If a person works according to their biorhythm, they do more and get tired less. And this startup claims that successful teams also have their own “biorhythms”! If such a biorhythm is identified and applied to another team, it will start working just as efficiently! The startup’s approach turned out to be so interesting that 26 million dollars were invested in their still-unlaunched platform in one fell swoop.
Essence of the project
Today’s startup was founded this year. Recently, it started collecting emails from those who wish to get early access to its platform, which is only planned to open at the beginning of next year. However, at the same time, the startup raised a significant first round of investment of 26 million dollars, so I couldn’t pass it by 😉
The details of the platform itself are not yet disclosed on the website, but I gathered general information from various articles about what it plans to do.
Rhythms is creating a platform that will help improve the productivity of teams in companies.
If a company has a sufficiently large number of employees, then several teams work on the same tasks simultaneously – for example, there are several sales groups and/or departments.
Employees in these teams are hired according to the same criteria, taught the same things, and they work, in principle, by the same rules. But the problem is that 25% of teams show good results, 25% – poor, and 50% are between them.
To solve this problem, companies create special departments to study and increase team productivity, but their activities usually do not bring significant improvements – because they cannot capture what distinguishes the methods of an effective team from an ineffective one.
Rhythms claims that the reason is that people analyze team work with human methods – although AI should be used for this, which can identify patterns that the human eye and brain cannot capture.
For this purpose, the Rhythms platform will connect to internal corporate systems that keep track of team work – to analyze their habits and rituals: how, when, and with what frequency they hold quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily planning meetings, discussions, retrospectives, stand-ups, calls, and other events for planning, coordination, and control of their work.
In other words, Rhythms’ founders believe that each team has its own “biorhythm” in which it lives. And successful teams have similar biorhythms, while all others differ in some way.
Accordingly, the Rhythms platform will identify the biorhythms of successful teams, both within a specific company and within entire industries – and give recommendations to other teams on how they can change the rhythm of their work to increase their efficiency. Roughly speaking – hold general meetings on such and such days with such frequency, individual calls with team members then, summarize on such a schedule, and so on.
What’s interesting
At first glance, the idea that teams have their own biorhythms seems quite strange.
However, on the other hand, people do live by their biorhythms. For example, no one argues that there are “larks” who are most efficient in the morning, and there are “owls” who are not good in the mornings but are great in the evenings 😉 And this is only the simplest version of division by biorhythms, but in reality, everything is even more complex and interesting.
And if you adjust a person’s work schedule to their biorhythms, then the efficiency of their work can noticeably increase just because of this, and they will experience much less stress.
This fact is used by the startup Arcascope, which I wrote about last summer. It has developed a platform for analyzing a person’s biorhythms, intended for shift workers. With the help of the startup’s application, people can adjust their shift work schedules to their biorhythms – and then they will work better and get less tired. The startup has raised 4.7 million dollars in investments, and new investments have been attracted after my review.
Another important point is that Rhythms plans to analyze the “biorhythms” of entire teams, not their individual members.
The principle of this approach is that the efficiency of a modern company is not the simple sum of the efficiency of individual employees. The essence is in how effectively employees interact with each other, how each of them is in their place and performs their role.
Roughly speaking, you can harness a strong swan, cancer, and pike in one cart. But they will pull the cart in different directions, and at best it will not move from the spot, and at worst – it will fall apart.
That is why traditional methods of compiling periodic “performance reviews,” which are conducted in most companies, do not work well now. Because these reviews try to assess the efficiency of each employee separately – but the results are not produced by individual employees, but by teams.
This problem is solved by the startup Confirm, which I wrote about in September. Their platform first automatically builds a “network structure” of the company by analyzing interactions between employees in corporate systems – and then helps create productivity reports based on the interactions identified in this way between employees within the company. Confirm has raised 11.4 million dollars for this.
Why might the Rhythms platform be in demand right now?
The first reason is that all companies are currently in a difficult position due to the worsening overall market and financial situation. Therefore, they need to continue to grow in a context of limited budgets, having the same or even fewer employees.
But for this, they have to pay special attention to increasing the productivity of their labor. They don’t go to astrologers for this yet, but analyzing “team biorhythms,” apparently, they are ready 😉
The second reason is the growing popularity of remote work. As a result, companies lose the ability to constantly monitor employee work in the office. However, constantly pulling them into calls and meetings, regularly bombarding them with demands to report on this or that reason – is to annoy, distract, and kill their efficiency.
And this means that planning, coordination, and control need to be carried out in some softer mode – so as not to let everything go by itself and not to overdo it. But in what exactly mode? The answer to this is what today’s Rhythms is going to give – suggesting finding such biorhythms of interaction that would ensure maximum efficiency of results.
Where to run
The general direction of movement is to create platforms to increase the efficiency of team work, not individual employees.
The task is relevant – both because team work determines the efficiency of companies’ work, and because the problem of increasing labor productivity has become acute, and also because most companies have not yet found methods of effective work in remote and hybrid (office plus remote) modes.
Today’s Rhythms approach may be non-obvious, but interesting. From a general point of view, it is quite viable – because in the conditions of remote and hybrid work modes, it is really difficult to maintain a balance between the necessary and excessive frequency of interaction within teams.
And it is unlikely that this frequency can be revealed manually. It is hardly possible to do without AI. So the task is not only relevant but also feasible only now.
And the amount of money that was invested in the still unlaunched Rhythms at once suggests that investors consider their approach quite realistic. Well, this means that it can be repeated – but already with a similar platform of your own 😉