Loop Team希望给远程工作人员一个上班的感觉

当我们在流感大流行期间搬到家里工作时，远程工作者感到与外界联系是一个挑战。Loop Team是企业沟通领域的新成员，他认为我们沟通的方式需要改进。这就是为什么这家初创公司今天发布了Loop Team，这是一个试图用软件重现在办公室体验的工具。公司创始人兼首席执行官拉吉·辛格说，他曾在一家以远程服务为优先的公司亲身体验过被孤立的感觉，尽管他尽了最大努力利用科技来产生办公室里的感觉，他说他仍然有被孤立的感觉(可以说)。于是他决定构建他想要的解决方案。

“我们已经观察了很多发生在办公室里的互动——视觉交流，背景对话，走廊里的闲聊，意外的碰撞，诸如此类。我们建立了一种有效的虚拟办公室体验。所以它试图以一种虚拟的形式，展现真实办公体验的最好一面。”辛格向我解释道。虽然他在COVID之前创建了这家公司，但冠状病毒大流行凸显了这样一种工具的必要性。在创建这个软件之前，他采访了数百名在家工作的人，了解他们在办公室之外工作的问题，他听到了很多常见的抱怨。

“有一间办公室，他们不一定知道发生了什么。他们不知道谁有空。他们不知道谁在附近。很难联系起来。每件事都通过日程表安排好了。他们失去了一些存在感，他们感到孤独、失去联系或脱离了圈子，”他说。

他的公司的解决方案试图利用人工智能、良好的老式到场意识和其他技术重现办公室体验，让团队成员知道你在做什么，以及你是否有空聊天。所以，就像你会在大厅里闲逛，看到同事在打电话，或者在笔记本电脑上埋头工作一样，你也会对Loop产生同样的感觉。

它给出了这个人的当前状态，您可以通过查看团队中哪些人可以进行交谈，哪些人在忙来了解他。当你进入虚拟讨论时，团队可以看到谁在开会，个人也可以进来，就像你在办公室一样。更重要的是，你可以设置房间(就像在Slack中那样)，但这些都是设计来给你一个更私人的联系，使用视频和音频进行实际的讨论。你可以通过屏幕共享来处理项目，而那些因为其他任务或时区差异而错过这些会议的人总是可以回顾一下他们错过了什么。在某些组合循环的布局和演示的目的是帮助你清楚地看到的对话,让你想看什么,而隐藏你不感兴趣的部分。

该产品从今天开始免费提供，但Singh希望在明年引入一个基于团队规模的定价模式。他希望总有一个针对少于10人的团队的免费增值版本。

该公司成立于2018年，由斯坦福研究院(SRI)培育。到目前为止，它已经筹集了475万美元。如今，它以第一款产品开始了自己的创业之旅，随着越来越多的团队发现自己比以往任何时候都要远程工作，这款产品的推出恰逢其时。

As we’ve moved to work from home during the pandemic, it’s been challenging for remote workers to feel connected. Loop Team, a new entrant into the enterprise communications space, thinks the way we are communicating needs improvement. That’s why the startup is releasing Loop Team today, a tool that is trying to use software to reproduce the in-office experience.

Company founder and CEO Raj Singh says that he learned about the problems of feeling disconnected first-hand at a previous remote-first company, but in spite of his best attempts to use technology to produce that in-office feel, he said he continued to feel out of the loop (so to speak). That’s when he decided to build the solution he wanted.

“We’ve looked at a lot of the interactions that happen when you’re physically in an office — the visual communication, the background conversations, the hallway chatter, the serendipitous bumping, things like that. And we built an experience that effectively is a virtual office. And so it tries to represent the best parts of what a physical office experience might be like, but in a virtual form,” Singh explained to me.

While he created this company prior to COVID, the pandemic has highlighted the need for a tool like this. Before he created the software, he interviewed hundreds of people who worked from home to understand their issues working outside of the office and he heard a lot of common complaints.

“There was an office and they didn’t necessarily know what was going on. They didn’t know who was available. They didn’t know who was around. It was difficult to connect. Everything was scheduled through a calendar. They were missing some of that presence — and they were feeling lonely or out of touch or out of the loop,” he said.

His company’s solution tries to reproduce the office experience using AI, good old-fashioned presence awareness and other tech to let team members know what you’re doing and if you’re available to chat. So just as you would wander down the hall and see your colleague on the phone or deeply involved with work on the laptop, and know to leave them be, you could get that same feel with Loop.

It gives the current status of the person, and you can know from looking at the list of people on your team who’s available to talk and who’s busy. As you go into virtual discussions, the team can see who’s having meetings and individuals can pop in too, just as you might do in the office.

What’s more, you can set up rooms (like in Slack), but these are designed to give you a more personal connection using video and audio for actual discussion. You can work on projects via screen share and people who miss these meetings because of other obligations or time zone differences can always review what they missed.

While you can do all of these things in Slack and Zoom, or in some combination of similar tools, Loop’s layout and presentation is designed to help you see the conversations in a clear way and expose what you want to see, while hiding parts of the day that don’t interest you.

The product is available for free starting today, but Singh wants to introduce a pricing model sometime next year based on team size. He expects there will always be a freemium version for teams with fewer than 10 people.

The company was founded in 2018 and nurtured at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). It has raised $4.75 million so far. Today it starts on its journey as a startup with its first product, and it’s one that comes with good timing as more teams find themselves working remotely than ever before.