Viva Insights is an app within Microsoft’s Viva suite. It provides individuals, managers, and business leaders with the necessary insights to develop better work habits and improve their work environment. In this blog, we will explore how Viva Insights works and its many features.

How does Viva Insights work?

Viva Insights shows users personalized recommendations that can help them do their best work. By analyzing Microsoft 365 data, such as emails, calls, meetings, and chats, it can generate insights for building better work habits that help people become more productive and improve their well-being. The tool can gather and provide the following information:

• Personal insights help individual users understand how they work and what they need to do to improve their performance.
• Teamwork habits let you determine work habits that may cause burnout, such as having too many meetings, too little focus time, and frequent after-hours work. This way, team members can learn how their habits affect the rest of the team and how they can help their colleagues balance productivity and well-being.
• Organization trends provide managers and business leaders visibility into how the work culture is impacting employee productivity and well-being. They can use the recommendations to make necessary improvements.
• Advanced insights can help company leaders address vital issues about organizational resiliency, such as how work affects their people and the business.

What are the other features of Viva Insights?

Aside from providing important insights, Viva Insights also has a few handy features that can help employees improve their work life. These include:

• Stay connected: This feature allows users to interact better with their colleagues. It also suggests one-on-one meetings with managers or colleagues, sends meeting reminders, and reminds users to RSVP when needed.
• Protect time: Viva Insights users can schedule focus time right on the app. Do Not Disturb functions are automatically enabled to prevent distractions.
• Send praise: Users can acknowledge their team’s and colleagues’ hard work by sending them praise via private chat or a Teams channel.
• Reflect: This feature encourages workers to focus on themselves. Users can create reminders to see how they are feeling and access their reflection history to determine how their feelings have evolved. Users can share this data with their managers and other company leaders.
• Headspace: Users can access the mindfulness app Headspace within Microsoft Viva to help them start their day grounded, relax before a big presentation, or focus before starting a project. They can also use it to close out their day with a mindfulness exercise during their virtual commute.
• Take a break: This feature encourages users to take several deep breaths for one minute.
• Microsoft To-Do: This task management application helps users better manage their tasks and commitments.

To make sure you reap all the benefits of Viva Insights, give us a call. We’ll be more than ready to help you set it up and tailor it to your business’s needs.

Viva Insights is a powerful tool that gathers data on your employees’ work habits, analyzes this information, and then recommends ways to help team members perform more efficiently. The application also seeks to improve your staff’s productivity and well-being so they can achieve their full potential.

How does Viva Insights work?

Viva Insights shows users personalized recommendations that can help them do their best work. By analyzing Microsoft 365 data, such as emails, calls, meetings, and chats, it can generate insights for building better work habits that help people become more productive and improve their well-being. The tool can gather and provide the following information:

• Personal insights help individual users understand how they work and what they need to do to improve their performance.
• Teamwork habits let you determine work habits that may cause burnout, such as having too many meetings, too little focus time, and frequent after-hours work. This way, team members can learn how their habits affect the rest of the team and how they can help their colleagues balance productivity and well-being.
• Organization trends provide managers and business leaders visibility into how the work culture is impacting employee productivity and well-being. They can use the recommendations to make necessary improvements.
• Advanced insights can help company leaders address vital issues about organizational resiliency, such as how work affects their people and the business.

What are the other features of Viva Insights?

Aside from providing important insights, Viva Insights also has a few handy features that can help employees improve their work life. These include:

• Stay connected: This feature allows users to interact better with their colleagues. It also suggests one-on-one meetings with managers or colleagues, sends meeting reminders, and reminds users to RSVP when needed.
• Protect time: Viva Insights users can schedule focus time right on the app. Do Not Disturb functions are automatically enabled to prevent distractions.
• Send praise: Users can acknowledge their team’s and colleagues’ hard work by sending them praise via private chat or a Teams channel.
• Reflect: This feature encourages workers to focus on themselves. Users can create reminders to see how they are feeling and access their reflection history to determine how their feelings have evolved. Users can share this data with their managers and other company leaders.
• Headspace: Users can access the mindfulness app Headspace within Microsoft Viva to help them start their day grounded, relax before a big presentation, or focus before starting a project. They can also use it to close out their day with a mindfulness exercise during their virtual commute.
• Take a break: This feature encourages users to take several deep breaths for one minute.
• Microsoft To-Do: This task management application helps users better manage their tasks and commitments.

