As we begin to ponder the emergence from COVID reality. We start to wonder if and how our professional day-to-day will change. Can we start flying again? Are team meetings at a café cool? Is it back to the office? And possibly the most important one; Is Happy Hour back? However, things probably won’t charge straight back to pre-COVID normal, and it looks like WFH lifestyle is here to stay. The advancements in transitioning to virtual operations have proved to be quite successful, though not without challenges. Two of them being, especially important during the frightening COVID reality, company culture, and employee well-being.
Early last month we told you about a Sarona Ventures and LA Fusion backed Israeli startup called Eloops. The startup’s platform gamifies company culture, making it easier for HR to incentivize and manage the corporate well-being of the most important resource that an enterprise has - its people. Now just a month after the launch of its HR tool, Eloops announced a partnership with Microsoft.
"We picked up the phone, and it was Microsoft"
Microsoft integrated the Eloops tool into its Microsoft Teams platform, providing employees and users with a variety of games, quizzes, surveys, content, and additional positive communication channels that can all be customized based on company culture and long-term company need. Though it may surprise you that Eloops, previously named Appyvent, wasn’t always focused on employees - but was on culture.
“We were always focused on enhancing real-world experience and the first startup was Appyvent, a B2C private social network for events that enhanced the experience for attendees before, during, and after events. Once we started doing events, some attendees decided to use Appyvent for their corporate events and team-building activities. Once companies started using us frequently in recurring events, they asked if they could use our platform to improve their on-going employee experience - for their entire employee journey; from their on-boarding to their exit, and not just around events. This is when we understood that this was the opportunity we had been waiting for to improve employee experience "at scale", and has since been at the heart of what Eloops is today. You could say that our customers have shaped our journey since the very start,” explains Eloops Co-founder and CEO Idan Shem-Tov in a conversation with Geektime.
The gamified platform offers an abundance of activities, which Shem-Tov reports that employees are using with their families, while everyone is spending a lot of time at home these days. Furthermore, workers can receive in-house awards as additional incentives, including personal meetings with the CEO, parking preference, meals, gift cards, and more. This was one of the reasons that Microsoft identified the Israeli developed HR tool as a great fit for the pandemic reality and for the company's long-term plans, which has adopted WFH as standard for the time being, despite unveiling a new state-of-the-art Israeli campus recently.
“A few months ago we picked up the phone, and it was Microsoft! They had researched the employee engagement and gamification market and they found Eloops very interesting and relevant to their customers who use Teams. They suggested a collaboration to enable their customers to integrate Eloops into their MS-Teams,” tells Shem-Tov regarding the milestone collaboration. “We are enjoying working together, and it is all done remotely. It is inspiring to see how professional they are and it is also helping us to improve Eloops in different ways, from product, through marketing and sales.”
Finally, Shem-Tov shared his vision for the future of the HR SaaS tool, now that the company has yet another market-leading partner utilizing its technology “We are planning to be a one-stop-shop for companies to meet all of their employee engagement and experience needs. From the tools and the content to offline and virtual experiences that engage employees wherever they are, we want to make every day a much more fun and meaningful experience at work.”
