2020 brought a year of lockdown and teams had to adapt to the new normal of working from home. With this new change, however, came new challenges of maintaining and managing communication and cooperation with employees working remotely. Though the concept of working remotely was put more in limelight due to lockdown, it has been existing for over a decade facing the challenges of team engagement, communication, and collaboration.
After years of working remotely, Yanis Mellata, CEO and Co-founder of Kosy Office, experienced the same challenges. Determined to find a concrete solution Yanis with his co-founder Sam, founded the company, which is a virtual office platform that has been reinventing team interaction and paving the way to the biggest work revolution in decades.
Yanis shared his motivation behind co-founding the Kosy office, saying, “Kosy was built for employee engagement and social interaction,” he said, “We have been making it easier for companies to recreate the day-to-day social aspects of a physical office, from coffee breaks to parties and events, no matter where employees are located.”
With Kosy, teams can come together to co-work, collaborate, and socialize in a natural, easy-to-use virtual office, leading to high employee adoption and engagement.
Instead of scheduling meetings, users can seamlessly jump into a conversation or brainstorming session just like they could in a physical office. By giving the right mix of engaging professional and social activities, every company, team, and employee can interact with one another on a single platform of Kosy Office built for employee engagement.
Revolutionising remote team culture
Companies have been transitioning towards remote work, especially due to the ongoing pandemic. Teams often choose to connect through virtual conferences and meeting platforms. However, these platforms are primarily focused on structured collaboration and communication, which lack the efforts of employee engagement. Thus, employees struggle to recreate the comradery of being together through these platforms. That’s where Kosy Office proves its uniqueness.
“In addition to improving employee engagement, Kosy also creates more productive and collaborative teams with co-working capabilities,” Yanis shares, “For example, when working on a new project with remote/distributed members, Kosy brings everyone together around a virtual table to co-work and reach out whenever they want. Dedicated project rooms remove communication barriers that can slow projects down.”
Kosy also helps customers build thriving remote work culture by improving transparency and trust by setting up online office hours for their HR, IT, senior leadership, and other teams, so employees can quickly reach out throughout the day.
Needs led to innovation.
Before co-founding Kosy Office, Yanis and Sam worked for over years in managing teams. Yanis worked at BCG, a top management consultancy helping the leadership of companies all over the world on a range of topics including building productive and high-performing organisations. Sam worked remotely for over 5 years, managing technology and product teams.
While helping different organisations building highly productive teams and remote management of teams the duo experienced the pain of maintaining highly productive and connected teams that are not physically together. This led the duo to incept Kosy.
The journey through the pandemic and beyond
While the concept of a virtual workplace is rather old, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic further strengthened the roots of remote working, which led to finding means of keeping employees happy, productive, and connected to their work and with one another.
According to Buffer’s 2020 State of Remote Report, 98% of remote workers want to continue to work remotely (at least part of the time) for the rest of their careers. A Gartner survey found that 82% of company leaders are planning to let employees continue to work remotely even after the pandemic is over.
Yanis shares his vision of utilising this trend in near future, “Ultimately, we expect all companies to move in the direction of more flexible work arrangements—whether that is fully remote or hybrid-remote,” Yanis says.
“Some offices will still prefer physical offices in the short term. However, the longer these companies hold out on building a culture that supports remote work, the more difficult it will be for them to make the transition in the future when they find themselves struggling to compete with remote-friendly employers,” he adds further.
The fact that Kosy Office has garnered customers from over 30 countries proves the trend of remote working is here to stay. Going forward, Kosy Office is set to utilise this opportunity to aggressively expanding the company through funding from top European investors.
