The founder of OVO Energy has launched a new start-up that aims to force employees to prioritise their workloads.
Stephen Fitzpatrick, who previously owned F1 team Manor Racing, co-founded Just3Things after using the system to save his own energy business “millions of pounds a year”.
Mr Fitzpatrick created the company with Kim Atherton, who was previously the chief people officer at OVO.
The pair believe the app, which has been privately funded to date, is well placed to take advantage of the surge in people working remotely. Just3Things was first spun out in 2018 but will look to raise funds for the first time by March of next year.
The app, which already has clients like Deloitte and PayPoint, acts as a central hub where employers can outline their key goals and vision of the company. Workers can also update the hub with the three top things that they’re working on, giving managers a top-down view of their staff.
A look at the Just3Things interface
Credit: Just3Things/Just3Things
The company claimed it heavily reduces the amount of time wasted repeatedly updating colleagues with the same news. By putting the update into the system it means everyone inside a company can see that it has been done.
“As an organisation, OVO started out as a very small company of about 10 people with everyone understanding or knowing what everyone in the business was doing,” Mr Fitzpatrick said.
“But after growing to 10,000 employees it was impossible to know what everyone was working on. Time and time again we found that it wasn’t clear to everyone what the important priorities were.”
He also claimed Just3Things was able to save OVO Energy £3m a year in improved productivity and an increased ability to avoid duplication of work.
Ms Atherton said the increase in remote working, spurred by the pandemic, has also led to a spike in interest for the product.
“It certainly made us more relevant,” she said.
“Some of the businesses we’re talking to put together task forces that look at how to improve remote working. A lot of companies have these huge barriers to entry, like procurement processes, but a lot of them are really streamlining that.”
The pandemic has led to sizable shifts towards online working tools that improve productivity while people are not sitting next to one another. In the opening quarter of the year Zoom’s users jumped from 10 million to over 200 million. Similarly apps like Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and Slack have all reported sizable jumps in usage.
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