Wurkr Building And Enabling Boundary-Less Office Spaces
Wurkr is a virtual workspace where distributed teams in a hybrid to fully remote work environments can collaborate, communicate, accomplish work and cultivate company culture within a single platform.
Tim Lloyd (Co-founder) and I (Annil Chandel) have been a solid team for over three decades before founding Wurkr. Our realisation that there was no such product or solution that would help us work together from different geographies made us conceptualise Wurkr. When separated by distance, both of us experienced the impact of disconnected and isolated teams on business goals, employee health, creativity and productivity. And thus, we set on a mission to optimise the morale and productivity of distributed workforces. And that’s what Wurkr is all about!
Talking about the business model, Wurkr provides digital and interactive office spaces for teams/companies with as low as 10 employees to as high as 10,000 employees in strength. Wurkr is all set to provide solutions that enhance a better company experience for employees who work remotely or flexibly.
How are you different from the existing competitors?
I don’t think we have a competition that keeps the same set of values as we do. Sure you can find other digital workspace platforms and other gathering platforms that help in communication and collaboration but the way we have designed Wurkr is to suit a much different mission.
Wurkr offers the ability to build a culture in your company. It’s very different from meetings, conferences, gatherings and so on; but are they devoid of all these? Absolutely not. It includes everything, from real-time chats, video/audio conferencing, real-time visibility, spontaneous conversations etc to a break room when you really need to stretch your muscles after an hour-long work.
What are the key business solutions that are expected to drive your growth?
Wurkr empowers company owners, HRs and anybody in the leadership role of a team; with the ability to build a uniform culture among their employees when they are separated by physical distance.
The biggest advantage of this is that the companies are able to promote and maintain better communication, collaboration and understanding amongst the team members, which is key to the success of remote/hybrid teams. We are very positive that the current traction that Wurkr is gaining among the teams that are adopting remote/hybrid work styles will continue to provide us with immense growth possibilities in the future.
How will Metaverse support hybrid working culture? What kind of innovation do you support, any examples?
Metaverse is an amazing concept, I would say, that it has the potential to transform how the people of the world communicate with each other, not just in a work environment but also in education, social gatherings and training.
However, the metaverse products of the current generation have to stand the test of time and also have a lot to improve in terms of usability. When it comes to using VR or AR technology, comfort, intuitiveness and robustness of these technologies come into question.
At Wurkr, we believe in making technology accessible for everyone, and hence instead of focussing on high-end and demanding technology solutions for building a Wurkrverse, we are working on making it accessible to everyone by using the best technology available to the market that is affordable, accessible and easy to use from anywhere.
The innovation of Wurkr comes in where it uses the best technology for video/audio communication and visualisation that doesn’t affect the focus on creating a seamless experience where people can work together from anywhere.
What challenges are you facing in running your business?
Wurkr is a platform with more than 5000 happy customers in over 111 countries, the challenge that we still face is in educating the target group of customers who are decision-makers of the SMEs and businesses that depend on distributed / remote teams.
Virtual workspaces, still being a fresh concept in the workforce, we often face comparisons with meeting apps and project management tools that belong to a completely different category.
We believe Wurkr will one day be featured among the most innovative products to have come out in the decade. Wurkr being chosen as the 2021 Red Herring Top 100 Europe Winners is just one such sign among the many.
What are your expansion plans?
International expansion, we have been focusing on UK, Europe and India markets, but we’re gaining more users in over 100 countries. Later this year, we will be officially launching in the USA
We are currently focused on workplace solutions which we continue to develop, however in the near future we anticipate stepping into industry-specific solutions such as Edtech, Medtech and Retail Tech.
We continue to grow and expand our team, by sticking with our ethos of hiring great talent from anywhere.