To make sure you reap all the benefits of Viva Insights, give us a call. We’ll be more than ready to help you set it up and tailor it to your business’s needs.

Viva Insights uses the power of data and analytics to help businesses of all sizes improve their employees’ productivity. Let’s learn more about this business productivity tool and how it can benefit your organization.

How does Viva Insights work?

Viva Insights shows users personalized recommendations that can help them do their best work. By analyzing Microsoft 365 data, such as emails, calls, meetings, and chats, it can generate insights for building better work habits that help people become more productive and improve their well-being. The tool can gather and provide the following information:

• Personal insights help individual users understand how they work and what they need to do to improve their performance.
• Teamwork habits let you determine work habits that may cause burnout, such as having too many meetings, too little focus time, and frequent after-hours work. This way, team members can learn how their habits affect the rest of the team and how they can help their colleagues balance productivity and well-being.
• Organization trends provide managers and business leaders visibility into how the work culture is impacting employee productivity and well-being. They can use the recommendations to make necessary improvements.
• Advanced insights can help company leaders address vital issues about organizational resiliency, such as how work affects their people and the business.

What are the other features of Viva Insights?

Aside from providing important insights, Viva Insights also has a few handy features that can help employees improve their work life. These include:

• Stay connected: This feature allows users to interact better with their colleagues. It also suggests one-on-one meetings with managers or colleagues, sends meeting reminders, and reminds users to RSVP when needed.
• Protect time: Viva Insights users can schedule focus time right on the app. Do Not Disturb functions are automatically enabled to prevent distractions.
• Send praise: Users can acknowledge their team’s and colleagues’ hard work by sending them praise via private chat or a Teams channel.
• Reflect: This feature encourages workers to focus on themselves. Users can create reminders to see how they are feeling and access their reflection history to determine how their feelings have evolved. Users can share this data with their managers and other company leaders.
• Headspace: Users can access the mindfulness app Headspace within Microsoft Viva to help them start their day grounded, relax before a big presentation, or focus before starting a project. They can also use it to close out their day with a mindfulness exercise during their virtual commute.
• Take a break: This feature encourages users to take several deep breaths for one minute.
• Microsoft To-Do: This task management application helps users better manage their tasks and commitments.

To make sure you reap all the benefits of Viva Insights, give us a call. We’ll be more than ready to help you set it up and tailor it to your business’s needs.

Insightly Analytics helps engineering teams stop problems before they happen, like slow release cycles, bottlenecks and uneven workload distribution that can lead to employee burnout. The San Francisco and Hyderabad-based startup announced today it has raised $1 million led by Together Fund, which it will use to expand its product, engineering and marketing teams.

Founded in 2022, Insightly’s target users are chief technology officers and engineering vice presidents who want to analyze their DevOps research and assessment to help make decisions and identify the causes of issues that can potentially lead to less revenue, less productivity or employee attrition.

Sudheer Bandaru, founder and CEO of Insightly, told TechCrunch that Insightly is currently at six-digit revenue and has some unicorns and public companies in its customer pipeline that can potentially take it to a million dollars in annual recurring revenue over the next few months. Its user base includes a total of 12,000 engineers, including teams in the U.S., India, Kenya and Israel. The platform is customizable by company size and its clients range from 50-member engineering teams to multi-billion-dollar organizations that have more than 800 engineers.

Before founding Insightly, Bandaru worked at organizations like AT&T, Merrill Lynch and Hewlett-Packard. Then he moved on to a role as director of engineering at a markets informational resource website publisher that was later acquired by Bankrate. It was at that job, and during his next role as founder of recruiting platform Shortlist Professionals, where Bandaru says he learned the pain points of managing diverse engineering teams across countries and continents. These challenges were exacerbated by the move to remote work during the pandemic.

