Simplifying employee management, team collaboration in their own unique way, Myfriday

Employee engagement by organisations and various tools to simplify employee efforts has been in focus lately. Among the startups engaged in that space is Sriram Hariharan and Srikanth N K's Myfriday. Founded in 2012, Myfriday is a software platform, working towards changing the way employees and organisations collaborate in day-to-day work by giving employees a 'go to place' for all ancillary issues at work.Lets see how they do this.

On Myfriday, employees can manage tasks, collaborate with team members, and in the process, get their performance reported. For eg., a BPO employee who has to engage in X number of calls a day. It's a quantitative performance and Myfriday helps analyse his performance and gives him insights which, 'a young manager' lacking in necessary experience and qualification may not be able to provide efficiently.

Myfriday can also be used for operational collaborations (like TESCO does) to coordinate transport needs of the employees. "The transport agency only solves the problem of commute by fetching employees from one location to another. Myfriday, through employee engagement and interaction, can make this process simpler and cost effective", says co-founder Sriram.

What makes Myfriday stand out is that it is a platform for large service sectors companies like BPOs, where employees don't necessarily have an internal communication channel like email addresses. "Currently, employee engagement in that sector is completely missing, making it impossible for organisations to communicate with these employees (or for them to communicate amongst each other). Myfriday addresses that space", says Srikanth N K.

He further elaborates, "these are problems of the emerging world, IT firms in the US don't even have an idea of these problems, these solutions have to come from the emerging markets. With a product like ours, organisations can gain significantly on both productivity and profitability".

Their revenue model is simple - a small initial fixed set up fee, followed by user fee per month. Keeping the target clients in mind, the company has included several interesting features like:

- enabling employees to access the platform through multiple channels like emails, Facebook or Twitter account,

- making the platform available in multiple languages, and

- keeping the user interface is 'as simple as any social network site'.

The venture is bootstrapped so far, and revenues from their two key clients, Wabag, a BSE 500 project management company and Tesco, is what is supports the operations currently. Besides the BPO industry, Sriram is also talking to companies in Singapore to manage logistics for the ports there.

The biggest challenge, Sriram says, is to get clients to feel comfortable with a small company but this problem, he believes will solve itself as they grow. He further adds that so far their principle marketing tool has been referrals by clients.

Speaking of entrepreneurship, Sriram who moved back from New York after a successful corporate stint of over 15 years in multiple sectors to pursue Myfriday says, "you don't do it because you're passionate, or to make money, you do it because there’s a problem which needs your intellectual capital, and you are keen to solve that problem, rather than a corporate issue".

Other players in the employment engagement/employee support sector we spoke about recently including Zalp, (which enhances employee engagement by using their social network as a recruiting tool) and dMACQ (which helps employees simplify and institutionalise the deal processes). So far each of them are showing promise owning to their distinctive characteristics and extremely specific services/target markets. It will be interesting to review how successfully they implement their business ideas in the coming years.

Company website: Myfriday