Corporate training is a good way to sell air with good checks 😉 Only you need to sell not courses, but a solution to the company’s problem! It would also be good to come up with a new name for the old topic of training. And implement all this in the modern format of an AI chatbot. To understand what this should look like – look at this startup and do the same, but in your topic.
THE ESSENCE OF THE PROJECT
KindWorks teaches company employees kindness.
In a work collective, “kindness” is, for example, thanking a colleague who helped you. Or giving feedback to a colleague on their work, possibly even with some criticism – but one that will help them grow.
Thanking a colleague – 1 minute. Giving feedback – 5 minutes. But even such small acts of kindness help companies establish and maintain connections between employees, improve motivation, and increase their work efficiency.
According to the startup’s data, employees of companies using the KindWorks platform have seen a 38% increase in job satisfaction, a 63% increase in confidence that their work is beneficial, a 35% increase in feeling connected to the team, and a 32% overall increase in happiness.
However, one still needs to learn how to show kindness 😉. KindWorks has developed an AI assistant named Beni, who teaches company employees kindness. He tells them about examples of kindness and also proposes theoretical work situations and asks how they would act in them. Afterward, he explains how one should have really acted and why 😉
All of this happens not in the form of long and boring video lessons, but in the form of short messages in a messenger. Each exchange of messages with Beni takes 1-5 minutes. Beni periodically “wakes up”, sends something to the employee in the messenger, waits for their reply, provides feedback, and then “sleeps” for a while again.
In the process of communicating with each employee, Beni begins to adapt to them—better understanding their character, interests, and even the time when they respond quicker and more eagerly. Such personalization allows Beni to explain the topics needed by a particular employee, give them the most challenging exercises specifically for them, and engage them at the most suitable moments.
Beni records the employees’ reaction assessments and consolidates them into unified tables, which can later be analyzed from different aspects.
The main goal of the analysis is to correlate the learning outcomes with the performance indicators of individual employees or departments. The task is to ensure that there is a clear correlation between an increase in the level of goodwill, work efficiency, and a reduction in the number of dismissals. The startup claims that such a correlation is indeed observed!
KindWorks was founded in 2020, but spent a couple of years developing its product and finding its place in the market. Now it seems to have found it—since it raised its first investment of 1.5 million dollars.
What’s interesting
In the working teams of companies, there are problems:
- 77% of employees are poorly engaged in their work. Simply put, they don’t care—hence their low efficiency.
- 66% of employees do not feel connected with the team. This situation has worsened recently with the growth of remote working popularity. And when there are no personal connections with the team—it simplifies the decision to quit.
As a result of all this, at any given time, 51% of employees of any company are in the process of actively looking for a new job. Where the same thing will actually happen 🙁
The cost of replacing an experienced employee costs a company an average of 50 thousand dollars—including losses from a vacant position, expenses for searching and training a new employee, and losses from insufficient efficiency of newcomers.
Within the overall labor market, this money adds up to a staggering amount of 9 trillion dollars—representing a global problem of massive scale.
The situation continues to worsen. The previous generation dedicated an average of 9.9 years to working in one company at various positions. The new generation, only 2.8 years. Thus, the situation has worsened almost 5 times! Companies need to start urgently doing something about this.
KindWorks claims that one way to solve this problem is by fostering kindness within the team. And “kindness” is much more than just “being pleasant to communicate with”.
It’s necessary to be able to establish and maintain relationships with other people, listen to them and understand, give them something (advice, support, and your time), express your feelings, empathize with others, be sincere, thank others for help, and rejoice in their achievements.
Showing kindness to other people helps these people grow. But not only! By striving to show kindness to others, we bring out the “best version of ourselves”—meaning, we also help ourselves become better.
But you cannot become kind once and for all. Just like you can’t become strong once and for all. Muscles need to be constantly trained, otherwise, they will not grow. And if they once grew—without constant training, they will disappear.
“Kindness,” as the startup claims, “is also a muscle.” And so, kindness also needs to be constantly trained. Even if little by little, but constantly. Therefore, the technology of KindWorks is active prompting of employees to short, but regular training in kindness with the help of AI assistant Beni.
Where to run
Actually, if we unwrap the beautiful wrapper with the word “kindness”, inside we will see the good old courses on emotional intelligence education. Even if in a modern format of micro-learning with blackjack and hookers in the form of a chat-bot with AI 😉
But I do not remember emotional intelligence courses that raised at least 1.5 million dollars in investment—what KindWorks managed to do. And this is a reminder that for successful product sales, firstly, not stuffing is needed, but two other things.
The first thing – we should not sell technology, but a problem solution.
Today’s KindWorks does not sell courses on emotional intelligence, but an increase in employee work efficiency and a reduction in the number of dismissals. Emotional intelligence education is just a tool to solve this problem.
The second thing – we should sell a beautiful packaging, which has some charm and/or novelty.
Courses on emotional intelligence are old and boring. It’s unlikely that they can be successfully sold to companies. “Fostering kindness” is something new. Although essentially old, but in a new packaging. And there’s also a trendy chat-bot with AI, hinting to companies that with new technologies they will be able to achieve a fundamentally new level of results.
In general, corporate training is a good way to make money on selling air with good checks 😉 If you can sell companies not the subject of training, but the solved problem, wrapped in a fashionable and beautiful package.
Accordingly, the general direction of movement is the sale of corporate training in the right way.
What are the main problems for companies now? What should employees be taught to hope to solve one of these problems? In what new format, not resembling the worn-out courses, can we package this training? What new beautiful word will we write on this package instead of the dull “courses on teaching something there”?
In principle, we may get something like today’s KindWorks:
with similar reasoning, but starting with the description of another problem, with a different header of a way to solve this problem instead of the word “kindness”, with a similar AI bot, but trained on a different data array. So, a) which problem will we choose, b) what word will we write and c) what will we really teach?
About the company
KindWorks Website: kindworks.ai
Last round: $1.5M, 13.10.2023
Total investments: $1.5M, rounds: 1