“There was little to no way for organizations to objectively see how efficient their engineers were,” he said.

As a result, Bandaru began to hack together a solution with data-driven insights to use at Shortlist Professionals. Then, as he started to get interest from leaders at large tech organizations, he realized his hack had the potential to be more than a side project. Bandaru notes a report from Stripe that says $300 billion is wasted per year around the world in software development inefficiency, even though 96% of tech leaders say improving engineering productivity is their top priority.

He adds many engineering leaders try to assess productivity with analytics from Git and Jira, but those processes are manual and time-consuming. Insightly is designed to automate the process of aggregating data to help speed up software development, find bottlenecks and gain visibility into workload distribution. Integrating Insightly takes about five minutes, is no code and immediately aggregates three months of historical data.

Insightly works by pulling in data and metrics from Git and Jita. Bandaru says its insights can help teams release products faster by spotting bottlenecks and distribute workload more evenly to avoid engineer burnout. It also maps business outcomes to tech efforts, helps teams decide if they should rework or do new work on a version, catch bugs and helps reduce tech debt by showing metrics like maintenance percentage to help teams tackle the most pressing issue first.

Insightly’s cockpit

Some use cases include a multi-billion dollar organization with almost 1,000 engineers that discovered most of their engineering teams were stuck for three to four out of five days because of team structure and release dependencies by using Insightly’s metrics on its release cycle and work distribution. Sendy, a Kenya-based logistics company with less than 100 engineers, discovered that the reason for employee attrition was burnout because of an uneven workload, which company leaders had not been aware of because people worked remotely. Meanwhile, one client realized that the amount of time that went into maintaining legacy applications over building new features as engineers left during the Great Resignation. New engineers had no option but to maintain their old code. Visibility into this problem allowed the company’s CTO to sunset low revenue generating products and build new products stead.

Insightly allows customizations at levels including creating teams by squad level, geographic locations, tech stack and business units. For example, Bandaru said one of clients discovered that a team with more reviewers based in Latin America, and the rest of the team in the U.S., had slower release cycles compared to teams who were all based in the same time zone.

Two of Insightly’s competitors are Jellyfish and Linearb.io. Bandaru said Insightly differentiates by not only showing analytics, but also why they are happening, and providing context to every metric and data point.

Seattle-based Zeitworks, which is launching its private beta today after raising a $4.5 million seed round in 2020, wants to give enterprises data-driven tools for improving the productivity of their teams and streamline their business operations. That’s a market that’s seeing quite a bit of growth right now, especially given how the pandemic has made remote work a standard business practice and how the overall talent crunch is forcing many businesses to do more with fewer employees. The overall idea here is to give businesses better insights into how teams work and where there are opportunities for improving business processes beyond simply using automation.

“The problem that we’re really addressing is that there’s teams and companies in just about every industry who execute all kinds of repetitive business processes every day– and to be clear, it’s business processes executed by humans,” Zeitworks CEO and co-founder Jay Bartot told me. “Think about processing bank loans or insurance claims or HR onboarding of new employees, moving information from system to system. Oftentimes, those systems aren’t interconnected or don’t have APIs. The problem that we’re solving is that the majority of these processes can’t be optimized because they’re undocumented and unmeasured. They’re just not understood.”

Image Credits: Zeitworks

Unsurprisingly, understanding these processes is at the core of Zeitworks’ product. But since these processes aren’t documented, you can’t exactly build a rule-based engine around discovering what people are doing. Instead, the company uses an AI-driven task mining system that uses signals from a wide variety of sources, mostly with a focus on the desktop applications these users interact with during their daily work. Bartot actually noted that he prefers the term ‘process intelligence’ over ‘task mining,’ given that task mining tends to be associated with creating RPA bots more than empowering teams and helping them work better.

