The problem of low employee engagement has become so acute that companies have even started paying for corporate beer tastings. Really, really! However, for employees worth retaining, business should be more interesting than beer. Therefore, it’s better to engage them in business, not beer 😉 And here’s an example of a platform for improving employee engagement that was created based on this principle.
Project Essence
rready offers companies to “unlock the entrepreneurial potential of their employees” in order to gain a source of new ideas and products that could help the company develop faster and more powerfully.
The picture includes the word “intrapreneur” – a frequently used word in English, made up of “entrepreneur” (entrepreneur) and “intra” (internal). It refers to “internal entrepreneurs” – employees with an entrepreneurial streak whose talent can be used for the benefit of the company.
rready helps companies discover entrepreneurial talents among their employees and direct them in the right way. To do this, they provide employees with a set of tools for developing entrepreneurial skills, an online platform, and access to a network of experts. They also provide strategic support to companies in organizing an entrepreneurial movement within the company.
“The toolkit” is a real physical box with a set of tools that each employee participating in the program receives.
This box contains an entrepreneurship textbook describing the path of creating a new product from idea searching to its realization. Paper templates for structuring the business models of emerging ideas are attached as supplements to it.
Additionally, the box includes something like playing cards used in board games like “Dungeons and Dragons.” But the cards from this box can also be used to “buy” their working hours, the working hours of other company employees, and external specialists provided by the startup for working on company employees’ projects.
All available foreign hours and competencies for purchase are presented on the online platform’s marketplace. Here you can order user interviews, technical development or product prototype design, creation of a marketing campaign plan, or assistance in solving legal issues.
All employee ideas are posted in another section of the online platform, where other company employees can discover them to express their opinion, give advice, or even offer their help in creating the product.
Working on new ideas is not confined within the company. The startup periodically organizes online and offline events, where internal entrepreneurs from different companies meet to share experiences, seek advice, or look for partners – both on an individual level and with the possibility of creating potential product and marketing partnerships between companies.
rready, originating from Switzerland, claims that more than 1,000 companies worldwide use their methodology for developing internal entrepreneurship.
The startup has now raised $4 million in investments, which is added to the $2.1 million raised in 2021.
What’s interesting
Some might wonder, “why would a goat need an accordion?” Why should companies develop internal entrepreneurship if the main task of employees is to “sit tight” and competently perform their assigned work?
Perhaps this is the dream of many managers 😉 But we live in an imperfect world, and this imperfection continues to worsen. There is a growing shortage of qualified employees in the market, and companies have to resort to various tricks to first attract employees of the desired level and then retain them.
This problem has become so acute that recently there has been an influx of startups with platforms offering companies different ways of attracting, engaging, and retaining employees. Sometimes in quite exotic ways.
The startup GoJoe created a platform where companies can organize team fitness competitions among employees. The startup claims that as a result, customer company employees’ attitude towards their employer improved by 84%, and social connections among employees strengthened by 91%. They raised 1.3 million British pounds in investments.
Other startups started offering companies to organize online team-building activities in the form of joint tastings of beer, wine, and whiskey, cooking classes, contests, quizzes, and board game competitions. Among them is Confetti, which raised $6.3 million or Teamraderie, which raised $9 million.
Surprisingly, today’s rready can be categorized in the same group.
Because 2 out of 3 results declared by rready that companies get from implementing their platform are the overall increase in employee engagement and improving the employer’s image among potential hiring candidates.
And only one of the goals is related to the results of internal entrepreneurship itself – the influence of employee initiatives on new business development directions for companies. However, this trend should not be underestimated either.
Take, for example, the startup Groopit. They claim to have created a new category of corporate software that helps companies engage employees in solving their problems. Essentially, they have made a platform for collecting employee feedback on various business issues – competitor analysis, development of existing and creation of new company products. This proved to be a promising topic, as the startup raised $12.8 million in investments.
In a related field are a couple of other startups – Elqano and Beatrust. They create a smart competency database that helps one employee find other employees to assist in solving their work tasks. Beatrust raised $9.1 million for this.
Today’s rready, Groopit, Beatrust, and Elqano share that they help companies encourage, develop, and utilize employee initiative – a consequence of the acute shortage of qualified employees and weakening ties between employees and their parent company due to the growing popularity of remote work.
Where to Run
It turns out that rready is actually a platform for developing corporate culture, as the startup wrote in the very first article on their blog several years ago. Because the “right” modern corporate culture should instill in employees the understanding that their ideas and initiatives are valuable to the company – then the “right” employees will want to work in such a company and will stay there.
An important detail emphasized by rready is that their methodology and platform encourage not just the expression of ideas and initiatives but their execution! Many can talk smartly, but few can actually do something real. And companies need those who can do, not just talk.
The beauty of the rready concept for engaging and retaining employees is that it doesn’t try to pull them into joint fitness activities, games, beer tastings, and other entertainments, as some other startups trying to solve the same problem do.
rready tries to engage employees in meaningful activities. In the best-case scenario, this can bring real output in the form of new ideas capable of bringing new profits to the company. Or even in the worst case, it will still give employees a broadened horizon and new experience, which will undoubtedly help them more effectively cope with their direct work duties.
So the direction is to create platforms for improving employee engagement and retention by developing their business initiatives. Either by encouraging their own entrepreneurial ideas, as in the case of rready, or by involving them in solving the company’s current tasks, as in the case of Groopit.
The overall task of improving employee engagement and retention is large and relevant, and companies are already willing to pay for help in solving it. If they have started paying for joint beer tastings, then they should be even more eager to pay for the simultaneous development of business initiatives and employee engagement. So copying and being inspired by the approach described in today’s review is twice as good 😉
About the Company
rready
Website: rready.com
Latest round: $4M, 09.11.2023
Total investments: $6.3M, rounds: 2