About a quarter of our team is remote full-time, but for a large part of the company, this was a significant shift in our day-to-day lives. We are comfortable holding meetings via Zoom with offices in various cities, and frequently collaborate remotely with clients and co-workers. But for some of us, being at home every day, not being able to leave the house, and not being able to socialize during lunch or see familiar faces in the office took a toll.
We knew that if a company like ours was struggling with the stay-in-place orders, organizations unaccustomed to remote work must be having a tough time adjusting. We started to wonder how we might help. There is no silver bullet to make working at home tolerable for everyone, everyone’s needs and concerns are different. But we could provide an easy (and free!) means for organizations to reach out to their people to gather feedback on how individuals are doing and what might help ease the transition to working from home.
In typical Originate fashion, we set out to quickly build a tool to help facilitate those conversations. After a quick internal workshop with the goal of creating a lightweight and simple tool, we created the concept around VibeCheq.
What Is VibeCheq?
VibeCheq is a tool that allows organizations to reach out to their team with one ask — how are you doing? The goal is to allow admins to quickly and easily set up the email check-in’s and make it just as quick and easy for contacts to respond.
The idea behind this check-in is that if you can get a pulse on how the team feels and encourage them to elaborate on how their transition to working remotely could be eased, you can find actionable steps to help. Some responses may be more challenging to respond to, of course, like, “I’m stressed about the future of humanity!” Still, there may be others that are easier, “I’m always tired and sore because I’m now sitting at a dining room chair for 8 hours a day,” or “I miss my co-workers, a virtual happy hour would be amazing!”
We don’t know how your people will respond, but neither will you unless you ask.
Where is VibeCheq in its Lifecycle?
Undoubtedly, VibeCheq is not a polished, fully commercialized product. It is what we refer to as a Beta application, that’s to say, one that completes the fundamental end-to-end job well, but lacks the bells and whistles of a full-fledged application. A Beta’s goal is to swiftly get a barebones product up and running to test and iterate on in standard Agile fashion.
Typically, at this point in our development process, we would conduct user tests, look into insights from analytics, prioritize features from our backlog, and improve the usability and experience of the product. We would continue iterating until we felt that the product was ready for commercialization and a broader publicized launch.
In this case, our goal is to get a potentially useful tool into the public’s hands as soon as possible. So we’ve elected to forgo the formal user testing cycles and let you (the people we intended to help) tell us how we can make VibeCheq better for your team or organization.
Send us your feedback, tell us what you like, what you don’t, where you’d like more customization, or what would make this tool more ideal for you — we’ll get it done.
Yash Shah is a Sr Director of Product at Originate, a concept to growth acceleration partner for digital products.