Image Credits: Zeitworks

Now, in order to do all of this, Zeitgeist has to run its agent on an employee’s desktop and those users’ daily work is then tracked with quite a bit of granularity. Microsoft, with its Productivity Score, does something similar, but the company also faced quite a bit of backlash over it, given that managers could drill down to the individual employee and see how many emails they sent, chats they participated in, etc. The company later made some changes that put the focus more on the organizational level and away from individual users.

“In our world, the kinds of productivity scores that we are recording are around this repetitive work — the fact that people are processing bank loans or you know insurance claims repeatedly is a fundamental part of what we’re measuring and what we’re doing with pattern recognition,” Bartot explained when I asked him about the potential for backlash. “So the productivity scores are really geared towards that specific kind of repetitive work. I think in the case of Microsoft and other tools that we see out there also in the productivity space, when you’re measuring across many different types of workers up and down the worker stack from the highest level knowledge workers all the way down to kind of digital laborers, I think it’s more challenging to come with something that is useful and something that would make sense to people.” He believes that because his company has a very different kind of focus, its scores will be more useful and acceptable to users. 

Looking ahead, Zeitworks is starting to build out its go-to-market capabilities now that it has proven its system with a number of pilot customers. The company is also working on getting its SOC 2 certification.

Image Credits: Zeitworks

If you’re managing a remote workforce, you may wonder whether your team is doing their jobs or wasting time watching random videos on the internet. Using employee monitoring tools is a good way to keep track of your team’s productivity. But is this practice ethical? Read on to learn more.

What is employee monitoring?

Employee monitoring is the practice of using digital tools to track employee activity and performance, and the progress of their tasks. The data collected can be used to identify patterns, trends, and correlations across different teams allowing managers to gain insight into various work processes, and how they can be improved.

What are the benefits of employee monitoring?

Here are the key benefits of monitoring your employees online:

1. Improved productivity
Using employee monitoring tools can help you track how much time employees spend visiting non-work-related websites or chatting with friends. If an employee’s productivity goes down significantly because of these activities, you can address the issue by reminding that specific employee about the company’s policy regarding visiting non-work-related websites and/or limiting his/her internet access.

When employees know that their activities are being monitored, they’re more likely to focus on their tasks and avoid inappropriate internet use.

2. Better security
According to Verizon’s 2021 Data Breach Investigations Report, 85% of breaches reported in 2020 were due to human error. Monitoring the online habits of employees can help employers track and flag instant messages and emails containing sensitive and private information. In addition, managers can block employees from visiting phishing sites or websites that automatically download malware onto unprotected computers and mobile devices.

3. More efficient project management
Monitoring employee activity provides managers with continuous reports on workers’ progress, allowing them to stay on top of multiple projects. These reports can help managers delegate tasks and adjust schedules to meet deadlines.

What are the disadvantages of monitoring your employees online?

Despite its benefits, employee monitoring also comes with some drawbacks, such as:

1. Trust issues
Employees may feel that their privacy is being violated. This can lead to low employee morale and reduced productivity, as well as distrust between and among colleagues.

2. Legal issues
States and countries may have varying policies on employee monitoring, but one thing is constant ⁠— an employee’s consent is needed before any type of monitoring can be done.Without the consent of an employee, an employer can be charged with privacy violations and discrimination if the information collected is used to harm that employee.

To avoid potential problems that can arise from employee monitoring, employers should explain why monitoring is needed. A written policy should be created explaining how employees will be monitored, what information will be collected, and how that information will be protected.

If you want to learn more about employee monitoring, give us a call today.

The COVID-19 pandemic pushed many businesses to embrace a work from home setup. However, one of the challenges managers faced was checking the productivity of each employee. Monitoring employees online is a good way of tracking the productivity of a remote workforce. Keep reading to learn more about employee monitoring.

What is employee monitoring?

Employee monitoring is the practice of using digital tools to track employee activity and performance, and the progress of their tasks. The data collected can be used to identify patterns, trends, and correlations across different teams allowing managers to gain insight into various work processes, and how they can be improved.

