Your Workplace as a Community

For better or for worse, our work is becoming a very important part of our lives. After all, we do spend a lot of time doing it. In many ways, our workplace has replaced the tribe, the village, and the hobby-bound associations, making it essential for companies to seriously consider the kind of community they are creating for their employees.

Good relationships, opportunities for learning, and a sense of safety and comfort are no longer ‘nice-to-haves’ but ‘must-haves’ if you want to keep your employees and run a successful business.

The Service Industry

One of the biggest issues in the service industry is disengaged employees. Industries such as restaurants, bars, hotels, and cleaning don’t share the luxuries of beautiful office spaces, vacation benefits, seminar getaways, and Friday bars.

The employees often work alone or in small groups and at different times of the day or night, so their relations with their coworkers—and the organization in general—are literally obstructed by time and space. Add to that the mentally and physically demanding jobs, and the reason that these industries have very high employee churn seems quite obvious.

Social Technology

The rise of social media platforms unleashed a huge potential for connecting people. However, as quickly as this potential came into being, it became corrupted by ads, filter algorithms, and data theft.

They did, however, change our way of communicating with each other. The concepts of social profiles, groups, social walls, events, targeted news, chat, and group chat are in themselves very powerful and have become new standards of communication.

In Monotree, we want to take the best parts and leave the bad parts out. We want to combine the social aspects with effective means of informing, training, and task managing.

An App as a Community

Getting back to the thought of community as a place where we communicate, collaborate, learn, and get things done, we believe that a community app needs to be all of that. If you run a high-paced business in the service industry, you can’t have five different systems to take care of the challenges of communication, learning, daily tasks, doing surveys, and being social—or maybe you can—but you lose information and your employees in the confusion.

Your app serves a double purpose; it is not only the means to run your business, it is also the thing that binds people together.

Having Vision in Product

Often in technology, the providers, such as ourselves in Monotree, lose vision of what the product actually is, what it must stay, and what it must become. You easily end up making feature after feature without thinking about the ethical implications and the bigger picture. We are very opinionated here. We believe in vision.

We have proven that you can build a highly effective community platform without compromising our ideals. We strive to create communities that are fun, safe, and effective.

Community is Not a Competition, Nor a Panopticon

If you want to run a business where the employees feel like they are constantly competing with each other, don’t choose us. If you want hidden surveillance features, don’t choose us. If you don’t really care about data safety, don’t choose us. If sloppy programming and faulty tech do not bother you, don’t choose us.

Your Culture. Your Tech.

It is a great pleasure of mine to see how our customers care about their employees and their culture. Just getting an app is not enough to create a good community; you need to run your company with the intention of doing so.

We only provide the tools, but tools are important. My advice is: Test the tech products you choose, never compromise on build quality. And just as importantly, think about the tech providers you choose; does it fit your thoughts about communities? After all, in our case at least, we put your brand on your app.