUDGE

“ Remote working could become quite taxing if our new habits are not

sustainable. Our mental health is more important that ever before. ”

“ Never has my job required me to be out front so often

as I have needed to be in the past few weeks ”

Lisa has 15 years of strategic communications experience at global companies like LinkedIn, RSA Insurance and O2 Telefonica. She started her communications career with O2 UK leading brand experience programs and more recently moved to San Francisco to lead employee communications for LinkedIn’s Global Sales organization. She loves employee communications because no day is the same. But most importantly, it comes down to people. From coaching senior executives to inspiring her colleagues to live LinkedIn’s culture alongside her team, the best group of communications professionals in the industry.

President Macron said “This is not a time for falling back on comfortable ideology. We need to get off the beaten track, reinvent ourselves, find new ways of living.”

Customers and colleagues have leapt forward in digital adoption, we’ve advanced years in months - and lockdown has been long enough to make many of these changes stick.

● Over a four-week period during the lockdown, 7.9m UK households ordered groceries online, up from 4.8m last year

● Online share of total retail sales increased from 5.4% to 7.5% between December 2019 and April 2020

● A Share of The Crop, a veg box supplier which sources produce from southeast England, received a year’s worth of additional orders during a single week in March. Since the coronavirus pandemic took over Britain, three million people have tried such a scheme, a YouGov survey has found

● Wine Insiders, an online wine retailer has reported an upturn in consumers looking to booze their way through lockdown – demand for chardonnay grew 11%, and average orders went up 15% in the second half of March

● Peach, an online luxury loo-roll brand, says its sales went up 267% in the first fortnight of March

● Cook has accelerated the rollout of its online delivery service, adding 14 vans to its existing fleet of over 35 over the past two months

● Following a 400% jump in online demand in lockdown, Holland & Barrett has opened a new distribution centre and taken on hundreds of new staff

● Ocado sales surged by 40.4% over March and April

● Downloads for “mindfulness” apps hit 750,000 during the week of March 29, a 25 percent increase from the weekly average in January and February - users also spent about 85 percent more time using those apps that week than usual

● Rapper Travis Scott held a concert within the virtual world of Fortnite attracting 27.7 million unique visitors and 45 million views

And more broadly than employee and consumer adoption, cities after C-19 will need to be bold and imaginative, rather than driven by old solutions. Spaces will need to be adaptable and smart. New kinds of building materials, agile construction, and new approaches to accommodation will need to be part of this future too. 5G, platforms, digital twins, sensors, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things – all these technologies will be all the more important, and they will have to be deployed in support of a complete rethink of urban life, life in cities after COVID-19, where norms like social distancing will be the new normal.

As for the future of work, we believe that the transition will be slow. Unlike when lockdown happened - it was almost like a switch was flicked and that switch can’t be unflicked as quickly. Office readiness alongside employee confidence in commuting and being around people again will take time. Even when this confidence

returns, people will question whether they want to spend a big proportion of their day travelling. Businesses will question whether they need the space. And as we head deeper into recession, companies will begin restructuring in light of what they’ve learnt during lockdown. This combined, it will bring a seismic shift to how business gets done. We’ll learn to live in a much more blended or hybrid (as some people are referring to it as) world of work. We’ll become experts at switching between channels; digital, face to face and good old fashioned phone calls depending on the need. It will become flexible working rather than purely remote working. Facebook is taking it one step further.

Facebook’s vision for the future of work emphasises the impact virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) may have on the way people connect and build relationships. Synthetic 3D experience will replace the reality of commuting and sitting at a desk in a shared space. This will not imply, though, a loss of productivity or efficiency, says Facebook.

“We envision a dynamic virtual work environment anchored by genuine social presence. Next-generation devices would give people infinite workspaces with configurable virtual screens, whiteboards, and other visionary tools. You could work alone or collaborate in a persistent meeting room with remote coworkers like you were all sharing the same physical space, and with all of the nuance of in-person conversation.”


“ ... This is not a time for falling back on comfortable ideology. We need to get off the beaten track, reinvent ourselves, find new ways of living.. ”

Every cloud.WHAT’S THE OPPORTUNITY CREATED BY C19 FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION AT LARGE, AND FOR THE FUTURE OF WORK?

Fluxx featured in the 2020 Financial Times’ Top Management Consultancies List and is the UK’s leading independent Innovation Company. For the last 9 years, we’ve been supporting clients to accelerate growth and sustain change; helping big companies be purposeful, build internal innovation capability and develop new products and services at pace.

At Fluxx we design products and services at such pace that we transform the way organisations work. Whether the products and services are for customers or employees we start by starting; experimenting and iterating based on actionable insights.

Our training, coaching and storytelling techniques are experiential and hands-on

(as opposed to classroom), helping people to learn by doing, which means we drive real business outcomes at the same time as increasing capability and changing mindsets.

No two engagements are the same, we tailor our approach to the unique needs and context of your business. We bring a fresh perspective to the opportunities you are facing and help unlock the potential within your people and teams through a process of; inspiration, activation and acceleration.

Inside Fluxx, there are approximately 50 consultants with differing levels of expertise and experience - including product and service designers, creatives, innovation strategists to research and insight specialists.


Jenny is a Partner at Fluxx. As a creative thinker and positive disruptor, she specialises in brand, marketing, communications, customer experience and behavioural and cultural change, as well as having deep industry expertise in retail, banking, insurance, telecoms and energy.

Get in touch at [email protected]

SpotlightMIRO LANDS $50M SERIES B FUNDING

Miro, an online whiteboard and collaboration platform is surely going to be remembered as the company that was ‘in the right place at the right time’ during the surge in home-working.

During lockdown, Miro landed a hefty $50m series B funding. What’s attracting this level of investment is that this is a product made for a moment when workers are forced to stay home. One of the primary complaints about working at home is the inability to sit in the same room with colleagues and brainstorm around a whiteboard. This reproduces that experience.

What’s more, Miro isn’t simply a light-weight add-in like you might find built into a collaboration tool like Zoom or Microsoft Teams; it’s more of a platform play designed to integrate with many different enterprise tools, much like Slack does for communications.

Miro co-founder and CEO Andrey Khusid said the company planned the platform idea from its earliest days. “The concept from day one was building something for real-time collaboration and the platform thing is very important because we expect that people will build on top of our product.”

A BIT ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Use of Miro has skyrocketed among both business and educational customers as the pandemic has forced millions of people to work at home. How the Miro engineering team has kept up with the demand is remarkable. The startup just passed the 300 employee mark this week, and it will continue to hire with this new influx of money. They expect to have another 150 employees before the end of the year to keep up with increasing demand for the product.

“ ... The concept from day one was building something for real-time collaboration

”

”

the great work from home experiment · working age brackets. the largest group lived with their...

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