What are the benefits of employee monitoring?

Here are the key benefits of monitoring your employees online:

1. Improved productivity
Using employee monitoring tools can help you track how much time employees spend visiting non-work-related websites or chatting with friends. If an employee’s productivity goes down significantly because of these activities, you can address the issue by reminding that specific employee about the company’s policy regarding visiting non-work-related websites and/or limiting his/her internet access.

When employees know that their activities are being monitored, they’re more likely to focus on their tasks and avoid inappropriate internet use.

2. Better security
According to Verizon’s 2021 Data Breach Investigations Report, 85% of breaches reported in 2020 were due to human error. Monitoring the online habits of employees can help employers track and flag instant messages and emails containing sensitive and private information. In addition, managers can block employees from visiting phishing sites or websites that automatically download malware onto unprotected computers and mobile devices.

3. More efficient project management
Monitoring employee activity provides managers with continuous reports on workers’ progress, allowing them to stay on top of multiple projects. These reports can help managers delegate tasks and adjust schedules to meet deadlines.

What are the disadvantages of monitoring your employees online?

Despite its benefits, employee monitoring also comes with some drawbacks, such as:

1. Trust issues
Employees may feel that their privacy is being violated. This can lead to low employee morale and reduced productivity, as well as distrust between and among colleagues.

2. Legal issues
States and countries may have varying policies on employee monitoring, but one thing is constant ⁠— an employee’s consent is needed before any type of monitoring can be done.Without the consent of an employee, an employer can be charged with privacy violations and discrimination if the information collected is used to harm that employee.

To avoid potential problems that can arise from employee monitoring, employers should explain why monitoring is needed. A written policy should be created explaining how employees will be monitored, what information will be collected, and how that information will be protected.

If you want to learn more about employee monitoring, give us a call today.

With remote work becoming the new normal for many businesses, employers can’t help but worry about how much work their employees are getting done. One way to determine this is by monitoring employees online. However, this practice can raise privacy concerns. This article will shed light on what employee monitoring is and how it can help your business.

What is employee monitoring?

Employee monitoring is the practice of using digital tools to track employee activity and performance, and the progress of their tasks. The data collected can be used to identify patterns, trends, and correlations across different teams allowing managers to gain insight into various work processes, and how they can be improved.

What are the benefits of employee monitoring?

Here are the key benefits of monitoring your employees online:

1. Improved productivity
Using employee monitoring tools can help you track how much time employees spend visiting non-work-related websites or chatting with friends. If an employee’s productivity goes down significantly because of these activities, you can address the issue by reminding that specific employee about the company’s policy regarding visiting non-work-related websites and/or limiting his/her internet access.

When employees know that their activities are being monitored, they’re more likely to focus on their tasks and avoid inappropriate internet use.

2. Better security
According to Verizon’s 2021 Data Breach Investigations Report, 85% of breaches reported in 2020 were due to human error. Monitoring the online habits of employees can help employers track and flag instant messages and emails containing sensitive and private information. In addition, managers can block employees from visiting phishing sites or websites that automatically download malware onto unprotected computers and mobile devices.

3. More efficient project management
Monitoring employee activity provides managers with continuous reports on workers’ progress, allowing them to stay on top of multiple projects. These reports can help managers delegate tasks and adjust schedules to meet deadlines.

What are the disadvantages of monitoring your employees online?

Despite its benefits, employee monitoring also comes with some drawbacks, such as:

1. Trust issues
Employees may feel that their privacy is being violated. This can lead to low employee morale and reduced productivity, as well as distrust between and among colleagues.

2. Legal issues
States and countries may have varying policies on employee monitoring, but one thing is constant ⁠— an employee’s consent is needed before any type of monitoring can be done.Without the consent of an employee, an employer can be charged with privacy violations and discrimination if the information collected is used to harm that employee.

To avoid potential problems that can arise from employee monitoring, employers should explain why monitoring is needed. A written policy should be created explaining how employees will be monitored, what information will be collected, and how that information will be protected.

