What does office culture look like when there’s no longer an office?
Accenture estimates that 63% of high-revenue companies and tech startups are embracing
Cleary is leading the way on a new category of software platforms involving a central digital social gathering place — or a “digital lobby” — where leaders announce company news, where remote-employee
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“Hybrid and remote work gives you a chance to just completely reimagine things that we used to take for granted [in the] office,” says Thomas Kunjappu, Cleary’s co-founder and CEO.
Kunjappu’s vision first took root at Twitter, where he previously managed a group that built internal tools that served as the company’s digital fabric. Now, he’s out to duplicate and democratize the digital lobby concept at scale for virtually any organization.
An ability to humanize colleagues is the most important component of this digital lobby in the eyes of Rita Ramakrishnan, VP and head of people and talent at Cadre, a real estate technology platform with nearly 100 employees that utilizes Cleary’s solution. It’s where they can learn that she has two dogs and fosters many other canines, as well as what she does for physical fitness.
“To some extent, it emulates or facilitates the kinds of water-cooler chats that really drive toward an enriching experience for employees,” she says.
Margaret Aberin added a Google Chrome extension as employee experience manager at Shippo so that, for more than 250 employees at the fast-growing e-commerce shipping platform, the browser would automatically default to the digital lobby. Now with Alation, she’s poised to leverage this experience at the new company.
“What’s great is that there are so many functions,” she says, pointing to a news feed that not only allows employees to stay abreast of company updates, but also engage in posted articles and participate in icebreakers and games that precede company events. “We really wanted to make it be the one-stop-shop for everything that has to do with the employee experience,” she adds.
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The digital lobby helps employees feel valued, appreciated and connected to their peers, Kunjappu explains, holding together an organization’s connective tissue by integrating with leading messaging tools such as Slack, Microsoft Outlook, Wikis, Google Docs, HR systems and function-specific tooling. A larger aim is to help people collaborate more effectively by unblocking communication silos that form among various smaller groups.
Where Cleary has a leg up on Slack communication is that it can reduce the noise of water-cooler chats on multiple channels that may be unrelated to discussion topics, Aberin observes. “We can separate new hires from managers from leadership, and basically choose which of the articles should go up into their feed,” she says.
There’s also a shout-out component to the digital lobby that can be configured with a company with visual badges designed to publicly recognize exceptional behavior or deeds that fit organizational values. In addition, the platform can disseminate recorded videos from platforms like Zoom or Google Meet for employees who missed meetings.
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For Ramakrishnan, one of the best byproducts of utilizing Cleary was when teams collaborated with a nonprofit on the purchase of toys, books and other items to fulfill more than 100 wishes for children over the holidays.
“The concept of hybrid and remote work is here to stay,” Kunjappu says. “What we’ll continue to see in 2022 is midmarket and larger companies starting to solidify and embrace this concept.”
