After closing an undisclosed initial investment round, WorkPilot, a Melbourne-based knowledge management startup, is gearing up to launch their remote-working platform. The funding round was backed by a number of well-known Australian and international Angel investors.
WorkPilot is a central knowledge hub for a remote team, complete with a shared library of material, process checklists, and collaboration capabilities. The platform simplifies tasks like staff onboarding, knowledge exchange, and job handovers, addressing significant remote-work difficulties brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic.
WorkPilot, unlike other workflow platforms, incorporates a knowledge management system that allows teams to collect and share their knowledge, which is critical for remote workers.
Brian McCarthy and Marco Muscat, the company’s co-founders, founded WorkPilot. The WorkPilot team participated in two accelerator programmes as part of their startup experience before raising seed money to bring WorkPilot to market.
“Going through two accelerators, one led by QUT Creative Enterprise Australia (Collider) taught us the importance of solving real-world customer pain-points. How do you ensure your remote team has the knowledge they need to do their job? This is a huge problem that impacts businesses and teams all around the world. WorkPilot overcomes this challenge by blending workflow and knowledge management together in a very accessible way.”
Because of the continuous pandemic, an increasing number of startups, SMEs, and corporations have been forced to provide remote working capabilities for new and existing teams. During recent lockdowns, up to 47% of employees in Australia and the United Kingdom worked remotely. Workers in the United Kingdom, where the pandemic has had a significant economic impact, are increasingly gravitating toward hybrid models, but are having difficulty with remote onboarding.
According to recent research conducted by Microsoft in collaboration with YouGov, more than half of UK workers with flexible work arrangements would consider quitting if their hybrid alternatives were removed.
This finding comes on the heels of recent statistics from the Office for National Statistics, which revealed that job changes and resignations in the UK are at an all-time high.
While Microsoft’s study reveals that UK workers are looking for jobs that offer greater flexibility, the onboarding process has been fraught with difficulties throughout this time.
For example, 36% of those who started a new job during the pandemic did so remotely for the whole onboarding process.
Forming relationships, not having a leader nearby for support, learning new technologies, and embracing business culture are among the problems that remote onboarding processes face, according to these respondents.
WorkPilot intends to ease this load by offering employees with an interactive knowledge-hub where they can both share their knowledge and benefit from the assistance and participation of their coworkers.
WorkPilot has been in development for almost two years, with Imperial College London, BDO Global, City of Melbourne, Deloitte, and Queensland University of Technology among the early customers. 200 users can get a free early-access spot before January 2022.
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