If you want to learn more about employee monitoring, give us a call today.

Folk, the next-generation CRM started by European startup studio eFounders, is going live today. If you’ve paid attention to TechCrunch, I’ve already covered Folk in the past. Since then, the product has evolved a bit and is now ready for prime time.

“The biggest SaaS [software-as-a-service] category is CRM. The highest valuation in the SaaS industry is Salesforce,” co-founder and COO Simo Lemhandez told me. “But i’s also a category with products that are all considered as outdated,” he added.

For instance, Lemhandez thinks it’s too hard to customize a major CRM product to your needs. “We’ve all heard about Salesforce’s integration teams even though we are all used to the self-serve model,” he said.

Like many modern SaaS products, Folk draws inspiration from popular products that are highly flexible yet very powerful. Examples include Notion, Airtable, Figma and Shopify.

For the past 18 months, Folk has been iterating on its beta product. There are 10,000 people on the company’s waitlist who want to give it a try. I saw a demo of the product and sure enough, you can get started without any integration team. When you first sign up, you are asked to create a workspace and invite your coworkers.

Image Credits: Folk

Thanks to an integration with Google Workspace, users can import contacts, emails and calendars into the product. Folk instantly starts working on your contact database by merging duplicates, indexing all fields and enriching contact data.

With a simple keyboard shortcut, Folk users can search in their contact database. You can search for a name, a company, etc. Once you have this foundation, you can start leveraging your network.

Folk lets you create groups to organize your contacts. Each group can represent a project or a specific group of people. For instance, you can create a group for PR, another one for your existing investors, another one for potential clients, etc.

When it comes to adding contacts to groups, you can search through your contacts, import new contacts from a file, or leverage various integrations with third-party services. You can imagine integrations with Calendly, Webflow, Zapier, etc. You can also expect extensions for Zoom and a browser extension that integrates with LinkedIn and Gmail. Folk is still building some of those integrations.

Each group is highly customizable. Users can add columns, filter and order contacts, add some logic to some fields. For instance, you can order your contacts based on your most recent interactions. At any time, you can also switch to a pipeline view so that you can more easily see the status or your projects.

Folk lets you send batch messages with variables, such as first name and last name. Team members can also add comments to a contact so that everyone can remain on the same page. There’s also a reminder feature.

While Folk competes with traditional CRM products like Salesforce and HubSpot, the startup also consider database and spreadsheet tools like Notion, Airtable, Coda and Excel as competitors. There is also a new generation of CRM products on the market, such as Attio — a startup that I covered last year.

But it’s a gigantic industry with some companies that just don’t use any CRM at all. There will be room for more than one startup in the space. Folk has raised $4.5 million from Accel and 50 different angels.

Image Credits: Folk

Meet Amie, a startup working on a brand new productivity app for both individuals and teams. The company is unveiling its app this week and users can sign up to the waitlist. Amie is a well-designed calendar app that helps you get things done and keep up with your team.

Amie was founded by Dennis Müller, who previously worked as a product manager for challenger bank N26. Creandum, as well as Tiny.VC and several business angels, backed the company early on so that it could work on its product without too much pressure.

And what I saw during a demo with Müller was a polished app that could easily attract a loyal user base. There are a lot of tiny details that make it much more convenient than the default option for many companies, which is Google Calendar.

When you open Amie, it looks like a calendar, there’s no question about it. You can see the current week with all your events, click on an event to get details and move from one week to another.

Image Credits: Amie

But Amie is quite opinionated in its feature set, and especially around todo items. You can open your todo list in a column right next to your calendar and view them this way. But you can also drag them from the sidebar and drop them in the main calendar view to assign a date and time to your todo.

“If you want to achieve something, the easiest way to do it is put it in your calendar, assign a time to it,” Müller told me. And it’s true that many people already use their calendar as a sort of todo list already. The fact that todos can live in the sidebar or in your week view gives more flexibility than adding your todos to your calendar directly.

In the left-side column, you can also see a list of avatars. If you’re using Slack intensively, it looks a bit like the icons on the left to switch from one workspace to another.

