To help support companies during the era of remote work, WFHomie, a Canadian employee engagement and distributed team platform, seeks to improve the employee experience by assisting in bettering company culture with merchandise and reward deliveries, recurring events and fun virtual experiences for the whole team.
What is WFHomie?
“We leverage people analytics using AI and try to inform the best next steps that companies can take to really attract, activate, engage and retain their top employees,” co-founder and chief executive officer Pavla Bobosikova said.
WFHomie integrates with platforms such as Humi or Slack to get a better understanding of how the company is doing when it comes to employee retention, equity, diversity and inclusion. From there, using the basic analytics gathered, it can then suggest tactical steps to improve in a specific category that a company may be struggling with.
“We give them the analytics and then the toolset to fix these [issues],” Bobosikova said.
Seed funding
WFHomie has so far impacted the lives of more than 5,000 employees. And now, the company has announced that it has raised USD$1.5 million in seed funding.
Bobosikova said the company plans to put this money towards growing its team, specifically focusing on expanding the engineering team.
“We continue to hire…more so on the engineering side because with products like ours, we really see ourselves as category creators now that remote work is still something new. There’s just so much work to be done,” she said.
Strengthening employee relationships
WFHomie focuses on fixing the disconnection employees may feel as they continue to work alone remotely. Bobosikova said the company came to be at the end of 2020 because she felt that it was extremely difficult to build relationships and human connections in a remote setting.
“I think in the beginning of the pandemic, everybody was worried about productivity, but time has shown that hasn’t really dropped. We should be more worried about burnout than productivity. I think the remaining challenge is the connection.”
To prevent employee burnout, WFHomie elevates team building experiences, organizing events such as virtual escape rooms, mixology masterclasses, mandala mindfulness sessions, and home office ergonomics workshops.
Bobosikova said while a mixology class won’t immediately solve employee burnout, it’s all about leaders putting in effort and showing they care about the people they work with.
A flexible approach
As many companies continue to prepare for some in-person work, adopting a hybrid model, WFHomie is taking a different approach.
“We’re focusing on flexible work. That’s our internal thing, where we definitely believe that the office has its time and place. I don’t think it’s binary. It’s not like no office versus office,” she said.
She also noted that during the peak of the pandemic, many companies started to look for talent outside their home regions. WFHomie believes team building activities will continue to be a priority for offices to help accommodate remote workers and workers from outside the area.
“So if they had started hiring globally, and if there are people in Saskatchewan as well as downtown Toronto, then they should treat those equally,” she said. “It wouldn’t be the best idea to do some in-office ceremony for the people who happen to live around a block and then the rest of the people get an email. That just wouldn’t work.”