In Amie’s case, those icons represent other people in your team. Like in instant messengers, you can see if they’re currently available or busy based on their calendar. And if you hover over their avatar, you can toggle their calendar. For instance, it’s a good way to find out when it would be a good time to set up a meeting.

Each person also gets their own profile. On this separate page, you can see what someone is doing right now, get a reminder about their birthday, add a few notes and view when was the last time you were together. You can also set recurring reminders. It’s a lightweight feature that could help you stay in touch with people more regularly.

Image Credits: Amie

You also get some information from third-party services. For instance, you can see the current song playing from this person’s Spotify account. You can also open their Twitter profile from there.

“These calendar apps that are really focused on one person are cool. But if you look at other products that are successful today and if you want to generate some kind of network effects, we realized that we had to build some kind of profile,” Müller told me.

The instant benefit of adding a social component to the calendar is that you can more easily stay on top of the company’s activities. Amie has a home view with an activity feed. On this screen, you can see when someone creates an event.

It’s full of information and it could be particularly useful for companies with a transparent culture. “The home view could become the modern intranet,” Müller said.

On this home view, you can also see a list of all your events and todos. You can check things off from this view.

Finally, Amie has many of the power features that you would expect from a modern productivity tool. With just a keyboard shortcut, you can open a quick action menu, create an event, move to another view, etc.

When you want to share your availabilities with someone else, you can choose some slots in your calendar and share a link with the other person — no Calendly required. When an event is coming up with a video call, you can join the call with a keyboard shortcut.

Amie currently works with Google accounts on macOS and Windows. There’s also an iPhone app and the company is working on an Android app as well. On mobile, Amie has tried to locate all the important buttons and gestures near the bottom of the screen so that you don’t have to move your hand to reach a button in the corner.

We’re currently experiencing a calendar renaissance. Many startups are trying to find the right formula to reinvent the calendar app for the Notion era. Amie competes with Rise, Cron, Hera, Fantastical and others.

It’s arguably a big market. So it’s good to see so much innovation in the space. “For us, the calendar is the canvas,” Müller told me. “We do our job right if you sign up and you never open Google Calendar again.”

Image Credits: Amie

Flexibits, the company behind popular calendar app Fantastical, has added several new features that should help with scheduling. While Calendly seems to be the dominating player in this space, Flexibits pitches its new ‘Openings’ feature as a privacy-first scheduling feature. And, of course, it’s built into Fantastical directly, which means that you don’t need another tool, service or subscription.

After you update the Fantastical app to version 3.6, you’ll see a few new options in the settings panel — the new features are available on macOS, iOS and iPadOS. By default, Openings is disabled for all users. You have to set it up manually to start using it.

“You should be the person to opt in, you’re in control of your data,” Flexibits co-founder Michael Simmons told me.

Once you enable the feature, it is directly tied to the calendar accounts that you’ve already added to Fantastical. You can choose a calendar set as the main source of truth to figure our when you’re available and not available.

“It scans your Fantastical database and it only takes the dates and times,” Simmons said. Flexibits doesn’t grab the names of your events or the list of invitees as it doesn’t need that information to make the feature work.

After that, you can configure multiple event types. For instance, if you like to schedule sales calls on Monday and Wednesday mornings, you can create an event template for sales calls on those days between 9 AM and 11 AM.

There are a few options for event types, such as a title, a description, an event duration, a custom link and more. You can also turn on automatic approval or choose to manually approve meeting requests in Fantastical once they come in.

As you may have guessed, you then get a link that you can share in an email conversation, in a WhatsApp message or even on a website. When someone clicks on the link, they’ll see when you’re available, pick a time and request a meeting.

Image Credits: Fantastical

If you’ve set up automatic approval, the person requesting the meeting will receive a calendar invite in their calendar — they don’t have to use Fantastical and they don’t have to create an account to request a meeting.

The booking is actually done in the app, not on the web. When someone requests a meeting with you, your Fantastical app will create the meeting and invite the other person.

Chances are if you’re already using Calendly or another equivalent tool, you might keep your existing workflow. But if you’re a Fantastical user and you want to start sharing Calendly-like links, it’ll be much easier to turn on Openings in Fantastical.

Other improvements

Fantastical also offered a scheduling feature called ‘Proposals’. You could create an event in the app with multiple times and dates. Flexibits has quietly improved that feature to turn it into a Doodle alternative.

You can now send event proposals to several invitees. They can vote on a web page. From the app, you can then check what’s the best time and date, view comments and turn your proposals into a calendar event. It’s much easier to understand the feature with a screenshot:

Image Credits: Flexibits

In addition to scheduling features, there’s a new quarter view in Fantastical 3.6. You can start the quarter view on the first week of the quarter or with the current week depending on what you want to view.

A couple of years ago, Flexibits switched to a freemium model with a paid subscription to unlock all Fantastical features. The most advanced features, such as Openings and Proposals, require a subscription. It currently costs $39.99 per year, or $4.99 per month.

While Flexibits received a lot of negative comments on the App Store, the switch has been working well when it comes to product and business.

The team tripled in size from 6 to 18 people. Together, they have shipped quite a few updates and added Cardhop to the subscription.

While Michael Simmons didn’t want to share revenue numbers he said that “millions of people” have created a Flexibits account to start a free trial. Of course, only a small portion of this user base has an active subscription.

Flexibits is also thinking about ways to address different market types. For instance, the company is working on Flexibits for teams. At first, it’ll be a team account that lets you purchase licenses for a large groupe of employees. There’s also room for team functionalities in the app. But those features aren’t ready just yet.

Image Credits: Flexibits

In a world where the internet plays such a crucial role in any and all businesses, it can be hard to imagine a time when employers didn’t place as much emphasis on monitoring their workers’ online activities. Today, many managers and team leaders feel the need to keep an eye on what their employees do online in order to protect their company from liability or loss of sensitive information. But is it really a good idea to monitor your employees’ online activities? Read on to find out.

The case for monitoring

Monitoring your employees’ activities on company devices can be beneficial, as it helps:

• Protect your organization from data theft or harm since careless or disgruntled employees may leak or steal your data.
• Ensure members of your staff comply with policies such as not downloading illegal programs or visiting websites with illegal or hostile content.
• Provide evidence in case of a lawsuit should an employee participate in illegal activities using your business’s computers.

Arguments against employee monitoring

Of course, you should also be aware of the potential downsides to monitoring. These include:

• Reduced productivity, as monitoring can put a damper on employee morale and the perceived distrust may make your employees less driven to perform well.
• Privacy or discrimination issues that may stem from you being privy to personal details about your employees that you would’ve never known about had you not monitored them. For example, you may discover their political or religious views, sexual orientation, or medical problems. This subjects your business to potential privacy or discrimination issues if you or your management team acts negatively based on any of this information.

Monitoring guidelines to follow

If you decide to monitor your employees, here are a few tips you should follow.

1. Create written policies
When you monitor your employees, ask yourself, “Am I doing this for security purposes? Is it to ensure my employees aren’t wasting time on games or social media?” Monitoring policies that are too strict could create an atmosphere of distrust.

Set guidelines for acceptable use of email and social media, web browsing, instant messaging, and downloading software and apps. Also, make sure to include how monitoring will be carried out and how data will be used, secured, and destroyed.

2. Inform your employees
It’s important to inform your employees about the scope of your monitoring policies. If they find out you’re doing it secretly, you could face legal issues.

Explain to your employees why you’re monitoring them and the risks your business faces from misuse of digital assets. Reassure them you’re not doing it to spy on their personal lives, but to create a compliant and law-abiding workplace. Because their activities will now be less private, encourage your staff to use their smartphones for personal matters. Also, provide your employees with a copy of your written policy for them to read and sign.

If implemented correctly, employee monitoring makes your business more secure and productive. For more information about security and other IT support tools, get in touch with us today.